A review by karteabooks
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

3.0

 

This was another book that I picked up as it was on the Booker longlist and as it was the summer holidays, I felt I needed to read something that I wouldn’t usually pick up, something out of my ‘comfort zone’ and after an interesting chat with the bookseller in Daunt Books in Cheapside, this was the reasoning behind this book choice. 

It is a historical novel whose focus is on a group of remarkable and ground-breaking women, some of them well known (Virginia Woolf, Colette, Vita Sackville-West) and some rather less so (notably Lina Poletti whose story both opens and closes the book). Like the surviving remnants of the work of the Greek poet Sappho who inspired them, their stories are told in short episodic fragments mostly shorter than a page, but there is a loose chronology than runs from the 1870s to the late 1920s, and the fragmentary nature of the story made it quite difficult for me  to follow, and at times, I admit that I was speed reading some of the exerts to move onto the more well-known women. 

So, here are my thoughts, …this is HARD, I want to say positive things as it is a book about women and I really wanted to like this, maybe I will come back to this in a few months and see it through new eyes and write a completely different review. 

This was from a small press, Galley Beggar, and I am all for supporting small innovative businesses, so I suppose this is one of the few positives I have about this book, but you, on the other hand may completely disagree with my thoughts and absolutely love this book, there’s only one way to find out…