There are a few topics that tend to repel me — fashion, dandyism, symbolist and decadent poetry, French thought, prose-poetry, bohemians, Deleuze, Debord, Foucault — and Robertson has somehow managed to concoct a book out of them. This is as close as I've come to literary kryptonite in quite some time. I'll just quote a few passages so you can decide for yourself if you will enjoy The Baudelaire Fractal:

"A garment is a pause in textile."

"Fashion is the net of the history of love."

"I think my feeling for painting is a deferred material telepathy, an elemental magnetism. I was noticing a mineral sympathy of my body’s iron and copper and calcium towards paint."

"I happened upon an emancipation from vocables into the substance of mortality."

"I’ll be a feminine man whose decadent joy resists all appropriation. I’ll be untimely only."

"Anyone without a language for desire perishes."

"I wanted to escape the violent sociology of beauty to experience aesthetics as an even redistribution of the senses across the most banal parts of dailiness."

"I entered literature like an assassin, leaking, fucking, wanting, drinking."

"That spring I put tulips in all my poems. They were fists, they were cunts, they were clocks."

"The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it."

"My walks with my dog through the fields are theoretical experiments in the association of arcane concepts with a material history of margins." ( )

'The girl within the Baudelairean body of work will undo it by repeating it within herself, as indeed she repeats girlhood, misshapen. She's always and only untimely, apparitional, forbidden, monstrous, a stain on authority. Her sensation is multiple, an intoxication of number.'

I'm never the biggest fan of autofiction; I usually tire of the thinly-veiled disguise behind a 'character', when really it's just an autobiography. Whether you call this autofiction, I don't know, but this is just something different enough for me to sit up and notice. This is proper writing, if you get what I mean. Right from the very first sentence I felt that we, as readers, were in the presence of someone who could use language to create images and sensations and emotions that justify our time and involvement in the reading experience.

With a poet's sensitivity to, and playfulness with, language, Lisa Robertson - who perhaps is and is not the poet Hazel Brown - delivers a stunning portrait of the artist as a young woman. Waking up one day to discover that she has somehow written the works of Baudelaire, Hazel looks back over her youth as she now sits in her French country retreat, a 50-something woman recalling her days in Vancouver, London and Paris. 'Written' is something of a misnomer; rather she has subsumed the words, has become them to the point where they were 'physiologically my own'. This profound connection with words and art then reveals itself as she looks back on the start of her career as a 'writer', taking odd jobs and saving enough to rent small rooms in attics in Paris, having a succession of flings with nameless young men, and wandering around art galleries.

The attic becomes an important metaphor and reference point; here she is the heir of Virginia Woolf, finding a room of her own to write and become a self, but also of Mrs Rochester and the other 'women in the attic' (indeed, there are several explicit nods to 'Jane Eyre' throughout the book). This is a book about writing the self, about representing - 'augmenting' - the self. It is an intelligent book, wearing its learning on its sleeve, with multitudinous references to artists and philosophers sprinkled as we go. At the heart, too, is not only Baudelaire, but the figure of Jeanne Duval, his Haitian-born mistress who was literally painted out of his life but upon whom, on his deathbed, Baudelaire was able to gaze, with Manet's portrait of her on his wall.

This is a funny, smart and self-affirming book. The feminine and the artist are the central themes; it is a journey of self-discovery and of acknowledging mistakes. It is a call for representation and identity. It might be a self-portrait, but it is done with a linguistic style and a vibrancy that is impossible to resist. Read this. 4.5 stars, happily rounded up. Wonderful. ( )