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A review by gadicohen93
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
4.0
I'd give this book extra points for its rebelliousness. It's part stream-of-consciousness memoir, part academic treatise. Of course, it brings important conversations to the table. The relationship depicted in the book was *real* and the passages where Nelson chronicled the grittiness, the stresses of the relationship -- those were the most real, the best.
I feel very torn about the academic nature of the book. The quotes from scholars, scattered into the prose, were illuminating and served as foundational points for Nelson to jump off from and go into her own conjecturing. At some points, though, it felt forced, like someone sharing thoughts about a common object of banal conversation, cloaked in a radical terminology but really deep down still the fancies of a (really educated) muggle dumping her intellectually masturbatory thought processes into a journal.
However, it was riveting, in the way only reading a journal can be. We got a cross-section of Nelson's life and a sampling of her philosophy on it, and the writing was fresh and moving.
I feel very torn about the academic nature of the book. The quotes from scholars, scattered into the prose, were illuminating and served as foundational points for Nelson to jump off from and go into her own conjecturing. At some points, though, it felt forced, like someone sharing thoughts about a common object of banal conversation, cloaked in a radical terminology but really deep down still the fancies of a (really educated) muggle dumping her intellectually masturbatory thought processes into a journal.
However, it was riveting, in the way only reading a journal can be. We got a cross-section of Nelson's life and a sampling of her philosophy on it, and the writing was fresh and moving.