(As you can see what with my use of the word discourse, I’m slipping back into my academic jargon already). It’s written in a self-referential discourse that is bitingly authentic to arts and humanities academia, so much so that it’s hard to imagine anyone without that background being interested in the book at all. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant.īy effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender-and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.Ī gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.Dionne Brand’s most recent book, Theory, is one of those novels that does what it sets out to do absolutely perfectly but what it sets out to do isn’t going to be for everyone. While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavour: first, there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path and finally, spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics-a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists.

A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course.

Theory by Dionne Brand