Home › Books › Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
by
97/99
Critics' Rating Index
17/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
Volume of Reviews
45/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a temperamental autobiography," comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir. Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book's structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system: - The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950's jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent's voice. - The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be. - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of C�cile McLorin Salvant. - Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos. - W.E.B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story "The Hidden Veil" to write his famous "behind the veil" passages in The Souls of Black Folk. - The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson's relentlessly galvanizing mis en scene for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.
Reviews
"This slim volume is saturated with brilliance ..."
"It's an extraordinary reading experience — the first book I recall wanting to reread immediately after reaching the end ..."
"Jefferson's unique perspective and relentless honesty and self-examination ensure that there's something worthwhile on every page."
"Despite all the brilliant cultural criticism, personal anecdotes...are my favorite part of the book and I wish there were more of them."
"[A] bold and roving work ..."
"Rather than using her life's narrative to structure the book, she organizes her becoming through her models."
"Her new book begins by cross-examining what...'me' consists of, posing the question of how to author a memoir when you chafe against the concept of authority."
"Using the profile, interpretation, close narration, and quotation as critical techniques, Jefferson collaborates with these characters, cutting, scratching, sampling to make herself ..."
"Like a skilled embroiderer, [Jefferson] blends the multicolored threads of Black cultural life with memories of her past in a memoir that is impressionistic rather than chronological ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!