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Spain
“Here we are, in Spain.” Caren Beilin’s travelogue lays out a new path for the genre. Spain is sly cultural criticism (Blanchot to The Shining), feminist wink, post-breakup corrective, and portrait of the artist as a young mansplained woman. Our narrator finds herself, skeptically, at an artist residency in Spain, rendering her life into vivid fragments that pop and sting. With acerbic flair, Beilin swings an axe into the stuff of memoir. “I don’t care to dine with anyone,” she proclaims. Reader, pull up a chair.
While the other art colonists around her “are making the world soft”—photographers setting day-long exposures and textile artists felting cocoons—Caren Beilin's Spain is hard: made and re-made in its mosaic shards. Abject, affronted and audacious, the resilient narrator, who incidentally might faint at a thought, if it’s a rigorous thought, who might then rouse wherever, in the company of countryside sheep, is on the perilous cusp of insight on multiple fronts. She looks up from her book in her book to assert that form is a better heroine than Emma in Madame Bovary, and proceeds to “read against what was happening.” The beginning of the end of fiction.
—Brian Blanchfield
Caren Beilin’s Spain is like a Hostel-ization of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Beilin’s protagonist isn’t in Spain on a Fulbright. Rather, she’s paying her own way at a dubious artist residency with the proceeds of a defunct relationship with an older, wealthy man. Spain is a fantastic, poetic and realistic account of travel in a post-travel world.
—Chris Kraus
Spain is a genre-bending document of the narrator’s female, migratory writing life through the wounded, binoculative, molested soul of her nipples. Spain is stuffed with poetic axing, bicycling, pussying, traveloguing, Rilke-ing, Claire Denis-ing, reading, anti-Spain-ing. This highly inventive, highly imaginative book relentlessly disrupts the contemporary order of memoir writing. Beilin goes to the moon and back, and is not afraid to be scandalous or poetic or whimsical or ethical at a moment’s notice.
—Vi Khi Nao
While the other art colonists around her “are making the world soft”—photographers setting day-long exposures and textile artists felting cocoons—Caren Beilin's Spain is hard: made and re-made in its mosaic shards. Abject, affronted and audacious, the resilient narrator, who incidentally might faint at a thought, if it’s a rigorous thought, who might then rouse wherever, in the company of countryside sheep, is on the perilous cusp of insight on multiple fronts. She looks up from her book in her book to assert that form is a better heroine than Emma in Madame Bovary, and proceeds to “read against what was happening.” The beginning of the end of fiction.
—Brian Blanchfield
Caren Beilin’s Spain is like a Hostel-ization of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Beilin’s protagonist isn’t in Spain on a Fulbright. Rather, she’s paying her own way at a dubious artist residency with the proceeds of a defunct relationship with an older, wealthy man. Spain is a fantastic, poetic and realistic account of travel in a post-travel world.
—Chris Kraus
Spain is a genre-bending document of the narrator’s female, migratory writing life through the wounded, binoculative, molested soul of her nipples. Spain is stuffed with poetic axing, bicycling, pussying, traveloguing, Rilke-ing, Claire Denis-ing, reading, anti-Spain-ing. This highly inventive, highly imaginative book relentlessly disrupts the contemporary order of memoir writing. Beilin goes to the moon and back, and is not afraid to be scandalous or poetic or whimsical or ethical at a moment’s notice.
—Vi Khi Nao
144 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2024
About the author
Caren Beilin
12 books29 followersCaren Beilin is the author, most recently, of the novel REVENGE OF THE SCAPEGOAT (Dorothy, 2022). She has also written a nonfiction book, BLACKFISHING THE IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), and a memoir, SPAIN (Rescue Press, 2018). She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 24, 2019
The language in this book reminds me of those restaurants which offer the weirdest concoctions of food that make your tastebuds question the normalcy of every other traditionally delicious food in the world. Most of the time, my brain (operating as tastebuds to what I read) was delighted, sparked, spanked, and refreshed by the sting of fresh, new air. But yes, there were times I was challenged and had to question my idea of sentence structure, grammar, and "memoir." Spain is the kind of book that delivers something hugely different from the norm. Caren Beilin has my utmost respect and attention now.
From page 116:
"Rebecca was working in two restaurants and dating a man who dated. I met them at a bar. They were on some cocaine. He reached out and touched my crotch. A clothed cunt is a crotch? With the back of one of his fingers. He looked smooth, jellied, fished up from the very scrim of his very good website. She laughed into his shoulder, an unbelievable barfly my good friend was becoming, like crinkling a butterfly. Balling it."
From page 116:
"Rebecca was working in two restaurants and dating a man who dated. I met them at a bar. They were on some cocaine. He reached out and touched my crotch. A clothed cunt is a crotch? With the back of one of his fingers. He looked smooth, jellied, fished up from the very scrim of his very good website. She laughed into his shoulder, an unbelievable barfly my good friend was becoming, like crinkling a butterfly. Balling it."
October 13, 2023
found this so instructive! admire the way beilin situates this period of her life, interrogates different aspects of it rigorously from different angles, the way she thinks about her varied relationships to other women, and above all the way she uses language, abstracts with so much precision. recommend recommend recommend
December 5, 2019
The first travelogue I've encountered that does not center white men and their trifling thoughts. What a welcome change! This is full of cutting vignettes on what it means to be a womanhood, how it feels to encounter people that mean nothing to you, how it feels to encounter people that have lodged themselves deep in your psyche, and what it means to feel like a creative writer. Everything is wrapped up, well divided, by specific headers and informed by place. Beilin tries to categorize it all and ruminates on the pieces of her life that spill over the boundaries. The boundaries she explores, be them temporal, spatial, or relational, made me want to wade through the murkiness of my own life in a Beilin manner. She's sharp and unforgiving, the writer and thinker I aspire to read more of (and be).
Also, the cover is rubberized matte and I mean, just look at that artwork. *chef's kiss*
Also, the cover is rubberized matte and I mean, just look at that artwork. *chef's kiss*
January 13, 2019
Reading Caren Beilin is such a pleasure that it feels like it should, somehow, be forbidden. Her language is so sharp and every word elicits something, even a conversational, colloquial "man." It's inspiring.
September 6, 2023
Some of the best prose I've ever read! Stunning, poetic, aggressive and direct in every sentence. The actual plot, in which a woman goes to Spain, doesn't like it and doesn't do anything, is fun for a bit but does somewhat run out of steam towards the end. But hey, it's only 138 pages so who cares.
April 15, 2019
I loved this book a lot. It interweaves weirdly (in most senses of that word) between several threads of thought: the sheep in the landscape, the various characters the narrator encounters at a nascent artist residency in Spain (for which she is paying, she clarifies), the movie White Material, several books (The Lover, Heart of Darkness, and especially Madame Bovary), her friend Kristen, men they meet at a hostel, men at home, and her mother and father, separately. Yet somehow it all comes together into a vigorous perspective on old and new, men and women, solitude and togetherness, and the will to speak up.
Not to mention the amazing language and modern aphorisms that I will keep thinking about, such as:
"But really a woman is always the guest, and a woman who is less the guest (if there are two or more women, as there were here: Susana was there) will guest the shit out of the woman who has less bearing, so as to get some fucking footing for herself"
and
"You have to dream like that when a man begins to Heart of Darkness your whole goddamn time, when he publishes himself on the backs of your nodding face, for hours."
Not to mention the amazing language and modern aphorisms that I will keep thinking about, such as:
"But really a woman is always the guest, and a woman who is less the guest (if there are two or more women, as there were here: Susana was there) will guest the shit out of the woman who has less bearing, so as to get some fucking footing for herself"
and
"You have to dream like that when a man begins to Heart of Darkness your whole goddamn time, when he publishes himself on the backs of your nodding face, for hours."
December 26, 2019
I think the best quote from the Book Spain is : “Good Writing my Worst Cynicism.”
The fact that this book was so well written makes me applaud and appreciate it. But at so many times I felt disengaged. I’m not sure if this was an overwhelming read for me, because at so many times I felt power within Beilin’s words. She is very, very, very feminine & sexual; the time spent within the novel seems very intense for a person to handle. Even though it’s fiction, it’s poetic style can pass a memoir as she is an residency artist.
Her disbelief in herself made the world around her like a bubble “a balloon would do nothing here, no metaphor.” “No one will believe me, I thought what half of a Xanax has done, will do in a sensitive person. I’m no marcel Proust this is not France as not then.”
The reason this book gets such a low rating is because I thought it could be so much more. The idea of it was great, as a travelogue, but I felt there were things missing.
The fact that this book was so well written makes me applaud and appreciate it. But at so many times I felt disengaged. I’m not sure if this was an overwhelming read for me, because at so many times I felt power within Beilin’s words. She is very, very, very feminine & sexual; the time spent within the novel seems very intense for a person to handle. Even though it’s fiction, it’s poetic style can pass a memoir as she is an residency artist.
Her disbelief in herself made the world around her like a bubble “a balloon would do nothing here, no metaphor.” “No one will believe me, I thought what half of a Xanax has done, will do in a sensitive person. I’m no marcel Proust this is not France as not then.”
The reason this book gets such a low rating is because I thought it could be so much more. The idea of it was great, as a travelogue, but I felt there were things missing.
January 10, 2023
A physically and thematically disjointed narrative that very well could be the events of Caren's own life, or a parallel reality somewhere in which fathers touch their daughter's nipples unbidden, and men sleep in hostels at all hours of the day. I liked the way Caren talked about her own body, and her relationships with other women. I liked the short sections bouncing from one thought to the next almost frenetically. It won't all stick in my mind like a 600 page intergenerational drama might, but I appreciate it for the entertainment and mental exercise it gave me much more so.
July 10, 2022
Pushing the limits or perhaps redefining them entirely. While keeping the pop element, the mesmerizing magic of words. While unknowable what she might be meaning. and funny. tragic. etc etc. I suppose everyone will take from Beilin's writing what they take. Take take take, of course, it doesn't always come down to that either. Looking forward to my next Beilin experience even as I barely made it across the finish line.
June 17, 2023
this book was one of those that inspired me to write more. the cyclical narratives, the almost impalpable metaphors, the humor were all great. at times i found myself not wanting to like this book, maybe because of its honesty about the speaker’s inner world and her judginess. i did love it though. I love books like this that are somewhere between prose and poetry, held together more by imagery than plot. reminded me of anne carson’s autobiography of red.
December 12, 2021
Beilin employs arresting phrasing in this engrossing and honest account of her time at a writers' residency in Spain, a residency that disappoints but while doing so, provides the reader with both a story and framework for the age-old issue women face: circumventing man's ego and hands.
January 2, 2019
This might be my favorite travel/expat narrative/memoir that I have ever read. It completely subverts the genre. The prose is prickly and sharp throughout.
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August 11, 2019"I'm sorry she's bored with you."
"No. You don't understand."
"I get it, she wants to move on. She's very bored."
"No. You don't understand."
"I get it, she wants to move on. She's very bored."
June 21, 2022
Call me a Caren Beilin stan
August 12, 2020
fucking awesome. beilin spanks language back into life (taking "spank" from someone else's review--it's the right word)
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews