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A review by greyemk
Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist
3.75
I feel bad, because I’ve recently read or am reading two other books with similar themes (hybrid works of memoir, history, and fiction about what we can know about the past and what we owe to people of the past). Unfortunately I’m liking both of them better than this, though I don’t think this is by any means bad.
Ramqvist is interested in the story of Marguerite de Roberval, a woman who was abandoned on a desert island in the new world in the 1500s by her guardian. Very little is known about her other than this story.
What we have is a book that interrogates this story from multiple perspectives, but is also interrogating the author’s own obsession with this story, her biases, and her relationship to writing as a whole. I am very interested in these questions and I think I would have really liked this at a different time. However, I was not all that interested in Ramqvist’s hemming and hawing about what she was even doing.
This book has a pretty minimalist prose style, it’s very straightforward and unadorned. I prefer this topic with a more maximalist prose style like the other works I’ve been reading. I think it better accomplishes the goal of showing how truly overwhelming the task of “understanding the past” is, it suits the novelistic ethics and philosophy of the topic, and the nice writing maintains interest during the inevitably slow parts of the work.
Ramqvist is interested in the story of Marguerite de Roberval, a woman who was abandoned on a desert island in the new world in the 1500s by her guardian. Very little is known about her other than this story.
What we have is a book that interrogates this story from multiple perspectives, but is also interrogating the author’s own obsession with this story, her biases, and her relationship to writing as a whole. I am very interested in these questions and I think I would have really liked this at a different time. However, I was not all that interested in Ramqvist’s hemming and hawing about what she was even doing.
This book has a pretty minimalist prose style, it’s very straightforward and unadorned. I prefer this topic with a more maximalist prose style like the other works I’ve been reading. I think it better accomplishes the goal of showing how truly overwhelming the task of “understanding the past” is, it suits the novelistic ethics and philosophy of the topic, and the nice writing maintains interest during the inevitably slow parts of the work.