Chris's mad infatuation with Dick, a friend of her husband's, turns into a psychoanalytic and philosophical self-portrait of the most intense vulnerability and frustration. Fucking glorious.

A novel (that is probably semi-autobiographical? I labelled it fiction because it's categorized as a novel, but there's lots to explore here about the blurring of fact and fiction) about a married couple, Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, the author and her (ex-)husband's real names, who have dinner with Richard, a friend of Sylvère's, and the immense attraction that Chris felt between her and Richard (aka Dick), and the ensuing fall-out.

The first half is absolutely fascinating and hard to put down in a perverse sort of way, like a car crash, or like peering behind the metaphorical curtain. Chris and Sylvère write letters to Dick (most of which they don't send.... initially...) about how they both feel about Chris' attraction to him and what they want to do (or not do) about it.

Much like passion and attraction itself, it starts to lose a bit of steam over time, but it's also after that initial rapture and fascination and burst of energy that some of the deeper questions and more thoughtful analysis starts to appear.

This won't be for anyone who's not into navel-gazing, anything super meta, or deeply introspective. But I would posit the question of why so many people find those things repellent in women characters and writers but acceptable or even appealing for their male counterparts.

I can see why is it talked about, not to say hyped. It is a good book, but the whole postmodern thing feels really 1990s. Unfortunately, the feminist undercurrent of it makes it really relevant today as well...

I had to stop a quarter of the way in.

"Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind."

This work by Chris Kraus, the first I've read, is difficult to wrap one's head around. It's easy to read, on one hand, due in large part by Kraus's wonderful prose style. Paradoxically, on the other, she's integrated a number of theorists and high/continental/french/etc. theory into the narrative, as well as a number of arcane 80s New York artworld literati references that might taste more than a little indulgent for the average reader (the "average reader" being one that Harold Bloom would look down upon). Nevertheless, despite the fact that I caught most of the references blended into Kraus's text, the ones I didn't recognize (or, on a separate matter, understand at all) did not bother or interrupt my reading experience. Although Joan Hawkins in her "Afterword" to the book valorizes and centers the theory as the primary driver of the fiction (and vice-versa), I found that 'understanding' the theory (like you might have to do in a seminar) was a non-issue. What is really at issue for Kraus in I Love Dick is the this-ness of her life, its many connections, correspondences, restrictions, frustrations, desires, failures, etc. I believe her life at the moment of writing and its confluence of her age, marriage, career, body, gender, and sexual desire was the impetus, if not for Kraus's authorial intent itself, for the pleasure hovering over her words and turns of phrase. I'm not sure why prose of the "self" is so compelling (i.e. look at Knausgaard's works and success) when it lays bare the more abject nooks of the authorial "life." The more transparent, or at least seemingly transparent, the life is on the page the more we greedily consume its pages. For this reason I found the less theoretical/more traditional epistolary content of the book the most exciting, such as the opening salvo of letters tracing Sylvère and Chris's experimentation with this "new literary form." As opposed to other texts that approach the subject of 'female abjection' in the mode of hetero-sexual desire (I'm thinking mainly of Ernaux's Passion simple), Kraus manages to write sexual desire with spectacular nuance, such as when she reflects on Dick's ambivalent attitude to her pursuit of his passion:

"What do you want?" you asked again. "I want to sleep with you." Two weeks ago I'd written you that note saying the idea of spending time alone with you was a vision of purehappiness and pleasure. On the phone you'd said, "I won't say no" when I asked what you thought, but all the reasons, factors, desire splintered in a hundred hues like sunlight through a psychedelic prism came crashing with a thud when you asked me: "Why?"

Finally, the question of veracity vis-à-vis Kraus's relationship to Dick is one that seems to have troubled a lot of people. To be sure, some of Chris's behaviour is a little perturbing and might amount to harassment--in general she definitely oversteps the social boundaries delimited by a contemporary civil PC discourse which demands respect and polity at all times--but the truth-value and moral judgements formed in response to the text are beside the point. Kraus writes a certain truth into language here and it is one that is at once political, theoretical, fictional, and above all, absolutely engrossing.

Voor de eerste keer een boek uitlezen waarvan je weet dat het een lievelingsboek is/wordt: ben in extase.

This is an odd novel because of (1) its narrative framing and (2) its blend of art/cultural criticism & fiction (and possibly also nonfiction/memoir/“autofiction”). Frankly I think some of it was lost on me. It seems to be in conversation with a lot of literary criticism, postmodern theory, and feminist theory that I am just not very familiar with. So be warned that this review is just diaristic, not critical. There are way better people to read reviews from. For example I had never heard the term “epistolary novel,” which apparently this is.

Narratively, it mostly presented as a series of love letters written by Chris Kraus (authorial self-insert) and sometimes her husband, Sylvère Lotringer (also a real person, to whom Kraus was really married), to Dick __, a colleague of Sylvère’s with whom Chris becomes obsessively extramaritally infatuated and onto whom she projects many desires, frustrations, fears, etc. (as you do with a crush). (Dick is also a real person and Chris did really have a one-sided obsession with him that (I think) involved prolific letter writing.) Chris and Dick met only briefly, flirted (maybe) for a night—and thus started the saga. I will not just recount the story here, but suffice it to say Chris spirals farther into her infatuation and ends up writing several hundred pages of dangerously obsessed letters to a man she does not “really” know. Dick becomes a sort of icon/muse for her, and unfortunately for him she makes no secret of this fact. I saw someone describe the first half as “‘Madame Bovary’ written from the POV of Emma.”

There are great feminist sections of writing in this, particularly about sexism in arts/academia—the way women’s work is considered naive or sentimental if it is not about the subjects lauded by the patriarchal pedagogy, the way men may be bold experimentalists while women are discarded as childish or gauche or one-dimensional—man as subject and woman as object. The book itself, with the moral ambiguity of such a violation of (IRL) Dick’s privacy, is framed at times as a messy work of feminist revolution — “the things women must do to even be noticed, and surely they will not be taken seriously even if they are.” The art criticism is also smart and accessible and introduced me to the great painter Ronald Brooks Kitaj. Also it explained the Deleuze/Guattari capitalist schizophrenia thing better than any of the other brief summaries I’ve read.

I thought I wasn’t going to like this very much at the start—kind of dry and I was sure I had a grasp on it too quickly—but I was surprised by how much I ended up liking it as I continued reading. It felt honest, dangerous, and experimental, and witty too. It contains a sad story of desire and projection and futile attempts to sublimate—things I find relatable.

If this doesn’t sound like it’d freak you out or bore you to tears, check it out

The actual process of reading it was painful. I only felt sheer relief upon finishing it.

I'm still not sure if I should rate it one star. But then again, it did provoke me and maybe that's what a good book is meant to do? And maybe books shouldn't be able to be so readily classified and rated either. Was this part-memoir or entirely fiction? Should I "like" it because it challenged me or prompted interesting questions, or should I dislike it because, sometimes post-modernism can go too far and not everything needs to be deconstructed before being taped back together.

It reminded me of when I used to study English literature, and how esoteric/self-indulgent things could be; it didn't help that the final third of this work is predominately a series of art criticism essays. It was primarily during this section where I would finish a "chapter", put the book down for the day, forget about it because it had lost any sense of momentum before physically seeing the book again and remembering that, ah no (dammit), there's still more to go.

I'm going to leave my rating and jumble of a review as is. There are maybe a very small handful, three people come to mind, that I would recommend this to. And funnily enough, as it turns out, the one person who I knew would love it had already read, and whilst reading it had thought: "Yep, Linh would absolutely hate this". They weren't wrong.

I appreciate this book but didn't enjoy a lot of it.

A few years ago we took the kids then 10 & 12 to visit Tate Britain. and we led them past the unmade bed; and the piles of rotting bread with the human impressions; and the black canvas that has been ripped and we got so tired trying to explain 'why?' to the kids; 'why is this art? ' 'why is this clever?' 'why? '
and then we moved to the next room; and there was an old master, maybe painted in the 16th Century, in oil. In it was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel - we have a Cavvie - and it looked so real; the perspective so perfect that it looked like you could just reach in to the painting and stroke it.

So how to review "I Love Dick" " the most important book about men and women written in the last century.' (Emily Gould the Guardian) I'm so tempted to say 'flaccid' or 'if this is dick I definitely prefer cunt' but I bet those jokes were all done back in 97. actually Cunt is too strong a word; what is the vagina equivalent to 'Dick'? you can't say 'pussy' too porny; especially after President Trump's proud grabbing of them. fanny? Vag? wasn't there a poll in somewhere enlightened like Finland to name the 'willy' of vaginas - not sexual; not taboo; not 'the most awful thing there is. ." just the willy of vaginas. but when I think about it 'Dick' isn't 'willy' it's a notch above 'willy' on the swear scale. oh we have so far to go!
this book is so festooned in literary accolades it's difficult to judge impartially. and going by goodread reviews this is a real Marmite book (Americans don't have Marmite - how do they describe a 'love it or hate it' thing? how did we, before salty yeasty spread? ). I Love Dick is funny in places; very "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". never a page turner - no reason to continue reading and I never discovered what makes it justify all the praise lavished upon it. okay; every 4 or 5 pages there's a good line. But if you did the 180 flip and this were written by a man; writing all those letters to a woman - especially the 'we were wondering how to dispose of a body' letters - it would be creepy; intimidating; maybe fascinating? Maybe if it were subtitled "inside the twisted mind of a stalker" it would make more sense...
and maybe...maybe if Dick was more of a ... dick; he wasn't that much of a dick was he? I've met loads of guys that are way more dickish than Dick - hell, I'm more of a dick than Dick. Maybe events at the White House and the #metoo and Harvey Whatsisname have outdicked Dick to such a degree that he (as a villain) has been Undicked, dedicked. ..castrated?

But ultimately I feel a little left out; this is a cult novel and I'm obviously not in the cult.
weirdly, serendipitously, I had just decided that I hated this book and was going to abandon it when my mother gave me a review of a punk poetry book, in the TLS written by .... Chris Kraus! what are the chances? If I was a believer I'd say it was a sign. so I dutifully believed and returned to I Love Dick started part 2. After 15 minutes I thought 'aw feck it! life's too short! ' and skipped forward to when Dick wrote back....
and unlike Emily Gould I was utterly underwhelmed.
I reckon I much prefer .... [the vagina equivalent of dick] but then I'm a dick; what would I know?