Reviewed by Louis Klee

As if speaking from between these parentheses, transforming their constraint into a site of liberation, “I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature”—that is, the “she-dandy” narrator Lisa Robertson’s remarkable, sultry, cerebral, and finally original novel The Baudelaire Fractal—defiantly assumes this tradition. “When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?” The answer, as this novel makes vividly apparent, is yes, and yet self-appearance is no easy task. It may be a difficult and radical act. “I had to destroy art,” declares Hazel, “in order to speak my monstrous life.” Monster, according to one tradition, has its etymological roots in the Latin monstrare and French montrer: to show or make apparent. It could be that simply to manifest the she-dandy’s life or “a female thinking” without making concessions to realism—for Hazel, “another name for capital”—is to simultaneously write one’s life and a manifesto, to manifest oneself in a poise of simultaneous luxuriance and insurgency.