After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths. Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins a tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives.
After Sappho accomplishes what only the most generous art can: It makes a more perfect world out of the imperfections of our own ... The result is not quite narrative fiction and not quite history either. It is, however, a work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams ... This novel consists in just such a marshaling of shards. As Schwartz fictionalizes the real bonds between real women, she invites us to imagine a still more sprawling network of lovers and ways of loving, a whole world that never quite existed but that, in these pages, always has.
The novel’s greatest innovation may be the way its disparate subjects fashion a collective we of lesbian world-making and feminist activation. This we transcends time and place; it can maneuver both inside and outside history, in opposition to the forward march of misogyny and patriarchy, war and marginalization. 'Some acts can only be written as fragments,' Schwartz writes. Her story, in kind, forms and re-forms itself through fragments... which float between and beyond boundaries ... The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse for certainty or linear cohesion. She draws from history in order to reimagine it.
Evokes the lives of a loose arrangement of women across history who drew strength from Sappho’s example to fight for feminist causes and artistic independence ... Schwartz recounts pointed aspects of these women’s lives in a series of brief, cascading vignettes that are often organized around a line of Sappho’s poetry. The adulation of Ancient Greece is reflected in the prose, which is learned, refined and a touch mannerly. The tone, despite its emotional restraint, is resolutely celebratory, focused on the steady advancement of women’s rights and sexual freedoms. In this interesting passion project, art is put forth as an unambiguous force of beauty and inspiration.
