Genre: Memoir
Page Count: 160
Searching about Maggie Nelson online, I found one thing repeatedly and unmissably mentioned: ‘genre-shattering’. Now, I wish I had read something of Nelson before reading her memoir, or at least knew something about her.
As it oft happens with me, I like to keep my knowledge about hyped books as little as possible in effort to increase the enjoyability and originality of reading the book purely within my own opinions and thoughts. But it also leads me to not know even the simple and sometimes important things about the books that I take on reading, like its genre and the author.
And so, I mistook ‘The Argonauts’ for a novel. Nelson’s this particular book was mentioned in multiple lists of best books of 21st century so far at the beginning of 2020 when every other source was making their own lists. But as it turns out, not only is this book a novel, but Nelson is not a fiction writer at all. She is a non-fiction writer and poetess, and a very distinct one in both genres.
I wouldn’t know exactly what ‘genre-shattering’ means in respect to Nelson since I’ve not read her before, however, I definitely saw glimpses of her writing style in her bold and passionately vulnerable memoir.
Married to Harry, a transgender, Nelson is mother of a son, Iggy, who was implanted in her medically. And this topic of gender boundarylessness is by far the most talked about topic in this book. Nelson strongly lays bare her experiences with the growing and confusing questions of queerness and gender multiplicity and as well as being married to trans.
Sadly though, I could only relate to it only to a certain limit, which by the way was very low, for I live in Pakistan where we do not get to think or confront gender-related issues, unlike the west which is deeply being reformed by it. And although I very much tend to care about such identity-centered issues that face us and our humanity, this topic remains farther from other important themes that Nelson also talks about in this book.
And this in these topics of motherhood, laboring a child, writing, reading, and living, I not only found myself excited and moved, but I also felt a stark appreciation for Nelson and her talent for writing so uniquely. Even in 160 pages, Nelson succeeds to talk about all these topics is such an important, tight, neat, stark and moving way that by the end of book one feels as moved and exhausted as one might feel after reading a 500-page non-fiction book.
I might not be able to pin down in points what Nelson achieved in this book by talking about experiences that are so close to our being human and feeling alive and real, but I will however want to talk about how she manages to accomplish it. It’s her prose; challengingly fun and uniquely to the point, Nelson writes, and therefore thinks, on another level altogether.
If I look back, I can find myself feeling similarly awed and challenged by Milan Kundera’s, Ali Smith’s and Yiyun Li’s prose as well, all of whom have their own unique way to putting words together which convey thoughts in neat and perplexing ways.
But while it’s exciting to come across such different prose, it does however require an elevated amount of thinking, which can get a bit irritating at times when you aren’t able to either wrap your head around or comprehend what you’ve just read.
And that’s how I came to feel about this book in the end: a mixture of awe, warmth, joy, and irritation.
Ratings: 4/5 **** December 14, 2020_