RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksA Handbook of Disappointed Fate is filled with...allusive and subtle replies; the book envelops its critical objects, shears tucked in the wool of the lamb. It is full in the sense that you can return to sentences you thought familiar to find that their light has shifted, or trace their shadows across the pages as the essays turn toward and away from each other and any concepts or conceptual structure they purport to share ... Boyer positions herself against the dialectic of master and slave, or man and woman, against reproduction based on force, against society ruled by exchange ... Boyer’s distrust—of writing in particular, of the world’s bullshit in general—sharpens as it unfurls forms of expression within and against a language bent toward assent, forms of living a kind of life that constantly feels refused.
