Jane Unrue - To be alive requires that we build a catalogue of like-like images and stolen words and phrases, things we can put to use

Jane Unrue, Love Hotel, New Directions, 2015.

Working on behalf of a cunning and mysterious couple, a woman embarks on a haunting search for a stranger (a child? somebody’s lover? a ghost?), undertaking a perplexing, dangerous, and apparently timeless journey that originates on a secluded country estate and leads deep into the center of the city. Love Hotel explores a heartbreaking and nightmarish world of unrelenting excess, impossible convergences, undeniable urges, and inexorable loss. Jane Unrue’s writing, beautifully cunning and mysterious, twists and turns and lures the reader on with an erotic magnetism of its own. 

A mysterious couple invites a woman to visit their estate. Soon after meeting the pair, the woman, the central narrator in “Love Hotel,’’ finds herself slipping “into a halfway dreaming state in which I walked inside a tunnel,” which is a bit of the way most readers of this novel are likely to feel on check-in. Perhaps the couple recognized what a subtle and sensitive character they’d just met: “Clearly they could see in me what others had not seen in me/that in me all impressions feelings touches multiply.” The couple repeat their invitation. This time our narrator stays for several nights. She awakens in the manor house “with a feeling of foreboding.” Indeed, a sense of menace shadows all the narrators and presences inside this mesmerizing new novel by Jane Unrue.

That sense of threat — sexual, physical, psychological — is heightened by at least two parallel stories unfolding alongside, or perhaps it’s better to say inside, the primary narrative of the visitor. Another involves a wealthy woman who takes in a suicidal seamstress. The seamstress has a son raised inside the harsh circumstances of her life. Among the boy’s pastimes were imagining himself a spider, “hanging from a thread’s length down a wall.” Eventually the boy grows up: “If we should try imagining the raw intensity of the feelings of that child/a man now,” Unrue writes, leaving the sentence unfinished, fraught with foreboding. After all, someone is missing, bodies have been sighted — or dreamed, and off our narrator goes to the “Love Hotel’’ in search of an unnamed someone.
A third story, unscrolled in italicized bursts embedded in the other stories, seems to be about a farmer who watches his sons turning into wolves, and worse. The anxiety created by these grim unfoldings is further exacerbated by the book’s bold and deliberately intricate style, composed as it often is of fragments, interrupted sentences occasionally broken into lines, as in a poem.
In fact, Unrue, whose previous books include poetry, stories, a novella, and the haunting short novel “Life of a Star’’ — deftly undercuts our desire for the security and definitiveness of genre. To experience the luxurious power of “Love Hotel,’’ the reader must himself become a bit of a somnambulist, surrendering to its circular movements and recursively broken narratives without hoping for the usual consolations of fiction: recognizable characters with familiar psychological profiles and problems. Life isn’t quite as obvious as that, Unrue seems to say.
The poet and Dante translator Laurence Binyon once observed that “slowness is beauty.” With its fragments and elipses, “Love Hotel” is determined to force us off the tracks of the bullet train that is everyday reading in our post-haste society. Here the mystery isn’t confined to figuring out who done it. The novel instead asks a more profound and murkier question: What exactly do we think happened? 

Every time I thought I’d solved the mystery, I found myself confounded by a change in the pattern. Foiling our desire for clarity and closure, Unrue nevertheless continually provokes our curiosity. It may be that the figure in this carpet will be no more traceable than that of Henry James’s Vereker, whose intensions were describable only between “lovers supremely united.”
Gorgeous passages abound: “I began to see collected pictures fused together into overlays that covered up the real life versions of the world.” Here the erotic mixes with the creepy, laced with a potent but never directly expressed emotional undercurrent: “I heard their robes fall off. They then began to offer themselves to me/ a mouth /a breast / . . . I felt an insect somewhere on me.” With its singular music and evocative images, the book recalls Susan Sontag’s plea for “an erotics of art” in place of mere interpretation. I’m not sure I can tell you what happens inside Jane Unrue’s “Love Hotel,’’ but I urge you to book your room early. - Askold Melnyczuk

  A sense of open menace also lurks throughout Love Hotel, the latest work from Jane Unrue, though its direction and intent might be the most unknown as yet. Compared to the two examples above, the terrain of Love Hotel is more skeletal, fragmentary, subject to shake. Here, the narration frequently interrupts itself even in mid-sentence or during a gesture left incomplete. Like the structure of the looping hallways and staircases in Alain Resnais's iconic maze-film, Last Year at Marienbad , the very architecture of the world continues to mutate alongside any understanding of itself, as well as in the logic of the narrator, a nameless woman whom we are left to follow through uncertain darkness as if haunting her ourselves, from just behind.

And yet it is primarily this very mutating structure that lends the book its most pressing sense of suspense and eerie charm. There's so much white space between the paragraphs, the pages, often leaving a single sentence or a word free, like a trail. I can't help but think of the text of a video game, the way you move through it searching for what will speak next, what colors will emerge, what direction you will be led in. However, if there is a game here, it's more like a corrupted version of middle hours of The Shining than anything with thr undead or guns.

The narrator is looking for something, or someone—we seem to know that much at least, even if we are not sure exactly what or who—in a hotel that seems to disintegrate at will, eventually rolling over into open landscapes, other houses. The narrator's understanding of the world multiplies, too, often seeming to shift between several perspectives contained within the same body, all of which bleed together, drown each other out. She seems primarily to be consumed with fulfilling a task for a couple whose presence also mutates: Sometimes they seem to want her to become impregnated for them, other times to be a sexual companion, and yet other times to function as a kind of errand-person, meant to wander from room to room waiting to be given meaning.

One page just reads: "I stuck the key into the" and ends without even punctuation, leaving you to move forward onto the next page, describing the architecture of a room. "402 / It was a double with an ivory eyelet canopy on top with ruffle around the bottom both in dusty pink coordinated loosely with the carpet more directly with the walls all painted in the same pink color." Like the rest of the world around it, the grammar mutates, as does the layout. And yet we sense that there is meaning behind a phrase or shape of space.

And, as continuously unfurling and unraveling as the plot is, it is magnetic in the way it draws you through from page to page. The landscape of the text itself is as alive and cryptic as the world it describes (or fails to describe): Jagged edges to the broken paragraphs climb down through single words stacked into columns sometimes in all caps and sometimes italics, ornate descriptions clipped off in mid-sentence, questions asked and immediately discarded. Inherent to it all is the sense of sacred unknowing of the narrator, a sense of unshakable conviction to keep throwing one's self forward within some faceless sorrow. Overall here is an actual experience, on paper, one charged with so sharp a sense of mystery you could probably keep reading the book over and again, finding new narrow areas to worm through, vivify, obsess with, open. - Blake Butler 

A mysterious and frequently beautiful short novel by Unrue (Writing/Harvard; Life of a Star, 2010, etc.) pulls the reader into a sequence of heady, surreal vignettes that add up to more of a sensual experience than a coherent story.

A woman wanders through a strange  hotel and an unnamed city, searching for a man or a child—in this novel, details and time are both often elusive—on behalf of a seductive and sinister couple who live on a luxurious estate. Hints of back story and plot come through, but the novel seems to be less about the pull of story and more about the power of atmosphere, feeling, and how perfectly chosen, lavishly described details can make the reader flesh out an enormous world in the space between them. “I was recalling information so ornately,” the woman says, and she does, remembering and describing in images that are full of color, texture and sensation. The voice of the novel comes from inside her head, with sentences that are often disjointed and rhythmically uncomfortable, jumping from thought to memory without concern for linear storyline or traditional structure. Some pages are empty except for a few words, transforming the turn of a page into a noticeable rhythmic event. Everything could exist in either a dream or a nightmare, and certain vignettes push the novel into the realm of the fantastical with snippets of other stories that feel like fairy tales. A man searches for his wife in a forest, unaware that the trees move of their own volition. A man watches his sons turn into wolves and murder a couple.
For the most part, the surreal and tenuously connected pieces of this novel build an intriguing and intense narrative of feeling, even if the story itself remains unclear. - Kirkus Reviews

In this minimal and evocative new novel by Unrue (Life of a Star), an unnamed female narrator is asked by a wealthy and mysterious couple to locate a missing person. The search carries her from the couple's rural country mansion to a city hotel known for its sexual encounters. The book is evasive, and peeling back one layer reveals another. Dramatic perspective shifts, poetic structure, and an absence of commas dent the distinction between interior and exterior, imagined and real. "A week/I think/It's hard to say. No depth. No clear perspective. No free space. /before I met them I had started having problems with my/Previously/But this had been my pattern for as long as/sleep." The encroachment of one idea into another's space reflects the narrator's "limited fragmented" mental state. While there are moments when the text comes together to provide clear insight, the inherent obfuscation of writing often interferes. The novel is deliberately constructed to disorient and challenge, demanding that readers infer relevance and join the narrator's search for meaning. Because the story acts as a venue to showcase an innovative writing style, the book feels a bit unsubstantive and lacking in characterization and plot, but it is a clever piece of writing.  - Publishers Weekly 

“Information,” writes Walter Benjamin, is “incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.” For Benjamin, “half the art” of telling a story lies in learning not to tell the news; narrative should suppress reportage, achieving instead “an amplitude that information lacks.” Another name for this “amplitude” might be what Flannery O’Connor calls “mystery”— fiction’s capacity, as she puts it, “to penetrate the concrete world” of everyday facts, revealing “the image of ultimate reality.” What she means is that reading allows us to face away from the world, and, in so doing, see through it. We read because we want to be somewhere else, but the best books make us realize that “elsewhere” is where we already are. So, writing can turn toward or away from the known and the knowable, aiming at either information or mystery. One direction reports, reproduces, represents; the other points elsewhere, bringing the unprecedented into presence.

At every turn, Jane Unrue’s writing interferes with the flow of information—repressing, erasing, and reshaping it, aiding the amplification of mystery. Her new novel, Love Hotel, goes even further in this regard than its predecessors: the short story collection Atlassed, and the novellas Dear Mr. Erker, The House, and Life of a Star. Put simply, it’s almost impossible to ascertain what this book is “about.” On the surface, it seems to concern an unnamed narrator (apparently a prostitute) absorbed in a search for what may be a man, a child, or a ghost—his identity, like hers, is profoundly uncertain. Her journey takes her from a haunted mansion owned by her employers, or clients (a creepily seductive couple, seemingly capable of controlling her mind) to the titular hotel. This transient space is at once spectral and subtly erotic—populated by “fleeting shadows” who tellingly “go for just one night.” It’s what the anthropologist Marc Augé would call a “non-place”—a location defined by oblivion, where we forget who we are, and can’t come to rest. Within this indistinct world, some sort of sexual assignation occurs—although its significance, like so much else, is unclear.
That lack of clarity is important: trying to paraphrase the book’s “plot” fails to capture its formal and stylistic strangeness. Really, reading Love Hotel is less like following a storyline and more like looking up at an unknown constellation—a new and nameless arrangement of language. The opening sentences set the stage for this unsettling experience:
Immediately striking was the silence
no faint music
low lighting inducing a feeling of
One morning a man and his wife were working in the hay.
I felt none of what I had imagined feeling before I left my apartment
building
none of what I felt when I got on the train.

Line breaks like these run through much of the book, like faults or fractures, jolting us forward from word to word, page to page. Again and again, abrupt transitions scramble our concentration, stopping us from catching up with ourselves, or settling in one place. Like Unrue’s narrator, we’re constantly shuttled between situations, with no control over our speed or trajectory (notably, locomotion in Love Hotel tends to depend on trains, taxis, and elevators: Unrue’s “I” never drives; she’s passively driven.) The novel’s fragmented sentences feel like the ruins or remnants of earlier structures, broken apart as if by tectonic motion. If this is a book about transience, its language is likewise in transit—folding and turning and interrupting itself, evading cohesion or explanation.
Throughout all of this, incongruous phrases crystallize briefly, only to vanish, unfinished: “One morning a man and his wife were working in the hay.” The effect isn’t unlike an analogue radio, picking up snatches of speech before phasing back to white noise. In contrast to the urban milieu through which the narrator moves, these snippets hint at rural stories, heavy with folkloric menace: an enchanted forest which swallows wayward travellers; a man whose sons transform into murderous wolves. Another intertwined tale recalls the wrongful death of a child, whom we are told “was meant to be alive.” These echoes and traces may or may not relate to an “apparition” haunting the country estate of the couple who plan the narrator’s journey. “That’s how it’s creeping into there,” one of them tells her, gesturing at the cracks in a tattered painting: “he meant of course the evil in the air.”
Indeed, the essence of Unrue’s novel lies not in the plot, but “in the air”—in a particular kind of atmospheric pressure or density. Before an ambiguous sex scene, the narrator is instructed to “impart […] the information that if hands approach, you will collapse into an aura that will take the form of mist.” Something similar could be said of the book itself: its meaning evaporates upon approach, leaving only an afterimage—like the memory of being touched, or a photograph of a ghost. Later on, the narrator reflects that “I felt the background penetrate the foreground.” Likewise, reading this novel means feeling the foreground fall away; being penetrated; losing our bearings. In this respect, that cracked painting reflects the book’s structure: its “angles” and “shapes” are “composed against a background” which, we are told, is “clouded, as if to suggest eternity.” Foreground and background, angles and clouds: Unrue’s peculiar brilliance lies in the way she brings narrative content into collision with something deeper—something which seeps through its cracks, intangible and eternal.
According to Ricardo Piglia, the history of short fiction involves a continual tension between the surface text and “the secret story”—an undercurrent “constructed out of what is not said; out of implication and allusion.” Love Hotel secretly speaks of myths and folktales and ghosts; its subtext is, as the narrator says, “a story of events occurring in a time behind this time.” As readers, our impulse is to disentangle this secret story, to “trace it back,” as the narrator says, to “where it started from.” However, like her, we fail to do so, only becoming more entangled. Whatever lies behind Love Hotel can’t be reduced to meaningful information. Nor can its implicit “narrative” quite be resolved: if Unrue hints at a haunting caused by wrongful death, the novel never suggests that this wrong has been righted. We want to find a pathway through the woods, a thread to help us make sense of the text. Instead we’re thrust further into a thickening mystery.
So, Unrue’s narrator can’t turn back to the source of the story, nor can she bring it to a resolution: hers is a motion of incomprehension. Throughout the novel, her unthinking, unknowing movements resemble those of someone in a hypnotic fugue. She drifts through the city, and through the unlit rooms of the hotel, “as if acting in accordance with the orders of an unknown mechanism, operating from an unidentifiable location.” A literal reading of her movements might rely on the novel’s allusions to mind control: her enigmatic employers mention being able to “insert […] thoughts straight into you”—another kind of penetration. A more metaphorical interpretation would be to say that she moves in step with an unconscious time signature—what we might call the time of desire. To desire something is to succumb to a distinctive kind of motion. Desire is mesmeric and magnetic; it always draws us unthinkingly forward. In this respect, it’s often in conflict with memory, which it erases or falsifies into myth. This sense of restless, forgetful “towardness” suffuses the novel, although its ultimate object remains unknown.
Ultimately, this motion gives rise to a purified form of attention: an absolute state of orientation, which points toward something just out of sight. On one level, this manifests as an obsession with loci and coordinates: descriptions of the country house capitalize the names of particular places (“the STAIRCASE led us back into the STUDY,” and so on) while the hotel’s fixtures and furniture are italicized (“I will pray to bed to floors to windows even to my walls to be delivered.”) The emphasis brought to bear on these objects is such that they hint at something behind or beyond them: “upon the surfaces,” the narrator notes, “I made out traces of a presence.” But the novel’s knowledge of the connection between the seen and the unseen—between what O’Connor calls “the concrete world” and its invisible outside or underside—is best captured by a description of classical statuary:
I stepped through the doorway to the stately hall of statues Roman
Greek an elevated grand arrangement of cracked heroes
chipped
their bodies turned in different directions
heads
the ones that had them
angled differently
the faces pointed at a variety of spots well in the distance of that
limited although eternally unknowable majestic city. Their gaze was
collective
fixed as by coordinated effort on a set of points beyond those parchment tinted walls. Effect of having eyeholes rather than real eyes I told myself. Their expressions possessing vacancy as well as depth each searing cold stone look was trained upon a destination far too distant formless timeless for the living seeing person even to envisage.

The passage recalls both the disturbingly “eyeless” taxi driver who transports the narrator to the couple’s estate, and her encounter with a portrait whose “eyes appeared to gaze into the eyes of someone something just behind the painter.” Each of these sights could be said to express what she calls “patterns of anticipation”—where anticipation, much like desire, is largely defined by the absence of information. Of course, describing this absence gets us no closer to an account of what Unrue’s mysterious book is “about.” But maybe it helps us to formulate what it feels like to read it. So, here goes: reading Love Hotel feels like tracing someone’s gaze as they stare at something you can’t see. Or like feeling someone or something moving behind you, and turning to find nothing there. That tracing, that turning, that feeling marks the way art draws us into its mystery: the clocks stop, the world falls away, and suddenly, somehow, something appears. - David Winters

Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel, we know by way of its dust jacket, is a novel, a roman, a romance. It is also a poem where the stanzas are pages: with broken lines, cinematic cuts, intensified phrasing, wavering intuitions. And it is a play or screenplay with slug lines: NURSERY, STONE STEPS, NIGHT WE MET. Yet it is resolutely counter to the spirit of the book to render it whole. It is meant to be traced, I think, by the body or hand of the mind. “In place of a hermeneutics,” Susan Sontag admonished us, “we need an erotics of art.” I know of few contemporary novels that justify this sentiment more than Love Hotel.
A love hotel is a place with love in it because it is a place where love is brought and made, where fantasies are fulfilled and delayed, dissolved and explored. Only the exploration of love is done at love’s mercy, in the sense that it transports us through memory and space. The same could be said for Unrue’s novel. The love hotel of the title is one among many spaces its lines explore: an elevator, a lobby, a set of keys, seen, again, on the dust jacket, take us through a labyrinth of ecstatic impressions, some fearful, all within the bounds of the erotic. What I mean is that the flicker that enters your body when you read the words “love hotel” frames the spirit of the book.
If so far I have made Love Hotel sound incomprehensible, it isn’t. It’s more like the state of being you might encounter during (or after) a fulfilling, or overfilling, sexual experience. In that sense, the book is filtered through the prism of the body of its protagonist, a woman of uncertain age, and it begins, more or less, like this:
When I got to that hotel however I stepped down into the patio protected by a wall of textured brick. A flagstone walkway curved around a bed of flowers.
Filled with dread I tried to keep from seeing
hearing
There is someone in my room I repeated into the tiny opening in the frosted glass window of the reception desk.
I mean to say I tried so hard to keep from being seen.
New key in hand I took the elevator up.
Only, in Love Hotel, unlike other novels, the body and mind are not unlinked. Sitting across from a woman on a train, the speaker falls asleep; she dreams of a tiny, birdlike child brought to her on a plate. She finds herself on a verandah. In a city museum. She returns to work at a mansion for a couple with sexual, perhaps insidious, intent. The novel is flush with scenes of Proustian transposition, though her ekstasis (and yours) isn’t necessarily caused by a madeleine. She is just as readily transported by the touch of metal or a frightful moment or the lingering dread of an unsettling question. The speaker’s body is the talisman of Love Hotel. In one of many sexualized, often disquieting encounters with the couple in the mansion, the speaker rebels:
Clearly they could see in me what others had not seen in me
that in me all impressions feelings touches multiply
Followed by:
Take hold of me.
Although the novel at first seems French — I platitudinously thought of Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime, the nouveau roman, and the poetic realist films of Gremillon and Carné — the above lines more likely update the eroticism of Poe or Whitman. “I contain multitudes” is kindred to the “impressions feelings” that multiply within her when she is touched. But all of this betrays the truth that Love Hotel is less written than enacted through the body of its speaker. It glides between genres too elegantly and too bodily to be the work of a single mind (or body). But somehow it is.
One of Love Hotel’s genres is the playfully erotic, although such moments are held in suspended animation — you can sense them coming in ripples of fictional time. “Curtains drawn,” pages later, becomes:
He got on top of me. Then she. Beginning here I saw an atmosphere within the darkness start to glow as if it were illuminated by the borrowed light that burned within their bodies leaking through their eyes that shone like balls thrown in the air above me kept aloft by so much heavy breathing. Panting. Moans were helpful in identifying who was who but truly there was no detective work to do in there.
His
Hers
Hands
Bodies
Voices
They played out in a scene of jealousy.
“No detective work to do in there,” the speaker playfully enjoinders among the breathing bodies. In Love Hotel, what is detective work but interpretation? Sontag reminded us that novels, especially those that willfully cling to old forms, will remain “prone to assault by interpretation.” Not this one. - Jonathan Sturgeon

Jane Unrue, Life of a Star, Burning Deck, 2010.

“An actress of sorts, a woman recalls her childhood, longs for her absent lover, imagines traveling overseas, and wanders through gardens and galleries of art. Hers is a life meticulously lived, a carefully crafted and rehearsed engagement with a real and imagined world; a search for love and meaning that has left her, in the end, alone. Unrue’s intricate and intriguing sentences — now one word, now comprising whole paragraphs and interrupting one another — manage to fuse detachment and emotion, heartbreak and humor.”

“Artifice is at the heart of Jane Unrue's latest novella, a sequence of short, poetic reflections by an unnamed, lovelorn protagonist. This is not to say that the narrative lacks heart; if anything, this compact tour de force interrogates the truism that art can be either heartfelt or cerebral. The narrator has a passion for theatricality. Her ruminations are peppered with stage directions: " 'You’re right,’ I said (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself)." Her episodic memories of lost love share a similar staged quality, as much preoccupied with props as the dramatic action itself: “How I had waited for a moment when the setting and the lighting indicated we had finally found our scene, the scent of roses as if atomized through tiny tubing woven through the fence.” Behind the stagecraft, however, Unrue’s protagonist seems to search for an authenticity that she fails to find in the intimacies we take for granted. Provocatively, Unrue inverts the dichotomy of being on versus off the stage. If the narrator of Life of a Star feels like she is acting her way through life, it’s because so much of it is played out through assigned roles (child, woman, artist). By foregrounding narrative artifice, Unrue suggests new possibilities—both personal and aesthetic—such artifice obscures. The narrator’s comically surreal tryst on a cruise ship, and her memories of her actress mother, are among the most evocative sequences in a narrative that reveals emotional truths rather than evades them.” - Pedro Ponce

“I wish I had a better story for you,” confides the unnamed narrator a third of the way into Jane Unrue’s new miniaturist novel, though there’s hardly cause for so modest a claim. With just over one hundred pages, some of them hosting no more than a wee phrase or the clarion burst of a sentence, and most of them giving out well shy of the bottom margins, the novel, though slender, is emotionally thorough, dense but not crammed, and unnoisily original in the bloodbeat and quiver of its prose.
Unrue writes intricate, ribbony sentences that often reel themselves into the safeholds of eccentrically stacked, unindented paragraphs as lyrically loaded as Joseph Cornell boxes. Sometimes these gracile ribbons get snipped short of tidying grammatical resolution; the narrator, we learn, is in fact something of a mean whiz with a scissors and a knife.
Nearing (or already well submerged in) the loneliness and lovelessness of early middle age, she’s the daughter of a washed-up actress, and though not officially an actress herself, she has discovered the only certain way to insert herself acutely into experience: to regard every instant as an opportunity for performance, for representing herself rather than entirely being herself (and whatever further self-discovery that might finally require). So confused is her life with theatricality that rain falls “as if it had been yanked from buckets poised on rafters up above,” and stage directions are tucked into her thoughts, slipcased between parentheses—“(Full-body modesty)”; “(Mild eyebrow tip)”; “(single-handed heart-grip).” “Since there is artificiality in mere utterance,” she’s convinced she “must live the words.”
But life, as she practices the living of it, amounts to casting herself into an ever-narrowing repertoire of melancholy enactments unfolding mostly in the galleries of a museum (through which, profusely ruffled and garbed in preposterous layerings of underskirts and other costumic outlandishments, she kills hour after hour skulking coquettishly, hoping to pry one or another man loose from an alarmed wife) and by the fountain in a public garden, where she suffers little more than half a dozen rendezvous with, one gathers, her only lover ever, a worldly man who is apparently married (it’s a furtive, futureless courtship). From these outings she returns, unconsoled, to the ticktock isolations of her rented room, where she spinsterishly busies herself with embroidering a bumblebee onto a pillowcase (her goal, fittingly enough, to arrest the buzzy wingbeats into a stitchy stillness) and broods over her rooming-house childhood, during which the arrival of an alluring slip of a girl with dollhouse manners and a goshing vocabulary left her feeling upstaged, driving her to rages of violent jealousy. Her mother admonishingly declared, of all things, “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with these histrionics.”
But the narrator is scarcely one for foolery. Three-quarters of the way through her account, she brashly encapsulates the desperate program of her life in a dizzying, self-aggrandizing, one-sentence manifesto: “The one who stimulates attraction to herself by molding her complexities to meet a given situation and by demonstrating, at the same time, the effect her having on the situation has upon her own self, wins.” By now, though, she has been rehearsing herself further and further away from the heart-quickening enmeshments of life and deeper into claustral despair. Small wonder, then, that images of graves and buried girls figure so tormentingly in her imagination; it’s as if she wishes to be pulled alive from the burial pit of her part-playing self.
Inviting itself to be read as a phantom refinement of the celebrity-autobiography genre, Life of a Star, direly melodic and winsomely elliptical, belongs in that rich vein of contemporary fiction that forgoes narrative overrun, overmuchness of dialogue, and reportorial sprawl, and instead dispenses itself in slivery, pivotal declarations and gleaming summation. It’s a novel cored to the climactics, the crucialities—and it’s entirely a perfection.” — Gary Lutz


“In Jane Unrue’s third novella an unnamed woman visits galleries, fountains, and piers, and observes the underweight litany of her existence. This is a book to be read all at once with a long evening spreading ahead, in order to best note the slow, dexterous rising of tension, the avid portrayal, and the bare yet startling language. Unrue punctuates the unnamed woman’s thoughts (they occur while she does her needlework, visits the museum’s garden, and wanders in a city where she seemingly has no acquaintances) with muted intensity. Unrue’s sentences are as calm as they are discerning, often running against one another and interrupting in humor and emotion:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times I seem
Look how her––!
wonderfully, oddly
She’s not one little bit––!'
Mine is a woman’s face, though something of the child hides back behind the surface of my veering eyes.
Prose vignettes - at times one line takes up a whole page - read like private journal entries, and reveal a woman who is either on the verge of a crisis or has barely survived one. With time we learn the woman is a kind of actress - a failed actress, a closeted actress, a successful actress are all strong possibilities. The woman bitterly recollects a carefree girl from her youth who ended up acting (“I was diminished by her”) and the memory of this girl is followed by a taunting line from an adult, which appears in quotes and occupies a page: “Child, have you ever aspired to perform upon the stage?” These and other tidbits make it clear that once upon a time the woman had wanted to be an actress, and that now she is not (or never was). In fact, the ambiguities regarding the narrator’s occupation and her general background serve to highlight the incandescent and disturbing tension Unrue has created in the narration throughout the book:
'I pick the scissors up. A sparkling vision fills my head, those long-gone Christmas Eves and other nights-before when I would feel the glittering gaze of someone peeking in to see if I was just pretending to be asleep or if I really was asleep. I clip it, thread it, knot it at the end, and tell myself I wonder if I’m acting now.'
We are in limbo, just like the narrator. We find grounding in the woman’s memories of her childhood and of the conversations she once had with her lover. The conversations appear to us snipped, but they are beguiling. The woman and her lover converse on the nature of isolation, their relationship, and sex. That was the woman’s past.
In the present, the woman stares into the eyes of the subjects of Renaissance paintings, she plays a femme-fatale role (self-cast) at a gallery in the museum, and also hires herself for a part she wrote for herself. This last role is a “straightforward though deeply layered story” about a woman who lives in a one-room flat above her mother’s defunct flower shop. The woman acts out the role in a voyage, on a boat deck. Wearing an evening gown and donning a sea-pearl evening clutch, the woman concentrates on her manner and poise. The woman plays the role, rehearsing the execution in grueling and intensive practice sessions, so that “I, please God, might not convey to those around me evidence of jealousy, resentment, malice, desperation, anything.” Life of a Star reads as though Marina Abramovic or Allan Kaprow truly succeeded in erasing the lines between art and life - but the result is disturbing. Akin to the hair-rising fear we feel from looking down an abyss, we look upon the nameless woman playing her voyage role, reacting to the passangers on the boat as if her fellow actors, and we wonder how far she will be able to go without finally stepping into insanity:
'Soft blonde hair, her dress black taffeta, a beaded coral cardigan around her shoulders, she moved gracefully, so pretty, and he uttered something to her that I could not understand before I heard him tell her clearly, rather loudly, that he’d screw her (she had downward eyes) until she’s bleed (soft face; not shocked). Then suddenly she ran away.'
The mother-character in me wept for daughter’s bitter disappointment as the father in me shrank in weakness to confront that bastard piece of shit, while she, the woman that I really was
It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.'
Unrue strikes on a narrative drama that is interspersed with ordinary epiphanies, which reveal a life richly lived, but underscored by a quiet, masterful tension. The woman’s triangular connections with the world and her self (when the self she knows is slipping) are utterly intriguing. This is a portrait of a woman entering art and losing herself in it, increasingly unable to find the center of her own emotions. Life of a Star is a book for theorists, art lovers, academics, but mostly general readers who are both grateful and uneasy to find a writer who experiments with blurring the line of art and life.” - Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“Jane Unrue creates a truly riveting novel that brings new perspective on the woman’s search for love, and so much more. “Life of a Star” is a top pick for literary fiction collections.” —Midwest Book Review

“A woman, alone, embroiders a bumble bee onto a pillowcase and, while doing so, she recalls the first play she ever saw, how she once terrified a young rival into leaving town, how she seduced the married man by a public fountain. Life of a Star by Jane Unrue is the story of a woman embroidering her life. The unnamed female narrator reveals to the reader that, though she was never a professional actress, acting has deeply influenced her. As a child she constantly noted the way others were perceived and, in doing so, learned how to control the ways in which she was perceived. Her remembrances are peppered with stage directions, such as in an argument with her mother: “And I hate (looked:sink) you (mirror) too! (Floor.)” Her mother was a professional actress, but the narrator uses the craft of acting as a lifestyle choice rather than a profession. Instead of making money off her acting skills, she makes relationships.
The most emotional recollections are those surrounding an unnamed ex-lover, a married man. These moments, as all moments in the book, are recalled out-of-order, but the encounters with the lover are differentiated in that they are numbered in chronological order: “Encounter number four. ‘You’re right,’ I said, (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself).” The narrator uses the same self-employed stage directions with the man she loves and she did with her mother, constantly manipulating the distance between herself and the other through this carefully constructed artifice.
The novel unfolds as a series of disjointed thoughts, images, scenes, and memories. The book is 112 pages long, but may be read in a single sitting. No scene lasts for more than a page and a half, and an entire page may contain only a single sentence:
“It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.”
“New needle. (Bigger eye.)”
“Black satin thread emerges through a tiny hole: beginnings of a body.”
When multiple sentences do appear on the same page the language goes to the opposite extreme, becoming complex and lyrical: “Retracing all your steps along the corridor of trees, to search for an escape look up and see if you can find a dirty-looking star above this dead-eyes image of a garden conjured as if just to keep you from returning to the woman underneath you in your bed and telling her that it was only sadness for the many losses in your life, the many tragedies you’ve see, that caused your gaze to wander toward the wall.” It becomes difficult to get your bearings in a sentence such as that, especially in the middle of a story that is being told unchronologically by an unreliable narrator. It becomes essential, then, to approach the novel as you would a poem, to untether yourself from the presumptions of narrative and allow the sentences to grab you and pull you along like a riptide.
When the narrator decides she wants to close her self-created dramatic distance she finds herself unable to do so, commenting “it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves.” Having practiced fake emotion so well for so long, she has robbed herself of the ability to show genuine emotion in a genuine moment. This touches on an even greater question: is it possible to react genuinely once you’ve peered behind the curtain and seen the power of staged drama?
Ultimately, the narrator discovers through her musing both that she desires emotional intimacy and that she absolutely cannot have it. And even as she recalls her life to the faceless reader, she ponders the question, “I wonder if I’m acting now.”” – Dana Norris

“Anxiety suffuses much of Life of a Star, Jane Unrue’s lapidary bloodletting, and much of it is borne from the narrator’s bemoaning of language’s limitations, memory’s imprecision, romance’s sudden changes, and the seeming impossibility of love. The novella, composed of luminous, evocative fragments, is much like a mosaic wall, albeit a ruined one, missing patches of tiles, where the viewer must fill in the necessary blanks. Incredibly perceptive and imaginative, the unnamed narrator elliptically relays her brief moment in the limelight, her strained “encounters” with a lover, her attempted suicide, and her difficulties with finding a language to seam the mangled threads of her life together into some kind of whole:
'No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach.'
It’s a despair familiar to any writer who, continually exploring the vast resources of language, still finds him- or herself incapable of generating the proper vocabulary, syntax, and narratological framework to encompass the baffling complexity of psychological and emotional experience, of pain in all its forms. Emotionally off-kilter, the narrator isn’t satisfied with what she sees, feels, and thinks unless her experiences are given some kind of form or contained in a concrete way. She’s utterly self-conscious and spilling over with doubt: “It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.” Finding “artificiality in mere words,” she feels she must “live words.” Wandering naked in an idyllic scene, she distances herself from her surroundings by wondering how to contain it, capture it, control it: “It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, and my naked body coming, going too.” Oscillating in time, the narrative also sometimes shatters into incomplete sentences, mirroring the narrator’s own fractured perception of both her past and present. And many of these fragments are intruded upon by other voices:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times
I seem
Look how her—!
Wonderfully, oddly
She’s not even one little bit—!'
Unrue’s performance is quite arresting, here. Her poetic renderings of consciousness are expertly handled: she carefully maps her narrator’s vacillations and her confused outlook on life; and she harnesses the flotsam and jetsam of external things: the observations and judgments from other people she’s collected over the course of her troubled life. The narrator, embroidering, sewing, and stitching in the midst of her reveries is, at times, overwhelmed by her fanciful surroundings and the gravity of her personal history. Her own expressive inventorying serves as a way of bringing sense to the senselessness in her life: “To be alive requires that we build a catalogue of like-like images and stolen words and phrases, things we can put to use.”
Immersed in these wrenching scenes, where Unrue’s melancholic lyricism overflows, it’s easy to feel like her narrator who, after reminiscing about kissing her lover says, “This was a moment when the image and the words collide, the kind of moment people live for.” At one point, the narrator, embroidering, compiles a wish list of all the things she needs for her craft. This list could also serve as the best summation of how this novella was put together for it, too, is a “catalogue of patterns, stitches, backgrounds, combinations and suggestions, useful bits and pieces, images.” Unrue’s imaginative precision gives way to indeterminacy, clarity to tentativeness, cohesion to dislocation. The events and images in this world are delivered in a sensuous prose that harkens back to Carole Maso, another accomplished master whose prose belies great intelligence, insight, and a willingness to submit to the seductive power of the sentence. Think of Life of a Star, then, as an illuminated viewfinder, one where parallax, ambiguity, blur, and discontinuity may impede immediate recognition, but one which still impresses through the sheer power of its startling imagery and commanding poetics, its accretion of clues and repetitions. In the end, all of the fragmentary, floating images in Life of a Star finally cohere into an enigmatic portrait of a burned out visionary, an object lesson on the fleetingness of desire, of the perpetuity of pain, on the doubtful, but nevertheless worthwhile, possibility that language may bring meaning to life, or, at the very least, help one to endure its vicissitudes.” - John Madera

“arrived the other day courtesy of Waldrop generosity.
I started it tonight and read to page 62, just over half the little novel.
It's quite good.
I was already a fan of Jane Unrue.
Googling her just now, she seems to be a well-kept secret.
For now.
But that situation cannot last when one writes as well as she does.
Jane Unrue reminds me in an odd way of Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart).
They both write subtle novels composed of almost ectoplasmic prose.
In a weird way, it's like an inheritance of the Jamesian thing (the supernatural James anyway).
But they conveniently clean up his ridiculously Byzantine grammar and tool sentences and paragraphs of much more palatable length.
They keep that Jamesian mystery inherent in grammar itself, but they get rid of the Jamesian sprawl.
I suppose Mendelsohn's vampire novel is a bit slight, but I liked it. She was sort of the literary belwether on that, as vampire erotic lit broke shortly after her first novel along those lines.
But the Amelia Earhart novel was wonderful.
I listed Unrue's book House on my shortlist of "The Ten (or was it Twelve?) Books by Burning Deck Press You Should Own."
This one is about strange-fitting clothes of the erotic.
Also, it is about the torturously well-fitting clothes of jealousy.
Jealousy's ridiculous sartorial splendor.
And the wreckage that follows.
As usual, Unrue shows us that a straight line or direct stare is always the longest distance between two points we are trying to use to reperer in any real investigation of the world.
(Sorry, Kaplan's novel uses the French verb on every other page and now it's stuck in my head!)
Unrue's prose is deliciously Lobachevskian like that.
The irreal is found, as ever, to be more convincing. At least when it comes to that strange creature we call narrative.
She writes very well.
I see I have missed a novel, Atlassed, which came out in 2005, which I will need to hunt down.
And I see she published a novella in the swan song of 3rd Bed, Vincent Standley's wonderful magazine (of which I was happy to be a part on more than one occasion).
I probably actually have that somewhere in this house or the old one.
I'll try to review this when I finish it.
I can already recommend it.
Stylistically, it's that delightful mix of novelistic innovation and unapologetic anachronism--that thing so many contemporary French novelists (yes, P.O.L!) do so well.
P.S. Love Keith Waldrop's cover art for this!” - Willliam Keckler

“Reading Jane Unrue’s novel Life of a Star is similar to the experience of entering a quiet room and seeing the broken shards of a glass figurine lying on the floor and though when seeing the wreckage one is not familiar with what the shards once composed while intact, the essence has not changed—the figurine exists broken, it’s brokenness animated to high art.
The novel is made up of brief sections no more than two pages long. The unnamed female narrator at the center shifts back and forth between childhood and adulthood, between angst and agony, between galleries of art, the sewing of a bumble-bee pillowcase, lovelorn encounters and an early envy for a little girl “…far more likely to dazzle than” she could ever be. She hasn’t always been alone, but she is now.
What does this narrator want? Certainly the title is a wry play on words. The narrator is in an incredible amount of pain. She is a star only in her own multitudinous mind that announces stage directions for her to enact like “(Full body modesty.)” “(Eyes wide.)” “(Repeat for other side; wrist up.)” Her best performances, solo of course, are not attended:
That night, all husbands, wives, long gone, the water was so quiet underneath the little bridge, dark foliage all around, a moon up high, and I was wearing nothing on my body or my head. It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, my naked body coming, going too. p. 94
The “naked body coming, going too” might be the sine qua non of this entire endeavor. The narrator and her stories can’t keep still. She searches, spins and hams her way into a container impervious to other people. Escape, even from such agonies as lovers sleeping with others can never be commensurate with the self-flagellation in its wake:
…I lay there on my bed and wished I had not tried to lift you off my floor and bring you back into the bed…” Don’t tell me that you love me,” you said. He’s already gone, I thought, my gaze up at the ceiling flooded as if by a bucket full of liquid silver pouring down into my eyes and in my mouth. p.71
The last sentence is a Lynchian dissolve, a rainbow shimmer and ungluing of sense that stomps any snaky sentimentality and keeps loss lyrically stifling.
One may wonder what sense this journey into dark sludge has—where is the uplift, where lies redemption? but Unrue has gone into the well many scribblers have spelunked. As in Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, there are mystical childhood encounters, the changing galleries and gardens the narrator wanders through, the bumblebee pillowcase (reminiscent of the mother’s lace), and the concern with how to make prose sing (to be seen shortly). Each also concerns singular narrators who want to be more than they’ve become, but first they must struggle to see the world. Unrue (like Rilke’s directive from the Sonnets to Orpheus) “dances the orange” through a fine needlework of phraseology that takes what is melodrama and heightens it, producing not so much the life of a star, but the scrawl of a poet planting and detonating verbs, adverbs and nouns into sinuous strobes of sound:
No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach. P.104
Her text is the toil that separates her. The narrator is conscious of other ways to communicate but the struggle carries both the singe of the past and the problem of the future. Is there understanding? Is there a way to see truth and breathe into the pain? Unrue’s narrator does plenteous breathwork and the result is a tidy but by no means lean novel wherein the cries to stay private get choked by a willowy wordsmith, a shooting star—shot and fallen.” – Greg Gerke
Jane Unrue, Atlassed, Triple Press, 2005.

“Where does one go after Joyce? This fiction shows the possibility of a way beyond his shadow. Or the possibility of the nutrition that can grow from it. A collection of fictions in Unrue's precise, evocative style with section such as:"Looking Sideways" and "Hands Emerging Out of a Black Background." Perfectbound, with an elegant cover designed by Deron Bauman.”

“Somewhat on the Joyelle McSweeney page maybe, Unrue creates these worlds that exist nowhere but in her books, like little mirrored halls that go on forever, and new new new language mashes, I loved this, 'The Snarl is on the Mask' is one of my new favorite stories.” – Blake Butler

“Jane Unrue's Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of Paterson or Leaves of Grass—except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. "Brow and Chin Variations," or "Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission"). These headings supply in large part the "unity" of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.
At first, the separate chapters seem thrown together, ill-fitting lyric improvisations, voiced by different speakers on different topics. By the end of the book, what unites these pieces becomes much clearer—a kind of aesthetics of dissection, a discomposition of the elements of the body and a re-rendering of the human form as mosaic. This is elegantly expressed in a phrase that I read as a sort of mission statement for the book, from a section titled "A Neatly Folded Pile of Clothes" (a title at once evocative and ironic):
That same day I'd seen a temporary residence designed by different architects to occupy a plot of land devoted to the exhibition of new works of art. Each architect had been assigned a portion of the residence; they brought their portions in by truck, then everything got put together. That the pieces did not fit and that the residence looked unappealing was, I guessed, supposed to be the beauty of it. (134, emphasis added)
Perhaps this in part explains the continual linkage between love and violence in Atlassed, since one of the questions this book repeatedly asks is whether there is "any sort of line dividing deep-felt pleasure from the icy horror of a white-hot violent encounter?" (110). And this is in a sense, the exact experience of reading Atlassed; it is full of sequences that are at once erotic and horrifying, others that are evocative and enigmatic. Moreover, Atlassed always creates the sense that a greater conceptual unity exists, and that we are doomed to desire it forever. In "Table, Heart, Breasts, Kidneys," Unrue suggests that even a family on a road trip may feel an unrequited desire for a map, to render the events of their life, their stubborn anomie in the face of absolutism, easier to comprehend:
A sense of loss like nothing ever known is passed from family member on to family member in the car, each person holding fast to something: steering wheel, a seatbelt buckle, handle on a door. A slippery drop of rain has hit the windshield, and the father conjures up an image of two massive feet of stone adhered for centuries to the ground. (119)
The family knows that "mapping" is an impossibility, and that any attempt at its broad, totalizing vision will result in an image that is incomplete, disorienting. Unrue goes on to say that
This miracle, this nightmare, this at once so terrifying and enchanting scenic drive—it winds from left to right across the outer portion of the mighty granite wall, diminishing the sense of trust felt by the mother and the children toward the car, the tires, and the ability of the man behind the wheel to keep the car from swerving suddenly and plowing through the railings in the road. (119)
In the end, the book is a sort of revelation in reverse—Unrue brings the veil of language between the reader and the illusion of realism, suggesting dark and frightening possibilities beyond our ken that are at the same time exhilarating. Like the "leafy vines" in "Passion (Asleep)," Atlassed "rocks you in the manner of the darkest pleasures you have yet encountered" (155). Reading Atlassed is at times mystifying; but in the end, its alchemic blend of imminent horror with immanent revelation and its apocalyptic mixture of mystery and desire, create a dark and evocative beauty that is both enigmatic and enlightening.” - Gunnar Benediktsson
Jane Unrue, The House, Burning Deck, 2000.

“A woman wanders from room to room, or ventures outside, and throughout the ensuring procession of locations, ruminations, or dreams, is transported into the past, or to a love affair, or a marriage, or into the future, or to an ending, perhaps her own."

“Jane Unrue's extraordinary prose unfolds within the confines of a mythological house: I used to walk when the moonlight was just enough to make the metallic structural elements (the rest of the house as if missing) appear to be coming at me from all sides. 'I know those door frames and window frames are not really coming at me,' I remember saying, 'but it sure does look as if they are.' In restless, suspended sentences that seem to push closure beyond the horizon, a woman wanders from room to room or ventures outside.”

"Quietly plumbing the intimacies of architecture, landscape, and domesticity, Jane Unrue's debut, The House, develops a muted intensity through serial blocks of meditative prose... Displaying the influence of writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Bachelard, Charles Olson and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Unrue successfully forges an evocative approach that could be seen as metacubist in its dizzying, varied takes of the familiar world." - Publishers Weekly