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matthewkeating 's review for:
Like Love: Essays and Conversations
by Maggie Nelson
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Like Love is a collection of essays and interviews spanning around 20 years of Maggie Nelson’s career. I love Nelson’s work and came into this expecting to fall in love with it, and there were certainly parts I did fall in love with—I found the interviews especially illuminating, and I enjoyed the literary criticism. Much of the book, though, is art criticism, and art criticism of a variety that seems to presume a familiarity with the artist and/or the work—some of which can’t be found online with simple google searches. I found myself lost—or losing interest—a few times for this reason.
It’s an admirable collection insofar as it attempts (I think) to get around the problem of “How do I turn a bunch of disparate pieces into a book?” by showing that the same preoccupations with art, and love of certain artists, have followed Nelson around throughout her career—it was very interesting to see the names of these artists recur in various contexts, to show how Nelson situations them in place with one another. But I found myself wishing that there had been attempts to better familiarize me with the objects of criticism in question; when the object remains obscured there’s only so much insight one can draw from the writer’s circumlocutions, I think. Suddenly this feels like a broader philosophical take than I had intended to make when I sat down to write this, so feel free to challenge me; something something epistemology. Maybe more to the point, that kind of criticism—if it exists—would I think function on the presumption of the reader’s lack of familiarity. I mentioned earlier I enjoyed the literary criticism more, and that’s probably telling about me as a reader: I am much more familiar with the world of literature and of literary criticism than I am of visual art, so it’s unsurprising that I felt able to draw more from those sections than I did those about visual art.
In any case, like much of Nelson’s work, this is probably something I will return to.
It’s an admirable collection insofar as it attempts (I think) to get around the problem of “How do I turn a bunch of disparate pieces into a book?” by showing that the same preoccupations with art, and love of certain artists, have followed Nelson around throughout her career—it was very interesting to see the names of these artists recur in various contexts, to show how Nelson situations them in place with one another. But I found myself wishing that there had been attempts to better familiarize me with the objects of criticism in question; when the object remains obscured there’s only so much insight one can draw from the writer’s circumlocutions, I think. Suddenly this feels like a broader philosophical take than I had intended to make when I sat down to write this, so feel free to challenge me; something something epistemology. Maybe more to the point, that kind of criticism—if it exists—would I think function on the presumption of the reader’s lack of familiarity. I mentioned earlier I enjoyed the literary criticism more, and that’s probably telling about me as a reader: I am much more familiar with the world of literature and of literary criticism than I am of visual art, so it’s unsurprising that I felt able to draw more from those sections than I did those about visual art.
In any case, like much of Nelson’s work, this is probably something I will return to.