Review: Selby Wynn Schwartz’s Booker longlisted ‘After Sappho’ is the lyrical story of Sapphists at the turn of the century | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
In her debut novel, Shwartz uses a collective first-person narrative voice to draw readers into the histories of women who stand alone
Sunday, Sep 25, 2022
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HomeBooks and LiteratureReview: Selby Wynn Schwartz’s Booker longlisted 'After Sappho' is the lyrical story of Sapphists at the turn of the century
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Review: Selby Wynn Schwartz’s Booker longlisted ‘After Sappho’ is the lyrical story of Sapphists at the turn of the century
In her debut novel, Shwartz uses a collective first-person narrative voice to draw readers into the histories of women who stand alone
Written by Radhika Oberoi
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Updated: September 24, 2022 11:27:29 am
Book cover of 'After Sappho'
By Selby Wynn Schwartz (Source: Amazon.in)The women who inhabit Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho are never at ease. Or never in one place for too long. The concluding years of the nineteenth century are disconcerting in a variety of ways, and they navigate its vexations only to arrive at a new century fraught with fresh trouble. They change their names or leave a marriage or a child or a country to become, indelibly, who they really are – sapphists, trousered and booted poets, vehement artists, lovers of travel guides and foreign grammar. This novel is, quite literally, about the women who realise themselves fully after Sappho, the skeins of their lives gloriously knotted as their geographies, and destinies alter.
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Sappho, the Greek lyric poet of the 6th century who was born on the island of Lesbos, is the presiding deity of After Sappho. She is invoked frequently by the narrator – the plural first-person “we”, suggestive of a female collective or a chorus, still young, eager to become Sappho as they read her fragmented poems at school, and feel the lilt of words like aithussomenon,“the way that leaves move when nothing touches them but the afternoon light.”
This curious and excitable collective voice draws us, the readers, into the histories of atypical women, into their methods of transgressing the limitations of their sex, and of their milieu. Together we witness Cordula “Lina” Poletti still stuck in 1896, discarding her skirts and climbing a tree in her underthings, to read a Latin primer borrowed from the Biblioteca Classense. We observe Rina Pierangeli Faccio in 1895, giving birth to a child conceived in violence, and swallowing a bottle of laudanum. We note that she survives; we observe her in 1902, when she arrives in Rome, all alone, rents a room with a writing desk, and changes her name to Sibilla, a variation of the Delphic Sibyl. We watch as Pauline Tarn sloughs off “Plain, practical Pauline, and flat yawning Tarn” to become the person who arrives in Paris and takes a room on the rue Crevaux. She reads Sappho in a frock coat and breeches in 1899. “In the lamplight she looked like a sleek, dark line. She had become Renée Vivien.”
After Sappho is about the process of becoming, the difficulties it entails, the voyages it necessitates, the new loves it kindles, the furies it stokes. We are offered biographies as intimate tableaux that shift and move through a jagged timeline. Each disjointed vignette, with its protagonists at sea or on stage or in a besotted haze, is part of the swirl of events that make the turn of the century a hectic age.
Rating: 5