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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young
I’ve never been so full of words as after reading this book, itself so very full of words.
And yet the words inspired by the reading are hard to grasp, they slip through my fingers, fly out of my grasp, flit away on the breeze of an afternoon, such an afternoon as is pleasantly spent turning the leaves of this book in a garden, beneath a tree, the sunlight stealing through the gaps in the canopy overhead dappling the page, causing the words to shimmer and shift, while the breeze, that same breeze, lifts a strand of my hair, whispers a kiss along the nape of my neck and, having cajoled me nicely, reaches in to snatch those word pictures forming in my head as I read, whisking them away and up so that they go twirling and swirling, separating and reforming, now a pair of butterflies circling each other in an eternal mating dance, now the lacey edge of a flowing skirt sweeping across the waving sands of a desert far away, shapeshifting in a mirage of heat into a masculine figure on horseback galloping off to disappear into a black speck, a speck that passes through a keyhole in the clouds and reemerges on the other side of the horizon astride the moon, a little stick person in men’s boots and a red wig who drops gently onto a New England beach and pokes at the flotsam with the tip of her umbrella, unearthing here a wedding ornament, there a funeral wreath, singing old sea-shell songs as she goes, crossing paths with a sad and black-cloaked angel toting an alpenhorn, weighty with the sins of the world, while a horizontal figure like a hibernating butterfly at one remove from life drowses away the years in a crumbling mansion with no north, accompanied by wraiths from all the ages, endlessly bidding farewell to the world, and a lonesome bus ploughs through the Iowa night with a phantom driver and three spectral passengers towards what cheer?
I may well ask.
What have I read? How has it been written? Does it cohere? Is coherence so vital?
Does beauty have to make sense? What’s on the other side of beauty? Can I contemplate it?
Am I repeating myself? Does repertition uncover new layers? Do lists constitute literature?
Will I read the second half of this million-word work? Does my love of words override my love of economy? How many ways can I ask the same question?
How can sublime sentences become nightmarish chapters? How can nightmarish chapters be made up of sublime sentences?
Will I ever succeed in understanding the essence of Miss Young’s writing, the buzzing, the hum as of a corpse beneath the envelope of the text? Has anybody ever succeeded in pinning down this phantasm of a narrative? If they have, should I search out their explanation of her word riddles?
But why should I, when I can read hers instead, her ignotum per ignotious, her mystery of the mystery, her search for the true in the false?
Why should you?
And yet the words inspired by the reading are hard to grasp, they slip through my fingers, fly out of my grasp, flit away on the breeze of an afternoon, such an afternoon as is pleasantly spent turning the leaves of this book in a garden, beneath a tree, the sunlight stealing through the gaps in the canopy overhead dappling the page, causing the words to shimmer and shift, while the breeze, that same breeze, lifts a strand of my hair, whispers a kiss along the nape of my neck and, having cajoled me nicely, reaches in to snatch those word pictures forming in my head as I read, whisking them away and up so that they go twirling and swirling, separating and reforming, now a pair of butterflies circling each other in an eternal mating dance, now the lacey edge of a flowing skirt sweeping across the waving sands of a desert far away, shapeshifting in a mirage of heat into a masculine figure on horseback galloping off to disappear into a black speck, a speck that passes through a keyhole in the clouds and reemerges on the other side of the horizon astride the moon, a little stick person in men’s boots and a red wig who drops gently onto a New England beach and pokes at the flotsam with the tip of her umbrella, unearthing here a wedding ornament, there a funeral wreath, singing old sea-shell songs as she goes, crossing paths with a sad and black-cloaked angel toting an alpenhorn, weighty with the sins of the world, while a horizontal figure like a hibernating butterfly at one remove from life drowses away the years in a crumbling mansion with no north, accompanied by wraiths from all the ages, endlessly bidding farewell to the world, and a lonesome bus ploughs through the Iowa night with a phantom driver and three spectral passengers towards what cheer?
I may well ask.
What have I read? How has it been written? Does it cohere? Is coherence so vital?
Does beauty have to make sense? What’s on the other side of beauty? Can I contemplate it?
Am I repeating myself? Does repertition uncover new layers? Do lists constitute literature?
Will I read the second half of this million-word work? Does my love of words override my love of economy? How many ways can I ask the same question?
How can sublime sentences become nightmarish chapters? How can nightmarish chapters be made up of sublime sentences?
Will I ever succeed in understanding the essence of Miss Young’s writing, the buzzing, the hum as of a corpse beneath the envelope of the text? Has anybody ever succeeded in pinning down this phantasm of a narrative? If they have, should I search out their explanation of her word riddles?
But why should I, when I can read hers instead, her ignotum per ignotious, her mystery of the mystery, her search for the true in the false?
Why should you?