My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman review – an experimental romcom
The American author sets out to write a “feelgood” romance that honours her commitment to language as a charged, living entity‘Imagine my surprise when I found it was possible to be both narrative and anti-narrative at the same time,” Renee Gladman wrote in Calamities, her 2016 collection of meditations on living and writing. She made this discovery during an evening out with friends, but now in My Lesbian Novel she has found a way to express it in a novel as well. This is, as the title promises, a scorching lesbian romance, ending, as the best romances do, in bed, but throughout the book, scenes from the novel alternate with conversations between Gladman and an imaginary interviewer. Curiosity about the novel and curiosity about love wind round each other as she opens up about her structural dilemmas and girds herself to write the next scene.Gladman is an American author and artist, and sometime architect and mathematician. She writes prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction; she draws architectural plans and planetary fantasies, and she sees all these not just as connected but as one unified project. She’s drawing lines that may or may not erupt into paragraphs of text, exploring crossings and geographies, mapping the landscapes of our inner and outer worlds. Previously, her fictional urges have found expression in a quartet of novels set in the imaginary world of Ravicka, which comes complete with its own language and is reeling from an ecological crisis that has left buildings disappearing and reforming at will. Continue reading...
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The American author sets out to write a “feelgood” romance that honours her commitment to language as a charged, living entity
‘Imagine my surprise when I found it was possible to be both narrative and anti-narrative at the same time,” Renee Gladman wrote in Calamities, her 2016 collection of meditations on living and writing. She made this discovery during an evening out with friends, but now in My Lesbian Novel she has found a way to express it in a novel as well. This is, as the title promises, a scorching lesbian romance, ending, as the best romances do, in bed, but throughout the book, scenes from the novel alternate with conversations between Gladman and an imaginary interviewer. Curiosity about the novel and curiosity about love wind round each other as she opens up about her structural dilemmas and girds herself to write the next scene.
Gladman is an American author and artist, and sometime architect and mathematician. She writes prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction; she draws architectural plans and planetary fantasies, and she sees all these not just as connected but as one unified project. She’s drawing lines that may or may not erupt into paragraphs of text, exploring crossings and geographies, mapping the landscapes of our inner and outer worlds. Previously, her fictional urges have found expression in a quartet of novels set in the imaginary world of Ravicka, which comes complete with its own language and is reeling from an ecological crisis that has left buildings disappearing and reforming at will.
Continue reading...
