Went to look at some of the lower ratings because I had such a good time reading this, and it really is a collection of people snitching on themselves for being no fun and having no taste or patience. The structure, setting, characters, and their relationships and motivations were all interesting to me. A complex thing to pull off, and she did. 1,157 s6 comments Barry Pierce591 8,233

i need to know more about the painters' massacre of 1943.21st-century read-for-review read-in-2023194 s Meike1,728 3,717

Set in an alternative version of the US, narrator Charlotte Marie (C. M.) Lucca takes us along for the ride as she researches the mysterious past of her late wife, ploymath art sensation X. It all begins when another author dares to publish a celebrated biography of X that enrages her widow, as she feels it doesn't do X justice, so the book we read starts as a revenge project intended to set the record straight - but then, Lucca's extended research becomes a dark journey into the reality of emotional abuse and dependency. Is X, the artist known for her plethora of personas and literary/ film/ music/ visual art projects, a genius that riffs on the postmodern fragmentation of ourselves, always developing and moving forward by transforming into different manifestations, or is she a fame-hungry, manipulative, ruthless narcissist?

Lucca, we learn, left her husband for X and gave up her successful career as a journalist to become a full-time wife, while eccentric X set the rules: She was the adored, wild child artist, and her wife gave up her agency. With Lucca, we dive into X's many secrets, starting with the fact that she was born in the Southern Territory, which in the narrated world are the Southern US states that left the union after WW II and became a dictatorial theocracy before being invaded by the North in 1996, the year X died (the parallels to German history - wall, secret police and all - are pointed out repeatedly in the text). As a young woman, X managed to flee the strictly policed Southern Territory, an almost impossible feat, and after that took on various identities in almost all art spheres to evade her own trauma and the agents trying to kill her.

We learn about X writing songs with David Bowie, discussing books with Kathy Acker (and becoming not one, but several bestselling authors), making it as a folk legend, succeeding in the fields of photography and visual installations, traveling through the US and Europe and impacting (and manipulating) people everywhere, before it becomes public that she is indeed just one person - which cements her fame. We learn about X's marriages and friends, and there are references to real life people, events and art pieces en masse.

And while these shenanigans are glamorous and the art is amplified by the political background, we also get drawn into the debate about the ethical production of art: X's eccentricities can be read as authenticity - or as her being an utterly terrible person, whom Lucca was unfortunate enough to love. X's control over Lucca's life extends beyond the grave, it's a form of dependency and obsession with a cruel person that emotionally abused her (and not only her). The realizations that come as a product of Lucca's research alter her sense of self: "It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her."

Sure, nothing about this novel reads as particularly plausible (who would marry a person they know virtually nothing about and then proceed to just never ask basic question?), but it's not supposed to be realistic - rather, it's a game that plays with fiction and nonfiction as well as with the question what we can know about a person and, as an extension, about ourselves. The text offers tons of mock sources, photographs and other images, and it's cleverly done. What has to be said though is that the book is way, way too long, which sometimes lessens its impact, and the alternative political background takes center stage for a part of the novel, but then almost disappears as a theme. Some other interesting ideas, for instance the dominance of female artists post-WW II, are mentioned, but aren't properly worked through.

Still, I remain intrigued by Catherine Lacey's output, by her ambition to craft daring, innovative stories, by her beautiful prose, and by her complex characters - it's just great fun to read and to discuss.2022-read usa153 s2 comments emma2,151 68.2k

the only thing better than the biography of an eccentric groundbreaking woman artist is one that's made up.

unfortunately that's not what this was about.

(review to come)2-stars eh lgbt-plus ...more147 s2 comments lisen44 2

This one was painful to get through...

I was intrigued by the premise and really enjoyed the first part of the book, especially about the southern territory. After that the story doesn't really go anywhere, it felt we were repeating the same story over and over again with the interviews.

For being a biography I felt I learned very little about X, except for the fact that she was a total asshole. I don't mind a problematic character, but I got bored with hearing about how fantastic and intriguing of a character X was when everything I was reading about her was stating the opposite. I also have a pet peeve for when authors create historically significant people and you're unable to be convinced of their significance, especially when they make a character be good at everything. I had a hard time understanding why everyone was so interested in X, which made most of the story a drag. Although her story is probably the most interesting, I found the narrator quite bland too.

This is probably more of my personal opinion, but I found this to be kind of pretentious and self involved. Also waaaay too long, without much progress. Really not my thing.audiobook115 s9 comments Sarah Schulman218 361 Read

The literary version of Tar. 102 s Beata806 1,263

A novel that offers a quest of a woman whose late wife, X being just one of her many names, left her with few facts regarding her life. Set in alternative political and geographical circumstances with regard to the USA, which I found truly captivating, and in several places across the globe, the tale progresses slowly and so does the protagonist's comprehension of who her wife really was.
The book seems a little to slow at times, however, I got invested in the story despite feeling no closeness to any characters in particular.
*A big thank-you to Catherine Lacey, RB Media, and Netgalley for a free audibook in exchange for my honest review.*93 s Alwynne738 986

Catherine LaceyÂ’s multi-layered novel presents a biography by a woman C. M. Lucca writing about her wife, a now-dead, controversial artist widely known as X. Lucca considers it necessary to correct numerous misconceptions published in an earlier biography of X. But LuccaÂ’s attempt to construct a definitive life of X is complicated by XÂ’s past, particularly her phase as a conceptual artist operating under an array of aliases, each accompanied by its own, carefully-staged physical persona. Masks and personas are fundamental to LaceyÂ’s narrative, not purely as themes but concretised by the incorporation of a separate title and copyright page attributing it to C. M. Lucca, although the conceitÂ’s equally undermined by an earlier title page under LaceyÂ’s name.

Lacey seems to be building on a history of playing with identity in various cultural and artistic fields, a history rife with instances of reinvention and mis-direction from authors George Eliot and Fernando Pessoa to DJs in electronic music to artists Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun. A history which often openly calls into question notions of a stable or fixed identity. Lacey carries this further by making the character of X a composite of shards of existing figures in the art world. X stages performances that are clearly based on those of artists Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle. Aspects of the concept driving Lacey’s novel echo Calle’s “L’homme au Carnet” and Lacey invokes Calle’s famous stalking project “Suite Venitienne” but makes Calle its object rather than its subject with X as Calle’s pursuer. Sometimes this mirroring operates as a series of in-jokes but it also points to deeper concerns around authorship, originality and authenticity as well as issues of knowledge and attribution. Concerns that deliberately invoke Borges’s fiction – directly referenced in Lacey’s text – particularly his stories “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” and “Borges and I.”

Notions of authenticity and knowledge are central to Lucca’s perception of her attempts to piece together the fragments of her X’s past, although what Lucca thinks she’s doing and what she actually does are gradually revealed to be at odds. Lucca’s a former investigative journalist who uses her skills to uncover “truths” about X, whose origins have been deliberately obscured. She’s also a classic, unreliable narrator, far too personally invested in her subject, at one point too distracted by jealousy at X’s happiness with a former lover to pay attention to potentially crucial information about X’s activities – although as the story unfolds Lacey casts doubt on any possibility of objectivity when it comes to representing others. Even Lucca’s use of endnotes seems a ploy to shore up her claims that her account of X is authoritative.

LuccaÂ’s unreliability also extends to self-knowledge. In interviews LaceyÂ’s claimed her novelÂ’s primarily an exploration of grief and love, but LuccaÂ’s experiences are not those found in conventionally tragic tales of lost love. ThereÂ’s no sense of any real intimacy in LuccaÂ’s description of X or of their time together, their bond seems more dependent on a fateful combination of XÂ’s forceful charisma and LuccaÂ’s wilful self-delusion. A love grounded as much in projection and obsession as it is desire or affection, with X cast as the embodiment of Rebecca Solnit's mythical, female art monster.

Another thread that emerges via Lacey’s portrayal of Lucca’s research is a critique of biography as an interpretive form. Lucca relies on interviews with X’s former lovers, colleagues and acquaintances but these often serve to create an impression of X as an object that can be viewed from a variety of angles. Features of the commercial biography Lucca’s ostensibly attempting to debunk recall Benjamin Moser’s widely-criticised biography of Susan Sontag – here also part of X’s circle. Moreover, X’s connections to the real-life writer Kathy Acker reminded me of Chris Kraus’s book about Acker, and the uneasiness stirred by the revelation that Acker was the former lover of Kraus’s partner.

A key feature is the location of X and LuccaÂ’s story, a version of America separated into North, South and West, with South as a closed-off, fascistic theocracy. ItÂ’s an alternative history thatÂ’s fairly obviously indebted to Margaret Atwood and Philip Roth. But itÂ’s also quite an intriguing one - I relished specifics the rewriting of the lives of iconic figures Emma GoldmanÂ’s. X, LaceyÂ’s setting plays with reality, for instance the revolutionary factions in the South that conjure countercultural groups The Weathermen. Yet I wasnÂ’t always convinced by LaceyÂ’s imagined America or clear about its relevance. Lacey has said she simply wanted a backdrop against which X and Lucca as a lesbian couple wouldnÂ’t stand out, living as they did in a North in which homophobia has long since ceased to exist. But the world-building involved seems far too elaborate, and frequently far too distracting, for its stated function.

There were times when this felt slightly dry and stretched out – though it’s not clear if that reflects Lucca’s shortcomings or Lacey’s. I’m also not sure the interplay between Lucca’s reflections, X’s past and the more speculative features is entirely coherent. The ending too was a little predictable. But I still found this a fascinating, provocative piece, an impressive collage and commentary on cultural and artistic movements and their histories.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARCcontemporary-fiction memorable-2023 netgalley-arc ...more61 s Elyse Walters4,010 11.3k

Recorded books, netgalley (thank you for an advance copy)
Â…..read by Cassandra Campbell
Â….14 hours and 6 minutes

Have you ever wanted to spit somebody in the face?
And or tell them to fuck off, and never contact you again?
CM didÂ…..
CM wanted to spit into Mr. SmithÂ’s face Â….(the guy who wrote a biography about her deceased wife) and tell him to F off. (CM didnÂ’t because sheÂ’s a nice proper woman).
ButÂ….
IÂ’m getting ahead of myself hereÂ….

What I need to say — and others might want to know …. this is a remarkable piece of writing — strange — mysterious engrossing —
sometimes pathetic—other times darn messed-up hilarious.
There is nothing generic about this book.
It may not be for everyoneÂ….but I was totally captivated > and Casandra Campbell was perfect to read it.

CM left her husband to marry X.
Never mind
Â….that CM didnÂ’t know where X was bornÂ….
Never mind
….that CM ‘knew’ that X would be the center of her life and the mystery of her life.
Never mind
….that “X Lived in a play without an intermission, and where she casted herself in every role.
Never mind
Â….that X chose to live a life where nothing was fixed. She might change her name from day to day.
Never mind
Â….that X thought she was a person who could manipulate others and that CM would allow herself to be manipulated.
Never mind
….that CM had to ‘promise’ she wouldn’t tell anyone - would never report — when X disappeared. Sometimes for weeks. And CM was never to question where she had been when she returned. (Disappearing had been a problem in other relationships for X)….

Interlude >> let me repeat I found this book deliciously messed-up humorous.

Never mind
….CM never intended to write a corrected biography… she says “if that’s what you call it”.
But she doesÂ….and this is the book we get.

NEVER MIND
Â….the strangeness, CM and XÂ’s relationshipÂ….
“The Biography of X” is a whimsical, fresh, and thrilling ride for anyone who’s willing to take it.

CM set out to uncover as much information she could learn about X. The detail that bothered CM the most Â…..was not knowing where she was born.

Â…excerpt:
“What about those times when you call out to your wife telling them lunch is ready? And they don’t come? So you walk further down the hallway and into the room and call out their name again— only to find them lying on the floor, a pile of laundry…..
“What I want to say, is, when I went to look for her, and did not find her, when she died, that is, or after, when I looked at the body left behind, I knew exactly what happened”.

Note: Catherine Lacey wrote PewÂ…..another book that equally intrigued me. I guess IÂ’m an official Lacey fan now!






Roman Clodia2,628 3,600

I have to admire the craft and commitment that's gone into this book but I wish Lacey had made me work harder. The text lays out its premise in the opening pages and doesn't really deviate from this programme:
And might I - despite how much I had deified and worshipped X, and believed her to be pure genius - might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived with her.
The use of that 'deified and worshipped' links the central relationship to the alternative history of the US which is set as background and where America is divided by a wall in 1945 and the Southern Territory becomes a 'fascist theocracy' (an allusion to The HandmaidÂ’s Tale?). The ideological struggle depends, as always, on storytelling and narrativisation, and X's brutality draws a dotted line to the mass incarcerations and executions that take place (this is all off-stage and background only to the main story, and only emerges as the narrator investigates X's unknown life).

In the foreground is a not unfamiliar story of a wild-child genius who expresses herself through a vast array of performative characters, identities and media. She changes her name, travels extensively, is artist, novelist, song-writer (with David Bowie, natch, another shape-shifter) - who gives controversial interviews and can never be pinned down. All this is almost a postmodern manifesto and the text itself draws attention to the way it collapses 'fiction' and 'reality' as real people are slickly interwoven (Lynn Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bowie as noted) and intersect with X.

Lacey supports the book's ideological infrastructure with a vast array of footnotes, sources and references which made me think of Jorge Luis Borges where the more sources and evidence are provided, the further fictional 'reality' recedes for artificiality.

This is all huge fun as the narrative makes parallels between art, politics, activism and exploitation. It's perhaps a bit long for what it has to say but succeeds in bestowing upon itself exactly the kind of slippery identity that it is contemplating.

Thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalleynetgalley52 s Paul FulcherAuthor 2 books1,549

The last sentence is from Montaigne, though she gives him no credit.

Biography of X is the third novel I have read from the always-interesting Catherine Lacey, author previously of the brilliant debut Nobody is Ever Missing and the fascinating, if flawed Pew. Ultimately I found this less successful - more later - but it is certainly intriguing if not always entirely engrossing.

Biography of X largely consists of a book within a book, a biography of the enigmatic artist X, famed for her multiple identities (performance art in themselves), reinvention of her art into different genres, and unknown origins, written after her death by her bereaved wife, the journalist, C.M. Lucca. (both fictional of course)

Lacey's addition to C.M. Lucca's biography constitutes two 'real-life' lists of sources

- a revised list of photographic sources, some of which are, in Sebaldian fashion, photos Lacey has found, other from Wikipedia Commons, and some made by Lacey or commissioned by her; and

- sources for many of the quotes in the book (some of which have fictional sources in footnotes in Lucca's book, others simply phrases in the text).

The second of these is at the heart of the novel, as X, her own words but also those said by others about her, is a conscious (on Lacey's behalf) assemblage of many other female artists, writers and critics. A scan through the sources gives us, inter alia, Reneta Alder, Lynne Tillman, Clarice Lispector, Jean Stein, Kathy Acker, Susna Sontag, Maya Jaggi, Nathalie Leger, Amanda DeMarco, Jean Rhys, Susan Howe, Chris Kraus, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Connie Converse, Parul Seghal, Fleur Jaeggy, Merve Emre, Barbara Demick, Sophie Calle, Audrey Tatou, Marguerite Younecar, Louise Bourgeois and many many more. The book also features, as characters, male artists such as Tom Waits, David Bowie and Denis Johnson, X's career taking a nose-dive when she quotes political views using Bowie's real-life words (in the novel the more liberal Bowie disowns her views).

And this is an example of the confusion (or innovation) of the approach, some of the artists appear as characters in their own-right in the novel - Connie Conserve with a different life story, plays a major role as a lover of X - some are used to blend into X's own biography and sometimes artist A is quoted as using artist B's words to describe X:

In X’s archive, I could find only one note from Connie, an inscription in a Thomas Bernhard novel: “We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.”

This inscription from Connie Conserve to X is actually from Vivian Gornick.

And as another, early, example we get the following:

I rarely agreed with the way that other people described my wife, except for the quote from Lynne Tillman that was included in one of the obituaries. She’d said X was “voracious for people . . . one of the great devourers of all time. But her method of devouring was to entice. If you had a room full of twenty people and X came in, there was an energy uplift. It got everybody off their boring number. Here was this glamorous freak.”

The quote described as being from the real-life Lynne Tillman about X is actual a quote by Chuck Wein as told to Jean Stein.

Or this:

Nathalie Léger once described X’s names in an essay: “Who knows if it was in order better to conceal her self or to expose her self, if it was in order to escape her self or to understand her self; five names, according to some, though I only know of three. With a name nothing is ever clear, on the contrary, everything becomes more opaque.” Léger was one of the few past acquaintances I contacted who seemed to have a wholly uncomplicated relationship with X. “To me it seemed a reasonable solution to a person, being a self,” Léger told me over the phone. “You have to get through—how to put it?—shame, essentially, yes that’s it—the shame and boredom of talking about yourself.” She later added, “Shifting between so many names, between selves—it must have relieved some of that shame.”

The first quote (“Who knows...opaque.”) is by Léger, as translated by Natasha Lehrer, as published in her The White Dress about the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca (a book which itself draws on many other female performance artists). The White Dress is published by Les Fugitives in the UK (another of the publisher's novels, Now, Now, Louison) is used indirectly taking an anecdote about Louise Bourgeois and making it an incident in X's life.

The first part of the second quote (“You have...yourself.”) is also by Léger, but from an interview with, and translated by, Amanda DeMarco in Bomb Magazine and talking about herself, with the second part (“Shifting...shame.”) of Lacey's own invention.

Lacey's own appendix is clear as to all the sources - this is not my sleuthing work - and there is a partial reading list of more general sources here - but it's a rather odd approach e.g. it's not clear if the artists involved have been approached. My guess is not - it did seem Lacey was careful to mostly use the deceased as the main characters.

The novel is also set in an alternative America, one that was partioned (North and South Korea is obviously a model, with Barbara Demick's work is drawn on) post WW2 into a religiously-conservative South, a socialist North (activist Emma Goldman becomes the first leader) and a West that rather stays out of the ideological battles. This creates an interesting backdrop, and in particular proves the key to X's life story, and enables Lacey to have some fun (Rachel Cusk's words about female artists in a male-dominated society are used in the novel by a frustrated male artist 'Richard Cusk') but seems something of a sideshow which would perhaps have merited a separate novel in its own right.

And that ultimately gets us to the novel's biggest flaw - it is simply far too long, and the life of a fictional artist (punctuated by the need to check the appendix for who actually said what, or what this photograph really shows) couldn't sustain my interest for its near 400 pages.

So a reluctant 3 stars - but Lacey is an author I'll continue to follow - I'd rather flawed and fascinating than conventional.

Thanks to Granta via Netgalley for the ARC - and it would be nice if the references were changed to UK editions of books where they exist.2023 net-galley38 s fatma956 941

"The title of this book--as titles so often are--is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it."
At a certain point in Biography of X, one of the eponymous X's novels is described as "a novel that emulsified fact and fiction"--the same can be said of Biography of X. It's a slippery novel in the way that it straddles fact and fiction, deeply commits itself to both the "real" and the constructed. That it is billed to us as a biography, and not a novel, immediately speaks to the kind of standards that it is attaching to itself, and that it in turn attempts to live up to. As a work of nonfiction ostensibly written by C. M. Lucca, X's widow, Biography of X commits to the research that such a work entails: at the end of each of its chapters, the reader is presented with a list of sources that include--sometimes fictional, sometimes real, sometimes a bit of both--novels, articles, recordings, interviews, movies, archival materials, all listed along with their authors, dates, publishers, locations. That the novel does this seems to imply a kind of rigorous commitment to the work on the part of C. M. Lucca: this feeling that she is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to the integrity of this biography of her wife that she's trying to write. And yet, in many ways, Lucca is not a very good biographer, or not really a "biographer" at all: she is too close to her subject, her stake in this work too personal. Lucca's biography, then, Lacey's novel, both is and is not a biography: it is the account of the life of a deceased artist, and it is the account of the grief of the widow that artist left behind; it is rigorous enough to attempt to commit to the standards of its genre, and personal enough to cast doubt on its supposed adherence to those standards. In other words, it "emulsifies fact and fiction," mixes the factual details of X's life, supported by meticulous references, with the narrative that Lucca, as someone who loved X, wants to believe about X, or used to believe about X, or is trying to uncover from X.
"It seemed to be all I had ever wanted to know--how I might have changed her, what effect I'd had upon her. She had always seemed to me too powerful a mind and heart to ever fully breach, least of all by someone as fearful and flimsy as myself."
So far, I've talked about C. M. Lucca, the fictional author in this book, more than I have about Catherine Lacey, the actual author of the book. But Biography of X, the novel, and the biography of X, the biography, are not so easy to separate. a mobius strip, they feed into each other, the one looping into the other such that it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Put another way, Biography of X is a deeply metafictional novel in the way that it is constantly metabolizing itself, at once calling attention to and calling into question its own narrative, its author and her subject, its methodology.

One of the things I loved most about this novel is the way that it slowly unravelled--and, by extension, complicated--the relationship between Lucca and X. The novel, we are told, is the story of a widow who, in the wake of her grief, decides to write a biography about her deceased wife, who was quite a famous and prolific artist. It's the kind of premise that almost immediately implies a certain kind of story, one which boils down to: grieving widow finds out who her wife "really was." But the novel is not really interested in anything as facile as that; it's not interested in who X "really was" so much as it is interested in who X is made out to be, especially by Lucca. What it asks is, how do we construct accounts for people--and for ourselves--when they seem to elide being accountable in the first place? (In that respect, this novel really reminded me of Trust by Hernan Diaz and the way it also delves into the many accounts of an almost larger-than-life person.) X is undoubtedly a complex and elusive figure--becoming less rather than more understandable as the novel goes on (and I mean that in the best way)--but for me the more compelling figure in this novel is easily Lucca, X's ostensible biographer. As much as it is presented as a biography of X, I found Biography of X to be such a sensitive and moving portrait of Lucca: of what it is to be so deeply (and dangerously) caught up in a romantic relationship, to so intimately and vulnerably tie your sense of self to another person. For all its deft thematic explorations, Biography of X is also just about this grief that has overtaken its narrator, this persistent sense of loss that she cannot shake off, and that she is unable to resolve.

(One final note: Catherine Lacey's writing in this novel is just stunning. I have pages and pages of highlights; when it came to looking for some quotes to put in this review, there was an absolute embarrassment of riches for me to choose from.)

Biography of X is such a fascinating, engrossing, impressive novel, complex and challenging and resistant to any kind of simple answers--in other words, just the kind of love that I love, and that I did love, a lot.

Thanks so much to Raincoast Books for sending me a review copy of this beautiful book!2022-favs 2023-favs lgbtqia35 s leah384 2,620

Biography of X is a fictional memoir detailing the life of the eccentric and elusive artist X, as told by her widow. As the widow interviews many of the people that crossed paths with X during her life of constant identity switches and disguises, she uncovers a trail of secrets, lies, and betrayals, and is left wondering if she, or anyone, really knew X at all.

What impressed me the most about this novel was simply how inventive it is. Though fiction, it reads non-fiction, and is littered with quotes, photographs, and artefacts backed up with footnotes to books, articles etc – all of which are also fake. Not only that, Lacey also plants this story in an alternative reality of the USA where the country split into 2 territories after WW2: the progressive northern territory and the oppressive south. While this gives the story a dystopian flair, it also gives Lacey the room to stretch her creativity further, weaving a narrative so rigorous that it starts to feel real. I was simply enthralled by it.

4.5
lgbtq lit-fic own30 s Kate O'Shea849 90

I'm afraid to say that I wasn't blown away by this book.

I got the audio version from Netgalley in return for an honest review so I should say that the actual narration is excellent. Cassandra Campbell's voice is clear and very pleasant to listen to so that's one star's worth.

The story, however, whilst interesting and a different wasn't really for me. I loved Pew because of its spareness of language but Biography of X seems to ramble around circuitously for a little too long. Catherine Lacey certainly can write a great character and in X (or whoever she was during her fictional lifetime) was just too unable for me and CM came across as a little one dimensional and dull. I'm guessing that was the point given what the conclusion of the book was but (for me) it just took far too long to get there.

I'll definitely look out for more Catherine Lacey because I find her books interesting. If you a saga-style book rather than the short, pithy offering we got in Pew then this book may be for you. She's certainly done her research.31 s Bojan Ga?i?82 26 Read

Istina i ?injenice su ve?ito tražena roba. Mnogi su zaneseni u veri da baš njihovo vi?enje doga?aja pije vode i pruža ta?an uvid u hronologiju dešavanja. Ovo se jednako odnosi na li?ni koliko i na tu?i život. Velika satisfakcija od pomisli da znate kako je biti neko drugi, kasnije prerasta u još ve?e ube?enje u ta?nost vašeg tuma?enja tu?eg života. Veliki deo neautorizovanih biografija po?iva na ovom principu-kada ?injenica nema, praznine se "dotuma?e".

Kao odgovor na jednu takvu biografiju o svojoj pokojnoj supruzi, slavnoj i misterioznoj umetnici ?ije ime se sastoji od svega jednog slova- X(iks), glavna protagonistkinja piše korektivnu biografiju i upušta se u definisanje žene koja je ceo život bežala od toga da bude definisana.

Ovaj naslov je mnogo toga, a darovi Ketrin Lejsi kroz ovu knjigu su veliki. Samim tim se može ?itati na više na?ina. Forma biografije je u potpunosti ispoštovana kroz hronologiju doga?aja, pružanje istorijskog konteksta, transkripte i niz parafraziranih intervjua, zatim fusnota gde se navode izvori kroz nazive dokumenata, imena muzi?kih albuma i numera, privatnih prepiski i kolekcija. ?italac zaista ima utisak da je pred njim istorija stvarne li?nosti. Ali stvarnost je sasvim suprotna, "Biography of X" je fikcija. Svako svedo?enje, analiti?ki razgrani?eno i isklesano do sitnih detalja,plod je bogate mašte autorke dosledno posve?ene izgra?ivanju realnosti svog zamišljenog sveta.

Taj zamišljeni svet ovde poprima nove dimenzije. Naime, Ketrin Lejsi je stvorila sloj alternativne istorije. Naslovna "X" poti?e iz "Južne teritorije", otcepljenog dela SAD-a koji je postojao kao nezavisna teritorija pod autokratskim režimom od kraja Drugog svetskog rata pa sve do sredine devedesetih godina. Turbulentna egzistencija pra?ena je nizom diskriminacijskih zakona, afera, korupcijom, nasiljem protiv gra?ana, pobunama i pokušajima bežanja na prosperitetniji i liberalniji sever. Ovakav monumentalni podvig imaginacije i brilijantne kontra-faktografije,koji lagano stoji rame uz rame sa Rotovom "Zaverom protiv Amerike"(nekada je ?ak i prevazilazi), štivo je iz kojeg bi mnogi moderni autori mogli svašta da nau?e.

U svojoj suštini, ovo je pri?a jedne žene i njene bitke da kroz okean ?injenica i laži o tu?em životu kona?no sagleda i prihvati istinu o sebi, sopstvenoj traumi i patologiji. Taj put je trnovit, potpuna objektivnost i uspeh su skoro nemogu?i ali i neprihvatljivi. Nekada je fantazija nužno zlo u odnosu na stvarnost, nekada submisivni traže dominantne a nekada je ?injenica zaista ?udnija od fikcije.

Sve ovo zvu?i poprili?no zahtevno. Treba biti iskren, ovako ambiciozna knjiga zaista zahteva posve?enog ?itaoca. Ali klju? leži u dostižnosti jer pred vama je planina ?iji vrh možete dosegnuti, put je intelektualno stimulativan, na momente naporan, kao i sam život ali vredan truda. Ako se pisanje zaista može posmatrati kao eksperiment, Ketrin Lejsi je ostvarila maestralan rezultat, "Biography of X" je onaj u kojem možda i vi treba da u?estvujete.30 s Ari Levine217 191

A challenging experiment in building an emotionally rich and ugly biography of an imaginary but great avant-garde artist living in an alternative timeline of late 20th-century America who was also a truly destructive, unreliable, and abusive human being.

Retired investigative journalist C.M. Lucca, our cipher- narrator, and the second (or maybe third?) wife of X, a mysterious shape-shifting female artist in the downtown Manhattan scene who actively violated norms of gender, sexuality, and bourgeois propriety. The novel consists of Lucca's interviews with the other important figures in X's life-- in a clever Sebaldian touch, Lacey supplies fake photographs of X's many incarnations, and abundant pseudo-historical footnotes to Lucca's archive and fictional news articles and academic essays. Lucca's own backstory and inner life seems extremely thinly-drawn, and perhaps this is Lacey's point about the victims of isolation and abusive control in both intimate relationships and authoritarian politics.

X is a composite (one assumes) of Lacey's multiple artistic heroes: under a lengthy list of noms de plume, X wrote avant-garde fiction Kathy Acker, created performance art Marina Abramovic, performed in Times Square live sex shows, ironically appropriated dozens of class and gender identities Cindy Sherman, sold her installation pieces for millions in SoHo galleries, might have been an undercover FBI agent, and befriended David Bowie and actually wrote and produced "Heroes."

Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, X was also a serial user and abuser of her romantic partners, whom she isolated and dominated. And who were forced to accept her lack of stable personality structures, and her randomly dropping in and out of their lives in order to, say, fly off to Rome on a moment's caprice to fully impersonate an Italian feminist activist. Here, Lacey is wrestling with the most extreme edge case of life imitating art through maniacally-devoted method acting.

But what doesn't really work here is the shallowness of the world-building: Lacey's alternative timeline of American history seems to have been devised by someone with minimal knowledge of American history, and can't escape the political perspective of the Trump-era left. In X's 1945, the southern states seceded from the Union, built a literal wall along their northern border, and formed a fascist, Christian white supremacist version of Margaret Atwood's Gilead, a thinly-allegorized evangelical East Germany. Up north, the anarchist Emma Goldman became FDR's chief advisor, building a (to us, premature) Bernie Sanders-esque (he was President in the 1990s) welfare state, with socialized medicine, gender equality, and gay marriage.

Lucca reconstructs her late wife's early life: she was born Carrie Lu Walker in Christian fascist Tennessee. As a teenaged bride and mother, she joined a subversive cell of radicals, survived a failed violent uprising against the regime, and escaped to the Northern Territory, where she reinvented and insinuated herself into the New York art world. The deviations from our own timeline just seemed arbitrary, especially when this alternative New York felt almost exactly the real one, with only tiny and sporadic differences, Brian Eno and Rachel Cusk switching genders. But one deviation is clever and decisive: after the assassination of a dozen alpha-male artists Jackson Pollock in 1943, high art is now exclusively the preserve of women...

Maybe I'm just being a carping historian (that is my day job). But this novel about a brilliant but problematic artist didn't need to be unfolding in an alternative America, since our own is sufficiently alienating and uncanny. And alternative timelines are extremely hard to pull off (see under: Philip Roth's The Plot against America).2023 american library38 s CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian1,223 1,680

4.5 stars

"When we love people, they seem different from all the people that we don't love, but everyone is the same. Everyone is made of the same stuff and everyone reaches the same conclusion [ie, death]."

Wow, what a fascinating masterpiece beautifully performed in audiobook by Cassandra Campbell. A fictional biography that is just as much about its author (the subject's widow) as it is about X, the magnanimous subject. An incredibly real and thoroughly built alternative US history as setting, a charismatic and volatile artist, a laisse faire bisexual normative world, and queering of format and archives. Intellectually mesmerizing and thought-provoking. Although not as emotionally resonant as I usually my novels, I can't really fault this book for not being something it's not trying to be. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

If you this book, I'd recommend The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North. Also about a complicated bisexual woman artist!american audiobooks fiction ...more25 s michelle (travelingbooknerds)280 129

[26 march 2023] wow. love when 2% into a book you get the 5-star magic and it carries through to one of the best final sentences you’ve ever read in a novel. it felt everything in the universe was aligned and i was in another plane of existence for the duration of this audiobook—i couldn’t tell where the story ended and i began. truly such an engrossing immersive captivating reading experience i never wanted to end. can’t wait to come back here and elaborate on my best bits tomorrow, but i have early start tomorrow so gn for now
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