| Title | : | Insel |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0876858531 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780876858530 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 196 |
| Publication | : | First published October 1, 1991 |
Insel Reviews
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It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different dimensions at once. Sitting on the sidewalk—floating in an Atlantic Ocean full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important— the wonder was the sense of timeless peace—of perfect happiness—
Quotes would suffice to explicate the hypnotic charm of this book but I need to pacify the countless thoughts wandering restlessly in my head. Mina Loy- that’s her on the book cover, invokes the image of a woman sitting against a wall with words, colorful words scattered all around her. Whether she would gather them in a notebook or splash them on an empty canvas to give some form to her whims is an act of that untranslatable artistic defiance that one can witness but can’t categorize under some conventional genre. If you’re willing to see, then she is ready to mesmerize.
It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being—in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains—all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.
But she is better than others- takes in beauty and the wretched with equal fervor, berates the pity and peers directly into the human soul which consists of gazillions of contradictions but never cease to fascinate the ever searching mind. Having a nameless relationship with her surrealist friend, Insel*, Loy carefully bind together the fragments of their reckless meetings that reveal the variegated dimensions of life and the living. Her peculiar description about Insel gives a sense of continuity to an existence that can end anytime soon but hold on to something...surreal.
Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul, inhabiting the body of an ethic, ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here was no need for salvage.
Loy’s poetic sensibilities works well with the obscure and enkindle the present with nostalgia of incomplete memories. It gently prod us to look past the extravagance of some of her sentences and focus our gaze on the fleeting truth which is already prepared to travel the oceans of a different, more cordial universe.
Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank of orientation faded—the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.
Nothingness.
*Insel’s character was inspired from Surrealist Painter,
Richard Oelze.
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Insel is a book where words come first, where words stand on the page like little helmeted guards of the inner realm, and so the reader reads and paces the perimeter, enjoying the work of reading, of reading first one word and then the next and the next and so on, until the little helmeted guards themselves turn aside to chat amongst themselves, or pause for a cigarette, or piss in the brambles, and the reader slips through into the expansive realm of sense and sensation, free to wander in what feels like High Modernist Victoriana where rigorous sense impregnates vaporousness to eventually birth a hyper-logical Green Man of magic and pragmatism.
The writing itself is a delicious tangle of obdurate words, with beetling Latinisms looming over vapor and moss, while potent ideas (expressed with granitic logic, though often undermined by neologisms and eccentricity) mingle with dreamland’s deepest intuitions.
Insel is Loy’s response to Breton’s Nadja, and, for what it’s worth, bests it in every respect.
The meeting. The enchantment. The descent into the other’s realm unconsciously guided by that very other. The lessons learned. The return.
Both are quasi-fictional accounts of actual people and experiences, with Loy’s Insel being the “marginal surrealist” Richard Oelze, whose paintings, like his very being, are drifty chaos and dream just barely congealed into something apprehensible (if not completely comprehensible).
Insel/Oelze is pale and destitute, autistic, but nonetheless charming in a death’s-head-type way, conveying a natural magic and atmosphere of unconscious occultism. Loy is fascinated and plunges into the moss and fog of his personality, and as she is predisposed to a fascination with incipience, to that blurry point where things first come into being, Insel/Oelze acts much as an opiate and she’s hooked.
For most of the book she wanders in his realm, following him, helping him, being maddened by him, etc., in a kind of sleep or dream or swamp trek, until her natural defenses kick in, and the inherent logic of her mind, and her attraction to minute particulars as illuminated by sunlight, and she is freed from his spell, realizing that unlike as in Insel/Oelze’s vision (where all is in an arrested state of semi-stagnant fluctuation) things, even we as people, can ripen and come to fruition, can come to mean something.
And so Loy walks away. No doubt enriched by Insel/Oelze, but moving on.
The book left me with the distinct impression that it’s “message” was something very important to Loy in her solitude and reclusion (it was not published until after her death), and that it “fed” her in some fundamental and important way. And so by extension can do the same for the reader with whom it resonates.
* * *
Side Notes:
The 5 stars are no doubt my 5 stars as I'm in love with Loy, and though I first read this years ago it took a second reading for me to realize I could read it forever.
The cover design sucks, primarily for the fact that it bears no relation to the book's content or general atmosphere.
The font also sucks, in its inherent self, and because it rendered italics, which were used generously and appropriately throughout the book, virtually indistinguishable from the non-italicized text. -
I.
I should preface this section by saying that I am a huge admirer of Mina Loy's poetry; in fact, I think she is one of the finest modernist female poets, deservedly in the company of figures like Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. The Last Lunar Baedeker may well be the best collection of modernist poetry ever, surpassing even William Carlos Williams's Spring and All or Eliot's The Waste Land. (I don't include Eliot's Four Quartets given its publication date is after the Second World War, and thus after the modernist period proper.)
Who else can write such terse verses like these, packed with metaphysical inquiries, ruminations on gender, philosophy, truth, and subjectivity?The impartiality of the absolute
All of the female modernist writers I mentioned above—Barnes, H.D., and Stein—were also equally proficient and talented in prose, especially narrative prose. Barnes's Nightwood might in all reality be the best example of the modernist novel in English; H.D.'s
Routs the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it and caging
Lose it
(from
Human Cylinders)
HERmione (link to my Goodreads review) is one of the finest examples of the female Künstlerroman, not to mention a fascinating roman-à-clef that shows the egotistical influence Ezra Pound had on her life and her work; and, of course, Stein's Three Women and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and many other pieces that mingle poetics with prose, from prose poems to libretti, from novels to antinovels.
Insel is Loy's only novel, and it was never published during her lifetime. Unlike the compact, concise, and dagger-sharp precision found in all her verse, Insel lacks these qualities which make Loy's presence among the modernists, surrealists, Dadaists, cubists, and other bohemian art groups in the interwar period such a crucial presence. And Loy is indeed seminal to this period, both as a poet and as a curatorial presence to artistic figures as pivotal as Giacometti, Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray, and many others.
While there are moments of interesting scenes in cafés and clubs that bring to life the artistic world in Europe—and here, we are in an unnamed city in Germany—as well as tragicomical portraits of the surrealist painter Insel himself, Loy's prose meanders and is never sure of itself. At times, Loy is intent on relaying a tête-à-tête between the painter and the narrator, one Mrs. Jones, herself an artist (although very much ashamed of her output alongside more successful figures like Insel); at other times, Loy launches in philosophical comments about the meaning of art or the nature of place insofar as it informs subjectivity; still, in other sections, the growing camaraderie between Insel and Mrs. Jones results in an intriguing character sketch of what it might have been like to be a starving artist during this specific period in history.
But these sections have no flow to them—and, if you look at my favorite book shelf here, you'll see I actually prefer books without structure—and this is to Insel's detriment. Oddly enough, too, there are only a few passages where Loy's prose borders on poetic rumination: so this doesn't feel like "a poet's novel" (much as I hate to use that hackneyed phrase), but rather a poet's attempt to write narrative prose. And there are moments that succeed in doing just this, but far more that fail to cause Insel to be a complete fiction, standing on its own two feet. Rather, its importance to us now is as a social and historical document, which is something I consider in some depth below.
II.
Now, I should preface this section by saying how much I admire presses like Melville House who have just published Loy's Insel as part of their Neversink series. Without presses like Melville House, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, Archipelago, and NYRB, to name but a few, many books would never see the light of day, languishing under layers of dust in an archive somewhere with no readership to savor the succor many of these works afford. So Melville House should indeed be commended for publishing Insel, along with the "Visitation" fragment—which has never before seen the light of day—added in their volume as an appendix.
With that said, because as I stated above that Insel is a social and historical document—and that its import lies there, rather than its flawed attempt as a fictional experiment—I can't help but feel that the Melville House edition of Insel is one that falls flat of the requirements such a document necessitates. Sarah Hayden even addresses this in her introduction:Due to the exigencies of space and formatting conventions established by the Neversink series, it was not possible to include by extended notes and critical apparatus.
Although Harding is speaking solely about her notes to the "Visitation" fragment, one can well imagine that her notes to Insel itself have also been excised due to these monolithic "exigencies." A social and historical document requires annotations throughout, not just an introductory or prefatory section, in order for readers to continually situate the text within its specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. For example, while many of the non-English terms—mostly German—are indeed translated at the end in yet another appendix, most of these annotations are Loy's own. Since Insel does not function solely in terms of fiction, as I have said repeatedly, it requires a contextualization and grounding for which Melville House's "exigencies" do not allow—and, sadly, the dearth of such materials can cause the text to be further isolated from a contemporary reader's experience of the bohemian art world it dramatizes.
I know that many readers have issues with academic presses, largely due to the costs of their products; however, I think that the only proper way to do Insel justice is to have the excised notes (and whatever other materials Hayden possessed and which were not placed on Melville House's website, which they have done in the case of Hayden's as far as "Visitation" goes). It is only with recourse to them that the world in Insel can come to life. Would an academic press have done a better job with the text? While I can't answer that question, I can almost assuredly say that they probably would have.
When reading fiction, minimal notes are always best so as to not detract from readers' experiences of the text. (I recall, for instance, a friend's experience reading several of Woolf's novels in the Harcourt editions, failing to realize there were notes toward the back as Harcourt chose not to "blemish" the main text with any indication—superscript, asterisk, or otherwise—that there were annotations.) But Insel is not fiction to be enjoyed: its whole raison d'être should and must be as a social and historical document: one requiring the laborious and sometimes cumbersome footnotes and annotations of academic work. Only then can this text be properly placed within its context; as it stands now, in this edition, the context is lost, thus making Loy's only flawed (failed?) attempt at fiction all the more glaringly futile when taken solely on its own terms. -
Mina Loy’s elusive novel is a composite of experiences and ideas taken from her life: her involvement with the surrealist movement; her thoughts about art and writing; her unusual blend of mystical and religious beliefs; all intermingled with aspects of surrealist philosophies and techniques. These techniques are frequently visible in Loy’s chosen style, alongside a distinctly modernist approach. Insel is by turns a form of self-exploration; a critique of the male-dominated, surrealist art world; and even satire, as Loy freely criss-crosses various genre boundaries.
Loy’s story features Mrs Jones, loosely based on Loy, and Insel a version of German painter Richard Oelze. Loy and Oelze met in Paris in 1933 when she was working as a buyer for a gallery and he arrived in flight from Nazi Germany. Insel has no real plot, it charts the developing “friendship” between Mrs Jones and Insel, over various meetings, mostly set among Paris’s bohemian cafes. The semi-autobiographical dimension’s reinforced by the real-life figures from Loy’s circle who make cameo appearances, Man Ray joins them at their table, there are thinly-disguised versions of artists like Andre Breton and direct references to others like Joseph Cornell. All either former associates or friends of Loy.
Insel’s impoverished, emaciated, a near-vagrant whose lack of French makes it almost impossible for him to communicate. For many years he’s survived by manipulating women’s goodwill. For Mrs Jones he’s curiously appealing, emanating strahlen (rays) that have a profound, hypnotic impact on her consciousness. Mrs Jones decides to work with him on his autobiography, so he can sell it to finance his new life. But Insel’s a trickster-like figure, when the project’s almost finished, he give Mrs Jones a copy of Kafka’s The Trial, and she finds his tales were taken directly from it – Kafka crops up more than once here, including his story “A Hunger Artist.”
Other texts are key to Loy’s vision, the bond between middle-aged Mrs Jones and the younger Insel echoes, and subverts the one central to Andre Breton’s Nadja between a male artist/mentor and the unstable young girl of the title. Breton’s Nadja’s seen as embodying the irrational feminine, muse or inspiration. Although he’s an outsider in Paris’s artistic community, Insel takes on elements of Nadja’s role but he’s more reminiscent of the misogynist attitudes Loy encountered on the fringes of Breton’s world – Insel’s also discovered making money by pimping out black prostitutes, recalling the exploitation of black art during the ‘negritude’ phase of the 1920s. Insel’s illogical, self-obsessed but insecure, his appearance typifies the mythic (male) starving artist. But he's also traumatised by serving in WW1, perversely loyal, and has the ability to heal through an inexplicable psychic link.
Mrs Jones’s equally complicated. An artist and writer, she’s more grounded in reality than Insel; her white hair’s a symbol she’s no longer eligible for the status of acolyte or lover allotted to so many of the women linked to surrealism. Yet Mrs Jones’s ties to Insel both reinforce and undermine her independence. And, on some level, the narrative appears to be a vehicle for Loy’s questioning of her own position as a woman artist/writer, her issues about patriarchy, her feelings about her past, as well as a means of working through complex internal conflicts.
Insel can be dense at times, it’s highly referential, sometimes a little arcane. It's a book that probably needs to be read more than once. Some of the references to race made me uncomfortable. Loy’s use of language can be unsettling too: pithy, witty sentences mix with long, Latinate constructions that need careful attention. But it’s also a stimulating, entertaining perspective on art and gender as well as a fascinating account of an influential period of art history. Although a fully-annotated edition would definitely help readers unfamiliar with Loy or with the ideas and histories she’s representing. -
How did this ever take so many years to see publication? But we're lucky it did. Extreme eloquence, vision, and poetic-expressive precision of language makes what is essentially a character study of a minor forgotten artist, instead, something sublime and widely insightful. Really, it's magic. The passage about the metaphysical and psychokinetic significances of "closing a door", against its terminally ordinary appearance, is one incredible passage, but leafing through again, its pretty clear that they're all like that. This has been described as a female angle on Nadja, but stylistically it's much closer to Aragon.
So did any other Mina Loy prose ever get into publication? Cause I need it, NOW. -
Mina Loy, a poet, and very much a major figure in European/American arts during the DADA/Surrealist era, wrote one novel regarding the relationship between a female and a male painter, who is a pain-in-the-ass. The book in parts is very funny, especially with Loy's character putting down the painter as sort of a drama queen. It is also very much a book of its time and place - Paris in the early 1930s, when Andre Breton ruled the landscape. This book is very much a poet's narrative. The language is deep and rich which jumps around narrative wise, yet, the strong leading characters keeps one turning the pages. A fascinating document but essentially it works on a fictional level. Most would read this as an insider's look into the world of Surrealists - but in the end of the read/day, it's really a relationship novel between these two characters. A wonderful writer.
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An other-worldly book by a memorable Surrealist.
See : the Eddie Waktins review. Mina Loy was unto
herself--. -
The unbearable emptiness of the house
Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?
You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously
The artist who was to live in your apartment never came
Dressing up his insanity in another man’s madness
He visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape
Within myself I found the artist
The world is populated with people anxious to know how I am getting on
But when I tell them — the world immediately depopulates!
I am starving to death except for a miracle
Her eyes are volcanic
My charmed curiosity wanted to cry
I’ve never really seen you
You always give me the impression that you are not there
Your way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances
You’re so afraid of actuality
I can materialize for you. Forever—on the corner of this street
If only we could sit here eternally
When he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist
The future and the past were with me at present
The whole of time
There was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it
We could have such a wonderful time together! He was not speaking. He was praying
I urged to cross the frontier of his individuality
I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted
In him everything seemed inverted
It was only when both his eyes were fixed upon me I entered his Edenic region of unreasoning bliss to sway among immaterial algae
Eternity spins round and round
I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning
You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld — its laws
He had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity
If this is madness
Madness is something very beautiful
I am eternally content
My happiness is infinite
All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself
You are the living confirmation of my favorite theories
The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were still there -
Do you dig on surrealist painting? This roman a clef is like a really really huge one, in words. Rich, dense, bizzare yet somehow comforting... like a Voges brownie. Insel is also problematic (there's some nasty racialized essentialism) but worthwhile, you know, if you're into ladylike facemelting and that sort of thing. Which I definitely am. Will be reading this one again.
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3.4 stars
I could read this a second time and see myself equally likely to award it five stars as I would be to downgrade to two. It took nearly the entire book to get into Loy's dense rhythm. Sentences like: "I was being impelled to the pitiable serial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab, he had chased himself along the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution." Sentences that fold back in on themselves as if to point a finger and laugh at their own embellishments and fustian absurdity. Magniloquent, yes, but surprisingly self-aware and comical at times, too.
Can I have another few heads so I can read books in tandem, please? Great. Thanks, dear. -
A tremendous novel that should be better known. It's a character study of an artist on the fringe of the Paris avant-garde in the 1930s. The language and imagery are exquisite. As the editor mentions in her concluding essay, it serves as a kind of mirror to André Breton's Nadja.
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"You always give me the impression that you are not there. Sometimes you have
no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely
materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse
of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch. Your way of being
alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality." (Insel 36) -
Everything one could want from a Modernist novel! Surrealism, fragmented narrative, stream of consciousness psychical writing, satire, poetic - topped off with a victorious feminist message! Excellent!
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It is like eating a caramel the size of a bar of soap in EVERY way.
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A truly bananas crazy-making book. Though not long, it took me ages to get through because I kept stopping to look up words and parse the phrasing.
More than any book in recent memory (more than Ulysses! more than Nightwood!), this novel forced me to experience English as a foreign language. I felt like I was learning to read as I worked my way through, line by line.
Loy’s body politics are fascinating and I don’t even know how to begin to categorize them. Her descriptions are fractal and divisive and goopy.
So yeah, weird book. -
Viết về Paris những năm 30 của thế kỉ trước, nhiều người viết hay, nhiều người viết chân thật, nhiều người viết cảm xúc, nhưng viết nhạt và lơ mơ lờ mờ cũng ko thiếu hê hê. Nói chung là nhà văn viết thơ thế nào, thì nhà thơ viết văn thế í. Em Mina cũng không ngoại lệ, ngoài chuyện ẻm đa zi năng ra, viết nhiều phê bình cũng ko đến nỗi, nhưng viết văn thì cũng chỉ thường thường bậc trung.
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embroidering in the finest, richest word-threads, mina loy takes us into another, surreal dimension. this is absolutely my new favorite.
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It reminds one a lot of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Baroque language.
It follows a man named Insel, the ethereal bum, and his interesting acts. Its funny. -
As an analogy, reading Insel summons a desire to walk through scattered margins of a mind reading another mind reading a photograph in a mirror.
In Insel, the subjective and objective are not dichotomous realities, nor is reality itself a singular entity. Loy’s novel emphasizes the possibility that human consciousness operates from primal embodiments rarely perceived.
Read the full review here:
http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/re... -
Mina Loy might be a fine poet, but there's a very good reason why this novel wasn't published during her lifetime despite her numerous attempts: the writing is awful. There seems to be an amusing story about a nightmarish artistic mooch buried in the tortured prose, but unfortunately not amusing enough to warrant the effort of digging it out.
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While this novel is very obviously written by an accomplished poet, as prose, this writing does not work. Word choice usurps meaning more often than not, and I ultimately found none of the characters sympathetic or even interesting. The characters and the meaning were obscured by an overabundance of words--which in abundance become close to meaningless.
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You may well drift way from this tell of patrons and the ugly angelics they patronise (and perhaps you should) but if you stay with it for a while you may also find yourself magnetised, a centre for uncanny energies, an event that won't stop happening (and maybe it shouldn't).
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An excellent experiment for Loy. Carefully edited by Elizabeth Arnold, who's intro has a few interesting bits re: Loy's publication history.
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Too many racist and homophobic descriptions
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Reads like tripping with your friend Blake and seeing him “a lithe tree struck by its own lightning.”
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Never read surrealist works before but this is amazing. The descriptions are dizzying and so evocative. Well worth a read
