


Even after I had finished the book, something definitely stayed with me, influenced my way of seeing the world and made me question my perception of things. It is wonderful when a write is able to influence their readers in a way like this. She has sharpened my awareness for all colors, not just the blue. Nelson definitely managed to make me see the world in a different light. “I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.” She writes about love, sex and friendship, sadness and loss and she manages to do that in a very heart-breaking way: Her journey to getting to the essence of what blue is, is therefore also a journey to her most inner thoughts.

Nelson opens up a great deal about her feelings in some of the pieces, describing a variety of feeling of which not all are pretty. Her feeling of coming to terms with these things infuses almost every page of the book.īluets is a brave book. The two main ‘story lines’ are a love that Nelson lost and a close friend who had an accident and is now unable to walk. The connections between the short pieces are only evident in the end. There is no order, neither chronological nor topical, the pieces could each stand for their own and yet in the end they shape a clear and concise picture. Some are historical or scientific facts, connections to religion, art and literature and others are biographical snippets of the author’s life. The book is structured into 239 very short pieces, each one dealing with a different aspect of blue. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what it’s hue, can be deadly.” “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in it’s focus. Each new page is a meditation, not only on colours but on life and emotions and how we live with them: It is such an extremely wonderful and unexpected little book, that surprised me in many ways, all the way till the end.īluets, part poetry, part memoir, is a book about the authors love for the colour blue, but it is also so much more than that. I am actually glad that I got to read Bluets first. The Argonauts has been on my to read list, as friends keep recommending it but like I said, I haven’t read it yet. I had heard of Maggie Nelson before but haven’t read anything by her. Bluets was given to me as a birthday present.
