The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson
Poet Lisa Robertson’s debut novel uplifts the starving artist cliché with effortless, crystalline prose
Hazel Brown – penniless neophyte seduced by literature into leaving home – wakes in her hotel room one day feeling that she has written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. While Lisa Robertson’s debut might sound like science fiction, it is a study of somebody experiencing a sensation beyond their cognitive limits. Hazel finds her own story reflected in Baudelaire's biography: a young artist discovering their autonomy within the inadequate confines of cheaply rented spaces.
An acclaimed poet herself, Robertson navigates novel emotions with ease. Some of these Hazel feels herself; others, she finds in books. She reads Edgar Allen Poe and learns that Poe haunted Baudelaire like Baudelaire haunts her; he too awoke one day with the haunted sense that Poe’s work was his. Yet Hazel wears her realisation uncomfortably; Baudelaire’s work, now her work, is full of mendicant girls that are as scorned as they are lusted after.
Still, Hazel feels an affinity for his circumstances. Like her fellow artists in fugue, Hazel seeks freedom from her ordained place in the world, looking for a life lived outside money – one that may barely reach beyond survival, but will allow her to "not be bored and to experience grace." So precisely rendered is Hazel’s situation that no doubt someone out there will one day wake up feeling that they have written the complete works of Lisa Robertson. Many more will simply wish they had.