HERmione

Rating:
Summary: A portrait of the artist...
Review: ...as a genius. There are a lot of threads to follow in this layered and evocative monster of a novel. Here are a couple to follow. To start with, there's the Shakespeare business. While it's true that this is a "fictionalized" autobiography, it's also clearly a response to themes in The Winter's Tale--think of Hermione "turned to stone," and of hardness of heart. Then there's the psychomachia. When H.D. touches on an idea, she often will elaborate it in action. Hermione thinks about her experiences and her mind as a space full of doors; immediately, we follow her through the doors within her family's house, as if exploring the collective mind of the family and of Hermione herself. There's more, of course. "People make things and things make people." If that's true, then this "thing" called Hermione may change your view of things. The only weakness in the book to my mind is all that Freudian klapptrapp (see, by the way, Nabokov's Pale Fire or Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.) Enjoy...

Rating:
Summary: Female Writer Grows Up
Review: For those who know her society of partners: Erza Pound, Aldington, DH Lawerence; this book begins with her relationship of the first. Amongst her eccentric family, and bisexual classmate, HD presents a poetic sketch of her coming of age which is contrasted between her erratic hang-ups. Sometime sounding like Stein, other times Kerouac, Hilda plays with earthy metaphors which derives from her early years in the Imagist movement. Nevertheless, there was more to HD than being the Imagist's main figure; what went beyond is in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Mad Genius
Review: This book was written by Seattle poet Jesse Bernstein. It rules