Book review: The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson

By Simon Demetriou

The Baudelaire Fractal is a novel that feels at the same time extremely modern and extremely traditional. And this makes sense, given narrator Hazel Brown spends a good deal of time considering ‘the untimeliness within the timely’, the way in which fashion transcribes older fashion, or the way a 19th century painting can teach you about yourself now.

The most dramatic example of timely untimeliness is the event that prompts the title of the novel: the moment one morning in 2016 when Hazel comes to the dramatic realisation that she has authored the complete works of Baudelaire.

But none of this really explains why upon reading the book, I couldn’t shake the feeling of having read some very similar but hugely different things without being able to put my finger on what those prior texts were. Ultimately, I figured it out. Lisa Robertson’s debut novel is a spiritual autobiography transcribed into the late 20th/early 21st centuries. For those who have never read a spiritual autobiography – and unless you have an interest in late 17^th century religious literature, there’s very little reason why you would have – it is a text that documents the conversion of the narrator. They are typified by highly insular first person narration, taking every external and internal stimulus and weighing up their significance in an attempt to understand whether the narrator is going to heaven or not. The key question is, do I have grace?

This is the same question that chases Hazel throughout the novel after her departure from home aged 17, an opening that evokes the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, another novel that owes much to the conventions of the spiritual autobiography.

Where The Baudelaire Fractal differs from conventional spiritual autobiography is that there is no single conversion moment, and that the grace the narrator craves is not of God, but of girl. Hazel finds awakenings of her girl-grace in everything from wearing a knock-off Thierry Mugler suit to leaving a menstrual stain behind her on a chair in a Parisian cafe, to viewing Deroy’s painting La Petite Mendiante Rousse, to the titular Baudelairean authorship. And this is the key to a novel which ought to be read by everyone interested in ‘the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life’, no matter the reader’s own sex. Existing as becoming a girl in a world that is always already there when you arrive, and which works to define girlhood in the negative, can be achieved only ‘by the grace of [a] bulky untimeliness’, since for Hazel, and Lisa Robertson, a girl is ‘always and only untimely, apparitional, forbidden, monstrous, a stain on authority.’ And every one of those descriptions is a positive.