Bluets
2009 • 106 pages

Ratings48

Average rating3.7

15

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

December 19, 2023