Bluets

It's giving By Grand Central Station. Heavy on the Wittgenstein and Plato, but light on the narrative or thematic cohesion. Nelson makes the decision to restrict details of her lover to the type of sex they were having (for fear of displacing her memories with her writing, as with childhood photographs), but what results for me is a paradoxical combination of deep, powerful longing and nonchalance that I struggled to connect with.

At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.

One sentence synopsis... A series of loosely connected pieces of prose examining love and the loss of a relationship through observations about the colour blue.

Read it if you like... when books are described as ‘lyrical' and ‘poetic'.

Further reading... ‘Too Much and Not the Mood', Ocean Vuong, or Mary Gaitskill.

read this about two years ago and thought it was an incoherent mess. but after seeing continued praise for it and thinking about how my mindset and opinions have changed over the hundred-plus books i've read since then, i decided it was time for a revisit. i can now comfortably say i right the first time.

I like when the writing style is symbolic and sounds like streams of consciousness. This is why I enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Bluets. It feels like I'm reading a diary, as if I'm connected deeper to the protagonist. Bluets is meant to be poetry and it's funny because it also reads like a thesis about the color blue. The author included so many references which are interesting to me. I especially like when they relate blue to their friend in the hospital. The ending was just okay for me but hoped it was a bit better.

Amazing how exhausting less than a hundred pages can be. Feels like someone trying to journal through heartbreak/loss and unsuccessfully distract themselves with musing on the significance of a colour. 
While blue has associations with sadness, depression, it almost feels like the author could have chosen any colour and meandered off into reflections and neat or disturbing trivia about it. 
Writing does get ‘blue' in parts but it doesn't make the overall project more interesting. 
I'm a little suspicious of the amount of this spare text that's actually (credited) quotations from other people. 
There are pretty word pictures, but to a certain extent it's a deeply personal catharsis that means more/makes more sense to the writer than it ever will to the reader.

As much as it's cute as a small book, I think considering how art-conscious the subject matter can become, I could see it being a more appealing object if it was heavily coffee-table-booked: each page in different shade of blue, images of different blue art pieces/objects in facing pages, one two-page spread for each of these numbered snippet-essays. 

Presumably her disabled friend knew she was featured in the passages of this work, but I wish we hear more from her directly, it's not quite voyeuristic or exploitative or objectifying, but something about the writing in reference  to her friend felt weird to me. 

⚠️Suicidal ideation, depression, r slur