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 absoluteRouts the polemicOr which of usWould notReceiving the holy-ghostCatch it and cagingLose it (from Human Cylinders)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 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.
3.4 starsI 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.
Do You like book Insel (1991)?
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.
—Garima
