Bluets (Italian Edition)

by Maggie Nelson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

How do you approach “blue”? The color, the feeling, the tone. Maggie Nelson guides us in this gem of a title.

"E se cominciassi dicendo che mi sono innamorata di un colore?" Così Maggie Nelson avvia la sua esplorazione lirica, filosofica e inesorabilmente sincera di un momento di profonda angoscia personale, rifratta attraverso il blu. Nel ricostruire l'ossessione di tutta una vita per questo colore – il suo sguardo che sempre lo cerca, i suoi sogni popolati di figure intrise d'azzurro – ecco che le sfumature e i significati di blu, come un prisma, le restituiscono tutte le sfaccettature del suo dolore per la fine di una relazione e per la sofferenza di un'amica quadriplegica. La scrittura rifiuta i rassicuranti pudori e interroga la depressione, il sentimento del sacro, l'abuso di alcol e il desiderio, dialogando con famose "figure in blu", tra cui Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen e Andy Warhol. Viscerale e spirituale, oracolare e trasparente, Bluets è un capolavoro di grazia e innovazione letteraria.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791254800706
Publisher:	Nottetempo
Publication date:	10/27/2023
Series:	Narrativa
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	108
File size:	2 MB
Language:	Italian

About the Author

San Francisco, 1973) è autrice di diversi libri di poesia e prosa, tra cui Gli Argonauti (2016, vincitore del National Book Critics Circle Award) e Sulla libertà (2021), entrambi pubblicati in Italia da il Saggiatore. Il suo lavoro le è valso numerosi riconoscimenti negli Stati Uniti e all'estero.

Read an Excerpt

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has su‡ered during that long agony, is in- describable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.”

6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.”Above all, I want to stop missing you.

9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty.

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

Editorial Reviews

"Nelson's expressive style springs from her subject as much as the content, in turn, inflects her vocabulary, tone and structure. Seeking such reciprocity—no less an ideal than, say, 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'—may radically redefine poetry, as it increasingly becomes the genre that is not one."—Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

"An elegant, indispensable addition to the genre of the lyric essay."—Kathleen Rooney, Boston Review

"Maggie Nelson continues to raise the bar higher in what a reader can expect from a book. Bluets is smart yet intimate, quiet yet provocative, and a welcome addition to the poetic non-fiction discourse."—Susie DeFord, BOMB

"In the end Nelson breaks free of romance’s tyranny. She dreams someone sends her cornflowers, the American name for bluets. Shaggy, wild, and strong—they’re a revealing metaphor for the author."—Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail

"In 240 entries, Nelson relates a history of blue from philosophical, zoological and literary perspectives, all the while weaving in bits of memoir and emotional rumination. Through this collage, she broadens the definition of blue from a merely visual phenomenon to a vehicle for the divine."—Catherine Lacey, Time Out New York

"It’s an impossible book to describe without simply handing it to you; it is, hackneyed as it is to say, a book to be experienced. I can only report that I am reading it again and again, that the resonances between the (seemingly) disparate propositions are startling and emotional, that I suspect your reaction will be different and also quite wonderful."—Peter Rock, The Rumpus

"Brash, feverish, intractable, exploratory, and terribly 'touchant' Nelson’s Bluets is, I am reminded for some reason (it’s in Marías) of Rimbaud’s line: 'Par délicatesse / J’ai perdu ma vie.'"—John Latta, Isola di Rifuti

"Nelson doesn’t want to leave anything out, as suits a collector’s project. Thus, in the same way that she wanders among blue objects (shards of glass, bottles of ink, stones and tattoos and the nests of bowerbirds) and accidental theorists of color (Goethe and Newton and Duras and Novalis) and the color’s utility in human imagination (blue moods, blues music, the blue divine), she likewise wanders among the positions the orchestrator of these lists must adopt. This results in an admixture of candor, passion and detachment that makes for irresistible intimacy."—Ray McDaniel, The Constant Critic

"The book is a philosophical and personal exploration of what the color blue has done to Nelson. Despite the exhaustion, Bluets wears its hybrid/fragmented dress well, showing its seams and much enthralled by its wanderlust, an aesthetic runway that constantly leads Nelson to find new ideas, images, and expressions."—Thomas Larson, TriQuarterly

"Bluets reaches far beyond the constraints of its subject, resulting in a series of delicately associative numbered paragraphs investigating a broken romantic relationship, a friend’s chronic nerve pain, the writing process itself, and the deceptive elements of perception and color. The result not only defies easy categorization, but also leans toward Walter Benjamin’s famous declaration that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one."—Rob Schlegel, Jacket

From the Publisher