That the real actions are beneath the surface, where they exist as a force greater than both involved. “When you lose a loved one you can use so many words, in couples therapy or love letters, and you hold on to that for a long time, but at some point you have to recognize that it doesn’t happen where the language stops.

On the whole it leaves everything as it is, I suppose.” Like when you write, “Like it or not, I feel like writing changes little-if it changes anything at all. The book, whose form refers to the language philosopher Wittgenstein, seems to be aware of a certain futility when it comes to the power of language. Sometimes when you’re in love, people may say to you, “I don’t know if you’re really in love with her, maybe you’re in love with the love or the feeling it gives you.” Do you love the thing or the person for itself, or are you in love with the sensation? I think the book doesn’t answer that, it’s more interested in the space in between.” Just as love is also a subjective confusion. Color does not exist as we think, not in reality, it only starts in our eyes, and other beings do not see the same colors as we do. “The book asks explicitly what it means to love a color-to love something that doesn’t reciprocate that love. She collects blue stuff, but she doesn’t care about that stuff, or the turquoise ocean, or all those concrete updates of blue that blue she wants to write about is more abstract, elusive, just as love cannot be explained and analysed. The narrator is careful not to make blue too concrete, to explain and interpret that blue too much. Love and blue are analogous to each other in Bluets. īut perhaps, despite all those facets, despite the bookishness and language beauty and strangeness, Bluets is ultimately a recognizable story, about a broken heart and loneliness. Nelson knows how to touch because the philosophy and art she reflects on is always anchored in the lived experience a technique she reinforced in the previously translated The Argonauts from 2015, in which Nelson explores what it means to be queer and at the same time, through her pregnancy and relationship with a trans man, meet the normative picture of a happy nuclear family. And especially in the mystery of the work: who is in love with a color? Maggie Nelson It’s in the combination of Nelson’s personal tone, which always contains something unyielding, the poetic sensibility, the unashamedly feminine sexual gaze (“how scorching it is”), the admirable erudition. Even in the Dutch translation, twelve years later, the book remains a timeless jewel. It was unexpectedly a great success – the publisher speaks of a ‘cult hit’.

Maggie nelson blue