A review by trovah
The Body: An Essay by Jenny Boully

3.0

I've heard a lot about this book and was glad to finally get my hands on it. I'm interested in essay play and I was surprised to learn that pieces of this book had been published before as poetry. This is gratifying because I think the lines between poetry and essay can often become blurred, and for that matter between fiction and nonfiction as well. For any doubters of that massive, muddled gray zone, The Body is a great piece to test any hard and fast boundaries against. There's a lot of play with language and some playing with ideas. Is there truth to what happened in these pages? I'm not sure. There were wisps of a narrative, but I found those strands very hard to keep hold of. It did remind me of David Foster Wallace, who does a superb job of playing with essays via footnotes. Where DFW uses footnotes to explore alternatives ad infinitum, Boully focused more on absence. What does it mean to be present and what does it mean to miss something. Can you miss something that wasn't there? The text certainly could use another read through, but at this point I can say that yes, I do miss something that's not there. For my liking, there was just too little for me to hold onto and while I like the idea I was unable to really get into the text (or annotated lack of text).