aPriL does feral sometimes 's Reviews > The Argonauts

Um.

'The Argonauts' is about gender, pregnancy, and other things. The name 'Argonaut' is borrowed from a book passage in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It refers to a boat, and the answer is if you replace every particle of the boat, it is still the same boat called Argonaut, and how that compares to saying "I love you" to a person, renewing the meaning by each use, "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new." The author thinks the passage is romantic. Her partner sees it as a possible retraction.

o _ O

I know, right? Too too precious.

I'm supposed to either love or respect this book because of the intellectually elastic writing interwoven with high-end educated philosophical musings with a lot of quotes and passages from famous Intellectuals and writers pasted in here and there; and because of the author Maggie Nelson, who is a respected poet and critic; and because its disjointed narrative pieces and paragraphs of subject matter are artistically wobbled about and around in a post-modern literary style, which amounts to stray thoughts, philosophy, autobiography and TMI medical shi* pasted in willy-nilly, perhaps artistically.

A subject is dropped for awhile for a digression, which is examined briefly before the author returns to what she had been thinking about or doing, or not. Ideas and musings and autobiographical bits are mixed in with no particular linkage, except the subject rolls around female body issues and pregnancy. Some bits are extremely clinical and detailed about the vagina and anus, other bits are dealing with personal and public confusions with gender definitions which have become as fuzzy as quantum physics (my interpretation and words - I finished a science book recently about quantum effects).

There is a lot of brief intellectualized literary sketches of bliss, wonder and fear about babies, the process of getting pregnant, the pains of carrying a growing fetus, how various types of people react to babies and pregnancy filtered through culture and gender perceptions and unwanted medical fad advice given on the streets or standing in line for a movie or with smokers, etc.

Actually, despite the literary clever Modern/Post-Modern academic filter of the author's writing, she appears to me like a 13-year-old girl who wore a dubious fashion choice to school (I mean the pregnancy and her sexuality), and is alternating between defending and explaining the effect she was going for, while harboring secret doubts that it is a really stupid outfit and so she asks all of her best friends in the bathroom if she should go home and change..

The author feels outraged or conflicted or confused or thoughtful in language which is written in poetic university-speak code words usually used for Ph.D. thesis-level papers, only fragmented and memoir-personalized, although this stuff is what every mother goes through whether she is a Ph.D. Literature or Philosophy professor or a 16-year-old. The difference is the author has the ability to use $5 words, concepts and ideas in a post-modern stream of consciousness layout (at least it is punctuated and in paragraphs), about a subject most people would rather read if written more familiarly like in a typical memoir using 5-cent words and jokes.

The author is a lesbian, the book chronicles her pregnancy and some of her relationship with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who is a transgendered FTM. I understand why pregnancy is fraught with emotional and intellectual baggage for her, after all, she is a brain who processes everything in a prism of high-end thinking and academic literary concepts, but this book is an ego project, self-centered and unpleasant to read.

I found the book a chore to read and boring once I understood it is about her personal angst about pregnancy, with heavily-freighted emotional and philosophical observations filtered through her education, cultural experiences, relationship and gender anxieties, written in a style only academic literary intellectuals would want to bother with deciphering. A book club selected this for the read of a month; I don't know if it was for the challenge, if so, I don't think it is worth the struggle. If, gentle reader, you want to simply enjoy a read about person having a typical pregnancy while having lesbian anxieties on top of the usual issues of having a baby, written in literary academic coded language so that this little 100-page or so fragmented, name-dropping, literary- and philosophical-loaded allusion-heavy memoir will take you a month of re-reading to understand, this is perfect.