Thank you for this! I've had such mixed feelings on Sheila Heti, especially on How Should A Person Be. I feel like this gives me permission to just feel like she's not very good. I don't know if that's what you meant! - but that's what I'm taking from this! Her writing gives me such an odd feeling and I hadn't even gotten to the 'tangy ejaculate.' Yikes!
Actually, I disagree pretty strongly with that and disagree with @Castalia. I've been reading Pure Colour very slowly - it's on my bedside table - and haven't gotten to the dreaded leaf bit yet. But to me the passages about being suffused with the spirit of her father and, yes, including the ejaculate bit, speak to what grief is really like and I think to a very particularly feminine manifestation of grief. It is brave to write in the way that Heti does. These aren't pleasant or comprehensible emotions - and they wouldn't make much sense to people who haven't had exactly this sort of experience. But this is what writers are for IMHO - to say the unspeakable and to not be too concerned about whether that makes them come across as less-than-admirable themselves or whatever. Thanks for letting me spout! - Isabel
Hi Isabel, I appreciate that. I definitely see what you're saying. What I've seen of grief is that it's basically completely different from everything else and has an emotional vocabulary of its own - so that there's a case to be made that you can't evaluate a text about grief in the way that you would anything else. That maybe means that Pure Colour is ok - that what would be infantile in any other work is, here, actually truthful to its subject. But let me know if you still feel the same way after you pass the leaf bit!
And, by the way, the LAST thing I expected from a book review was to learn something fundamental about the way the country is structure.d. Very cool re Madison plus factionalism as the secret sauce for the whole thing. I guess Thomas Ricks gets credit for digging that up. But not something that would have occurred to me. Cheers!
Don't think Pure Colour is for me
Thank you for this! I've had such mixed feelings on Sheila Heti, especially on How Should A Person Be. I feel like this gives me permission to just feel like she's not very good. I don't know if that's what you meant! - but that's what I'm taking from this! Her writing gives me such an odd feeling and I hadn't even gotten to the 'tangy ejaculate.' Yikes!
Actually, I disagree pretty strongly with that and disagree with @Castalia. I've been reading Pure Colour very slowly - it's on my bedside table - and haven't gotten to the dreaded leaf bit yet. But to me the passages about being suffused with the spirit of her father and, yes, including the ejaculate bit, speak to what grief is really like and I think to a very particularly feminine manifestation of grief. It is brave to write in the way that Heti does. These aren't pleasant or comprehensible emotions - and they wouldn't make much sense to people who haven't had exactly this sort of experience. But this is what writers are for IMHO - to say the unspeakable and to not be too concerned about whether that makes them come across as less-than-admirable themselves or whatever. Thanks for letting me spout! - Isabel
Hi Isabel, I appreciate that. I definitely see what you're saying. What I've seen of grief is that it's basically completely different from everything else and has an emotional vocabulary of its own - so that there's a case to be made that you can't evaluate a text about grief in the way that you would anything else. That maybe means that Pure Colour is ok - that what would be infantile in any other work is, here, actually truthful to its subject. But let me know if you still feel the same way after you pass the leaf bit!
And, by the way, the LAST thing I expected from a book review was to learn something fundamental about the way the country is structure.d. Very cool re Madison plus factionalism as the secret sauce for the whole thing. I guess Thomas Ricks gets credit for digging that up. But not something that would have occurred to me. Cheers!