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A review by casparb
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
5.0
2023!!!! she keeps! its true and I just find, more every year ., a sideways love,.,, act so that there is no use in a centre
2022Reread this lovely I adore her so much & look I wrote a review, stumbling as it is, back in 2020 which I'm not writing over (palimpsestically!) for once. Diagonal prose
2020:
All sorts of strangeness & obscurity. So experimental, yet so early - it has been suggested that this experimental masterpiece was ignored due to Stein's being a woman.
I'm sure anyone that tries to read this will blink at the first page and question whether it is worth pursuing. It's undeniably a difficult work, crab-like in such a way that reminds me of Derrida's 'diagonal prose'. A possible key to this book is to (attempt to) read it rhizomatically. It is centreless.
I was reminded at times of the poems of W.S. Graham - I think this is because both Stein and Graham were literary figures that associated with sculptors and painters, rather than with poets. There is something in the defamiliarised, abstract descriptions of objects that reminds me of modernist sculpture. All is extension and shape - a practice often neglected by writers.
2022Reread this lovely I adore her so much & look I wrote a review, stumbling as it is, back in 2020 which I'm not writing over (palimpsestically!) for once. Diagonal prose
2020:
All sorts of strangeness & obscurity. So experimental, yet so early - it has been suggested that this experimental masterpiece was ignored due to Stein's being a woman.
I'm sure anyone that tries to read this will blink at the first page and question whether it is worth pursuing. It's undeniably a difficult work, crab-like in such a way that reminds me of Derrida's 'diagonal prose'. A possible key to this book is to (attempt to) read it rhizomatically. It is centreless.
I was reminded at times of the poems of W.S. Graham - I think this is because both Stein and Graham were literary figures that associated with sculptors and painters, rather than with poets. There is something in the defamiliarised, abstract descriptions of objects that reminds me of modernist sculpture. All is extension and shape - a practice often neglected by writers.