The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.

Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012) and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam), an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, U East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Piet Zwart Institute, Simon Fraser University, American University of Paris, Naropa, and California College of the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. A second novel, Riverwork, is forthcoming from Coach House Books.

Lisa Robertson's profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General’s Literary Award Fiction

"A difficult work of ideas, by turns enlightening and arcane, part autobiographical narrative, part literary theory, Robertson’s debut novel, for those interested in possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed."—Publishers Weekly

"Robertson’s work offers a philosophical defence of the girl, a celebration of the menopausal dandy, a speculative release from the constraints of gender, and a portrait of reading as drifting." – Andrea Brady, London Review of Books

"As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic." —Anne Boyer

"Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future." - Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum

"And perhaps that's what Robertson, with this demanding, erudite, and quite remarkable novel, is telling us is required to return those who have been expunged from the pages of literature: time and effort."—Stephen Finucan, Quill & Quire

"An intense if abstract portrait of the poet as a young woman in search of a kind of language that might lead to liberation."—The Kirkus Reviews

"It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before."—Rebecca Hussey, BOOKRIOT

"Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement."—Allison Grimaldi Donahue, BOMB Magazine

"A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal." —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Often reading a novel, even a good novel, feels like falling into a well-worn groove. There can be comfort in that. This is a different thing entirely. Ironic for a book that works by repetition: The Baudelaire Fractal is a novel you haven’t read before." - The Globe and Mail

"Robertson, one of Canada’s best and most innovative authors, thus cleaves close to Baudelaire’s own dictum: "Always be a poet, even in prose." - Winnipeg Free Press

"The Baudelaire Fractal is a book readers—certainly this reader—will continue returning to for its hypnotic narrative architecture, its portrayal of female ambition and courage, and its inner flint of artistic permission." - The Puritan

"The fabric of “The Baudelaire Fractal”—and it is most definitely a fabric, not just text but textile—is no less yours because it was thrifted. Learn to live in it. You won’t regret it, despite the lingering scent of shed self." - Newfound

"The overall effect is an augmented complexity, unrelated to progress, expansion or growth, in our understanding of artistic lineage, history and subjectivity itself." - MAP Magazine

"The Baudelaire Fractal doesn’t resemble a novel in most of its traditional senses, though the classification doesn’t really matter. Robertson bends the form to her will, and the result is captivating even as it tends towards abstraction." - Entropy Magazine

"A semi-autobiographical novel that blends elements of fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism, The Baudelaire Fractal explores what it means to be an author and a figure of authority, as well as how the Western literary canon and preconceptions about gender can limit who is recognized as a writer by society at large." - PRISM International

"This is a novel that, though its means are singular, will open and salvage possible worlds—above all, for writers, who perhaps will one day look back at their younger selves with an air of indulgence and find they were reading Lisa Robertson." - Music & Literature

"I want to spend many hours tracing the rapture of this book, as well as its seductions." - Spam Zine

"Everything becomes a form of writing, a code. Like the dispersed 'I' of the 'girl,' writing itself is both absent and multiplex, 'lost and grotesquely multiple'." - Cleveland Review of Books

"Above all, however, this book is governed by a poetic. The more you pursue it, the more you will find it to be unreadable, which is to say inexhaustible." - The Capilano Review