This is the fourth and final book that I needed to read for the Future Learn course How to Read a Novel. In this last week we are focusing on setting and After Sappho is the book chosen from the shortlist that most fits with this building block of literature.

I need to say, before I even start, that the writing is sublime. I can't think of a book that I have read over the last year that has been as beautifully written as this one - the word choice, the weaving of ideas and women and the threads that pull them altogether are gorgeous - and it needs to be because there are other elements that made this book quite hard to read. I am not really even sure if this is a novel. As the books says:

You may have sensed in this novel that the novel does not exist?

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Written in short, fragmented pieces it tells of the lives of Sapphists who have wanted more. From Lina Poletti to Virginia Woolf and many women inbetween (too many to list) we listen to a crescendo of voices who are restricted to marriage, running a household and ruled by men but who have broken free and are looking for that island where they can be themselves, have a room of their own and create and love as they wish.

Running throughout the braiding of these stories are the fragments of Sappho's poetry or lyrics, used to show us the relevance it still has today through the direct influence on the characters in the novel. As we move from the late 1800s to the early 1900s we encounter war and this inverts everything. Women can work, drive a bus or ambulance, nurse soldiers even become spies and so now they are Sappho with Woolf being the 'modern Sappho'.

Things I loved about this book are many. I loved the fact that men were written out of the story just as women have been throughout history. This is a great book to read after [Trust] by Hernan Diaz for that reason. I loved the way that Greek grammar is woven in to describe the moods and spirals round and round through the book right up until the end.

The genitive is a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive is defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.

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There were the optative moods the characters felt and the aithussomenon that forewarned with the trembling of leaves - 'the weather of afterwords'.

I loved the use of colour to describe. When Natalie met Eva Palmer 'whose long red hair was like a poem', they ended up living in a vermilion cloud. Or Romaine Brooks who dressed in black, furnished and decorated her house in black and paints faces with shadows 'like a black cap'.

If grey encompassed many feelings, then black was where they were buried.

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I also loved the way settings dissolved into characters or feelings with the continuation of vocabulary.

Leslie Stephen's study was at the top of the house, over all of the rooms of women and children. One floor down in the night nursery, a fire burnt through long winter evenings; Virginia watched the nervous, flighty shadows flung on the walls. As the firelight came in flickers and glimpses, her thoughts flared and fell into a charred confusion. Voices were coming and going like shadows, muttering at her, leering, crackling, casting themselves at the windows. She could hear them mouthing burnt words at her.

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Or, how about

After the war we were left with ash in our eyes, in our mouths. We set about clearing the rubble and dust from our vision; we were free to buy butter and petrol, we could walk the streets without fear.

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There were two things that challenged me. The first was the fragmentary style the book is written in. For some reason, the chunks of writing made me read faster and faster, gathering speed until I didn't really know what I was reading. I had to force myself to slow down and linger, to catch the ideas and words and how they trailed after each other.

The second challenge is that this is a book written about middle-class, white women who had the luxury of travel, building their own homes and finding the life they wanted when it went against society. The book is written in the first person plural with the pronoun 'we', a Greek chorus if you like, but the we, rather than being inclusive, excludes those who are not European or American or those of colour. Josephine Baker does warrant a line or two but not enough to really count. I haven't read anywhere about the author's choice of women but it would be interesting to know why she chose who she did. It might also mean that there is a gap here for someone else to round out the 'we'.

This is a book about the right to an identity that you choose, creativity and education. Schwartz has bound us to a winding road from the past to the present, paving the way for those who identify as creatives or artists. Towards the end Woolf describes what a biography is.

A genre telling people as if they were stories also tells people how to read them. It is a book that slyly goes both ways. A biography attending to the subject herself is also, with a slight bow, turning to face her readers, like a quadrille in a dance.
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Whilst you might not call this book a biography, it dances with the subject and the reader. Remarkable for a debut. ( )

19. After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
OPD: 2022
format: 267-page hardcover
acquired: January read: Mar 15-25 time reading: 8:02, 1.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Contemporary Fiction theme: Booker 2022
locations: mainly fin de siècle Naples & pre-and-post WWI Paris
about the author: teaches writing at Stanford

Initially I was thoroughly entranced by this play on the Sappho fragments. It took me back to one lovely 3-hour Sunday morning I spent in a Houston coffee shop reading all of Sappho's fragments (in a 1958 translation by [[Mary Barnard]]). There's not much of Sappho left to us, and much is literally just tiny, isolated fragments, a few words, barely a phrase. Selby Wynn Schwartz does a really nice job of echoing this experience of reading these fragments and reaching out to sense all their firmly lost implications. Her novel is a look at the Lesbian world in the late 19th and early 20th century, its expression and its repression in a conservative era where money could bend social norms a little. She provides a collection of micro-biographic takes on the famous women of this world. That means the really famous women, like Sarah Bernhardt, and Colette, the sometime lovers Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. But also many lesser known but important names from Italy, France, England, the United States, Greece and elsewhere. Women like Rina Faccio, Lina Poletti, Romaine Brookes, Jean-Claude Baker, Eileen Gray, Nancy Cunard, Isadora Duncan, Ada "Bricktop" Smith. They all have Wikipedia entries and important accomplishments and influences. All were famous in their time, although all these names are new to me, personally. She also captures some of the disapproving contemporary male experts on lesbianism.

The book maybe goes on a little too long. It's a lot of names to keep track of, and I got little tired of it, and I felt it became a little repetitive. The silence of those who don't have Wikipedia entries gets somehow louder, and more wanting. But that, of course, is part of the point.

My take is that this was a really nice experiment, but not a masterpiece and not quite something you all need to read. (but I can't recommend Barnard's Sappho enough)

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8113099 ( )

I loved the overarching concept of this book, but really didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. After Sappho shares the lives of a number of women who were feminist, lesbian, and living in Europe over a span covering the late 1800's until just after WWI. Most of the women were also involved in the arts (writing, theater, painting, etc.). The book is broken into paragraphs, each with a heading, and each paragraph tells a snippet (not even a vignette) about one of the characters before moving on to the next snippet.

The idea of focusing on the intertwining lives of women striving for visibility and recognition in a man's world is such a good idea. But, [b:When We Cease to Understand the World|53972214|When We Cease to Understand the World|Benjamín Labatut|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1596817309l/53972214._SY75_.jpg|84341168] did something similar, except with scientific discovery, and it was so much more engaging. I wanted to like this book, or at least appreciate it, but it was pretentious and overwritten and really didn't bring these women to life in any way. Plus it was nearly impossible to discern the biographical from the fictional, and I didn't really care enough to even try.

I can so see this book being taught in an English lit class somewhere, and there were some gorgeous turns of phrase . . .but at the end of the day, I want a novel to move me emotionally and engage me with some semblance of a story, and this book just didn't do that for me at all.

There was one paragraph that really encapsulated this book for me.

. . .we might open a seemingly ordinary biography, its chapters neatly partitioned, and find that it was webbed throughout with the most extraordinary filaments of a life. A life after all did not happen by itself, in discrete units. Thus this biography would be bound together with all of our lives, twined through from preface to index: curling, animate, verdant.

I think this is what the author was trying to do, intertwine the biographies of these women, and I love the concept of that! But the reality just didn't live up to the promise. ( )

This is quite a magical book which sent me down many rabbit holes to learn more about the women in it. It is written in fragments about many pioneering women of the past, and their complicated inter relationships. It gets a little confusing in places as they all switch around partners and follow various artistic pursuits but the details are less important than the overall atmosphere.

I have the Galley Beggar buddy limited edition black cover, with signed bookplate. ( )

This book is a collection of vignettes about women who lived in Europe in the late 1800s to early 1900s. These women are tied together by common elements – rebellion against a patriarchic society and the influence of the sapphic tradition. I liken it to assembling a collage. Take segments of the lives of notable artistic women, keep adding other fragments to it, and gradually a larger picture emerges. The poetry of Sappho lies at its heart, and it includes quotes from the (very few) surviving lines.

Many of the referenced women were familiar to me and several were not. I started out looking them up as I went along, but found this too distracting, so decided to read it in full and then look up the women I did not know. It is intentionally written in a fragmented manner. The upside of this structure is that it is easy to read a few portions at a time, set it aside, and come back to it later. The downside is that there is no unified storyline to follow. I think readers will vary widely in their response to this approach.

It is a melding of non-fiction and fiction, and I do not think this blend worked very well. It felt rather disjointed, and I found it challenging to connect emotionally. I tend to like immersive reading, and I just did not find that here. I appreciated the intent. I found it artistic. But cannot say I enjoyed reading it. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it were solely non-fiction.

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