Biography of x

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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey review – who is this mysterious artist?

Celebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in , one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in , it was never klar which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This fryst vatten a biography drawing on X’s archives and a range of interviews with the people closest to her, joining the dots about her background and exploring her difficult relationship with contemporary America. And it fryst vatten, like X herself, entirely a work of fiction.

Catherine Lacey, the author of this haunting, genre-bending novel, has struktur investigating characters with mysterious identities. Her previous book, Pew, wasa gothic f

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The first thing that you notice about Catherine Lacey’s new novel is the lack of a determiner. Nouns float, unhooked from any article. I found myself habitually inserting “The” in the title when the book came up in conversation, that brief sound of specificity, the most common word in the English language and the most wishful. As you open Lacey’s “Biography of X,” turning past the expected copyright and title, you reach a sequence of gradually lightening blacked-out pages, “Tristram Shandy” turned flip-book. Darkness lifts to reveal a second, nested title page, for a slightly different book: “Biography of X,” by C. M. Lucca. This copyright reads “,” rather than “”; you might rustle back a couple of pages to compare, and notice, on Lacey’s title page, the subheading “A Novel,” missing in C. M. Lucca’s version. Both title pages mention the same publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It makes sense that there is no “the”—or “a” or “this” or “my”—in Lacey’s title, as the project that t

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Biography of X

January 6,

Set in an alternative version of the US, narrator Charlotte Marie (C. M.) Lucca takes us along for the ride as she researches the mysterious past of her late wife, ploymath art sensation X. It all begins when another author dares to publish a celebrated biography of X that enrages her widow, as she feels it doesn't do X justice, so the book we read starts as a revenge project intended to set the record straight - but then, Lucca's extended research becomes a dark journey into the reality of emotional abuse and dependency. Is X, the artist known for her plethora of personas and literary/ film/ music/ visual art projects, a genius that riffs on the postmodern fragmentation of ourselves, always developing and moving forward by transforming into different manifestations, or is she a fame-hungry, manipulative, ruthless narcissist?

Lucca, we learn, left her husband for X and gave up her successful career as a journalist to become a full-time wife, while ecce