A review by serendipitysbooks
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

challenging informative reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

 After Sappho, arguably the most experimental of the Booker longlisted novels, won’t be for every reader. I, however, was fascinated by this collective, speculative, interlinked biography of some incredibly creative, unconventional, fiercely intelligent, and queer women, which spans the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the title and the connections with Sappho the fragmentary nature of this work, where snippets of different lives interweave with each other, seems appropriate. While some of the women featured in this book were already familiar to me - Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan - many were women I’d never heard of, which tells you something about the fate of women in the historical record and the fact that I’m less familiar with women from continental Europe than those from the US and UK. I’m sure there will be much debate about the women who weren’t included - this book is very white. Obviously I loved learning about their lives, and happily spent time Googling, not because I had to in order to understand the book, but because it inspired me to learn more. The way in which these women expressed themselves whether through dance, writing or painting, they way they discussed and debated ideas in salons, and especially they way they pushed back against the social mores and laws of the day which attempted to limit what they could do and how they could live was inspiring. As was the support they gave to each other and the love - platonic, romantic and sexual- that they shared. I also loved the use of first person plural, a really effective way of including the reader in the story, emphasising that the women featured were not the only ones but were actually part of a larger whole, and encouraging the reader to continue their legacy. This book is meticulously researched so in many ways it reads like non-fiction. Yet its fragmentary nature and the prose itself give it a poetic feel. These two statements sound contradictory yet the reading experience was never jarring. Rather it was a joyous (deliberately so), feminist, inspiring, genre-bending delight.
 
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