A review by sayitagainjen
Isadora by Amelia Gray

3.0

I'm honestly embarrassed by how long it took to read this book. Reading it was a chore, and yet when I had more than an hour to sit with it, the story bloomed. It’s as though, despite its length, it’s truly meant to be read and digested in one sitting. ISADORA exhumes the imagined life of Isadora Duncan, a woman often credited as the “Mother of Modern Dance,” in the year (or so) following the drowning of her children in the Seine. The narrative, if we can call it that, is a collage of third-person character vignettes, each orbiting a first-person narration of Isadora’s own experiences.

This pastiche of grief and anguish and art, dotted with no small amount of pettiness, offers a complex examination of what it means to war with being a woman and an artist under public scrutiny during the early 1900s. Isadora is at once a brazen, arrogant vision overwhelmed by the specter of her own brilliance and a vulnerable creature at odds with her reality and perceived destiny. When the book isn’t busy taking itself too seriously, it’s a master class in prose:

Men resent nothing more than their own comfort and hate the woman in their lives who offer it. They want safety from their wives and danger from other woman, without realizing that all woman risk mortal danger from strangers and live their lives holding that damage at arm's length, a cup that must never spill on the men they love, who meanwhile hate them for their feigned nature. This motherhood situation is even darker, as the mother grows in her body the architect of her own end; the child who doesn't kill her in childbirth will break her heart later on. Men have to manufacture this kind of danger, which comes so relentlessly to women.

At a sentence, even paragraph level, the writing is beautiful and cutting. But strung together, the hodgepodge narrative is a ponderous mire of tedious people who so often seem to deserve whatever fate befalls them.