Name: Bluets
Rating: 3.842526690391459 (281 reviews)
ISBN: 9781933517407

Maggie Nelson

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color."

Bluets

A Guardian Book of the Year Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of ‘pillow book’ about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. Much like Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

at first this felt saccharine but i ended up reading it all in a couple of hours and enjoying it much more than i thought. blue!! and not taking itself as seriously as i assumed

yasi

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Maggie Nelson is so cool. She is so very inspiring and intimidating and enviable and emulatable. I love reading her work because I don’t write like that but I also do, so I feel stupid and useless but also then want to write fervently for hours. Oh well, off to work instead!

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Maybe to have bleached and patch of sun is better than to have the blue entirely intact (reminder to self). 

Bluets is just a text that is so entirely itself. Nelson does something here that no one else could have done before she dared to do it. this is one of those texts that lends itself to endless rereads—on my third reading of this book, I am still floored, perhaps more so than on the first two reads (although then, too, I felt entirely changed upon reading). it speaks to itself, saying no man steps in a river twice—everything changes, or something changes and something stays the same. this time round, I am returning to this text a woman who too has loved something, or somethings, to a point of obsession, who too has loved a bad man to the point of consolation——and then arrived, again, at "but love is not a consolation. It is light." so it goes. "I long to be a student not of longing but of light."

biddy

It’s like different shades of blue being gathered in tiny fragments from all corners of the world: people’s stories and sprinkles of life in blue that capture countless angles across the globe. Sometimes it’s nonsense, sometimes facts, poems, historic events. All of it shaping a rainbow made entirely of blue, each hue holding its own meaning. And here I am, witnessing a universe being woven together into something I’ve never seen before. How wonderful it is to realize that even before our time, before any of this existed, the color blue lived on through these stories.

🏹

Writing is good but overall seems self-indulgent and dissonant, not worth the hype imo

Xiang

clay

there’s something incredibly blunt and sharp about the way maggie nelson writes, how she weaves each story over and under, again and again. i dont know if i like it but i know i was intrigued enough to hope for a definitive, clear-cut ending, for the sake of the voice, despite knowing there will be none. i think what i like most about her writing is the way she interprets and finds nuance in the mundane but also in the profound. in the book, she uses texts from other authors and paintings from artists, to describe loneliness, desire, grief etc etc. but she also uses anecdotes from her quadraparalytic friend to describe it and come to the same conclusion. what i dont like about her writing is more of MY skill issue than anything else; she’s incredibly verbose, and i read these at night.

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?"

as a blue-eyed person, i wish that was the case; maybe then reading this wouldn’t feel like rummaging through a vulgarly giant pile of impossibly washed-out blue-tinted trinkets by the sea shore to me. but this speck of dust is golden:

"Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I."

green has arms, i know the softness of its embrace

lily lily 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?"

as a blue-eyed person, i wish that was the case; maybe then reading this wouldn’t feel like rummaging through a vulgarly giant pile of impossibly washed-out blue-tinted trinkets by the sea shore to me. but this speck of dust is golden:

"Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I."

green has arms, i know the softness of its embrace

quite literally changed my life. now i can't remember the life i was living prior to reading this. i will be going back to this at different points in time

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

can’t say if i like the color blue but i liked this one

lexie

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.”

whoever the prince of blue is kind of an asshole.

erin

Disappointing read right after “The Argonauts.” Makes me like her writing less. 

Tired and obtuse in that breakup way. I probably would have loved it at the right time in my life. As it is? Meh.

Similarly as when I am writing to N, I felt like I have already read this book, in a beautiful way. I also feel like it should be given. 

I possess no facts. Is that a problem or it just is?

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Similarly as when I am writing to N, I felt like I have already read this book, in a beautiful way. I also feel like it should be given. 

I possess no facts. Is that a problem or it just is?

Bluets

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