After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I passed out a LOT of business cards at the Bay Area Book Festival here in Berkeley spring of 2023, and Selby Wynn Schwartz or her publicist responded with After Sappho: A Novel, which is really not a conventional “novel” at all, but a sort of epistolary, interlocking set of semi-biographical sketches of brilliant, creative women who loved and were inspired, embraced and periodically surrounded by other brilliant, creative women in the simultaneously ignorant, tolerant and brutally hostile worlds of men’s law, culture and morals from mid 1800s Italy through Paris and Britain of 1928.

All interspersed with lucid declarations, crystalline fragments of Sappho’s’ poems in translation and stunning pulsations of Schwartz’ prose that read like lyric verse. It’s mostly chronological, but not always, often seeming like an echoing, simultaneous present; and the names, genders and identities shift with time, relationships, marriages, threats, mysteries, maturations, forgettings and identities as much or more; and for oddly similar reasons as Myers’ The Forger of Marseille and Doctorow’s red team blues: a martin hench novel do.

Schwartz “holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and has been happily teaching writing for more than a decade. While on faculty in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program, she helped to shape new writing curriculum around human rights, gender and sexuality, social justice issues, and the arts… explores the politics of embodiment.”

“Explores the politics of embodiment.” 

Doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? No wonder After Sappho was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. *

She/They/He does understand WHY some of “these things” are going on. 

Schwartz expresses “why” like Arachne weaving Zeus and other gods’ seduction, rape and infidelities into her tapestry in her textile contest with virgin warrior rationalist Athena. The craft of Schwartz’s writing in such a captivating manner displays masculine overreach cruelly oppressing and purposely misunderstanding the divine modern muses of Isadora Duncan, Eleanora Duse, Colette, Vita Sackville-West and many more with their petty, arrogant and bullying legal, religious and cultural chains.

Sappho can be erased, fragmented and minimized with the lie that she committed suicide for the love of a man; but only if her courage, self-love, love for women, nature and artistry are torn apart and thrown away, too.

"These things now for my companions/ I shall sing beautifully."

Sappho, Fragment 160.

*  https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/selby-wynn-schwartz 

Published 19 October, 2023 as “Boundaries of Fiction, Power, Humans,” Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times.


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