What do you think?
Rate this book
The Melancholy of Anatomy
Amusing, touching, and unsettling, The Melancholy of Anatomy is that most wonderful of fictions, one that makes us see the world in an entirely new light.
Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humors released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them; the city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes; gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships; and a floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In this debut story collection, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages, and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humors released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them; the city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes; gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships; and a floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In this debut story collection, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages, and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
40 people are currently reading
1890 people want to read
About the author
Shelley Jackson
30 books125 followersShelley Jackson is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl (1995). Her first novel was published in 2006, Half Life.
In the late nineties, Jackson alternated hypertext work with writing short stories. She published her first short story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, in 2002.
Jackson's first novel, Half Life, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. She currently teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.[14]
In the late nineties, Jackson alternated hypertext work with writing short stories. She published her first short story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, in 2002.
Jackson's first novel, Half Life, was published by HarperCollins in 2006. She currently teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.[14]
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
February 1, 2016
It is always hard for me to review short story collections because I don't know whether I should do the book as a whole or focus on a couple of my favourites. I guess there is no right or wrong answer. What I will say is if you like weird short stories with philosophical musings, this one's for you. This is a collection of short stories written by parts of the body, or bodily fluids, all very weird but at the same time very thoughtful, creative, and imaginative, and sometimes funny. Stories were put under the headings of the four temperaments: choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine. All the stories is that they were very fascinating read that made me see things in a different way, see things outside their ordinary context : what if a foetus became the pastor of a town? How did a speck picked out of a girl's eye and thrown into the toilet become an ever-expanding egg which she became obsessed with? Can human substitutes be made of sleep? Some of my favourite quotes are below:
Foetus (In "Choleric" )
"One day Pastor Green simply left town, and no one was very sorry. It was the graceful thing to do, people agreed, and saw to it that the foetus stood behind the pulpit the next Sunday. At first it held an honorary post; we couldn't settle on a suitable title, but we did present it with a robe and a stiff white collar, which it seemed to admire."
Nerve (In "Melancholic" )
"Interesting things happen when you adopt pain for your own. The thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information."
Sleep (in "Phlegmatic" )
"Of course, sleep is literally both broth (add water) and yeast: a few grains of it scattered over warm, honey-fattened water will bewitch bread into a fantasia of dough turrets, minarets, grottos, candelabras, and credenzas, now sadly out of culinary fashion, but still traditional at sleepmastide."
Milk (in "Sanguine" )
"If the sky expresses its love in milk, then clouds are its organs of expression. Tender impulses from minute thickenings into the tissue of the sky. These lumps grow, incubated by the heat of the sun and kneaded by wind currents..."
Foetus (In "Choleric" )
"One day Pastor Green simply left town, and no one was very sorry. It was the graceful thing to do, people agreed, and saw to it that the foetus stood behind the pulpit the next Sunday. At first it held an honorary post; we couldn't settle on a suitable title, but we did present it with a robe and a stiff white collar, which it seemed to admire."
Nerve (In "Melancholic" )
"Interesting things happen when you adopt pain for your own. The thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information."
Sleep (in "Phlegmatic" )
"Of course, sleep is literally both broth (add water) and yeast: a few grains of it scattered over warm, honey-fattened water will bewitch bread into a fantasia of dough turrets, minarets, grottos, candelabras, and credenzas, now sadly out of culinary fashion, but still traditional at sleepmastide."
Milk (in "Sanguine" )
"If the sky expresses its love in milk, then clouds are its organs of expression. Tender impulses from minute thickenings into the tissue of the sky. These lumps grow, incubated by the heat of the sun and kneaded by wind currents..."
December 8, 2020
Like Gogol's "The Nose," but extrapolated, updated, crafted in a deliberately daring manner, modernized, and covering eggs, spermatozoan, blood, milk, fat, nerves, and more. Casting off abstract concepts like character, dialogue, and plot, S. J. focuses on the human body as an object of dream, fetish, and fascination. Implementing her vast imagination, she swells her subjects to uncontainable proportions. They become palaces, cathedrals, and labyrinths. If Borges dwelt in morbid alleyways, peddled grotesque poetry for psychedelic sustenance, his snippet productions would bring to mind this enigmatic short story collection. A thrilling emanation of ideas, and a visceral ride through gristly viscera, inhabited by the piquant ghosts of our primal fears, our soul-encasing frames expanding to encompass tantalizing visions. Beautiful, excessive, absurd, and unutterably strange.
November 3, 2020
“Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhuman.”
The astronomy of hearts, the zoology of sperm, the theology of fetuses, the sociology of phlegm, the hydrology of blood, the meteorology of sleep, the omnipresence of hair, and more, all enwrapped in the melancholy of anatomy.
“One reads of a dark, greasy, subterranean sleep, which seeps out of solid rock and hardens into strange fungal forms, and plugs underground rivers with a glassy but flexible mass that can be reliquefied by one blow of a pickax. Miners have staggered out of shafts and told tales of slow-motion tsunamis of sour treacle.”
These are highly imaginative and fairly macabre Calvino-esque tales with at times a veneer of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyone with even a passing interest in the human body (and who wouldn’t be interested?) would be both disgusted and fascinated by these stories. Jackson’s prose is contemplative, sometimes soft-spoken, other times snappy, though always conscious of language’s music and riddled with evocative metaphors. Her lexicon isn’t exactly wild but she’ll occasionally use a word that’s as precise as it is strangely beautiful, such as cicatrix and pinguid and atomy. The stories generally lack a powerful ending, though they make up for that with everything before the end, and although some stories were better than others, this collection is as close to perfection as possible, especially since I prefer novels over stories. This is easily right up there with Ficciones and Patricia Eakins’ The Hungry Girls.
“Sperm are ancient creatures, single-minded as coelacanths. They are drawn to the sun, the moon, and dots and disks of all descriptions, including periods, stop signs, and stars. They worship nail heads, doorknobs and tennis balls. More than one life has been saved by a penny tossed in the air.”
“Fœtus” reminded me a bit of the video game Death Stranding and an unpublished story of mine titled “The Infant King,” and in short it was both disturbing and hilarious, and probably one of the best stories I've read period.
“The fœtus floats outside your window while you are having sex. It wants to know how many beads of sweat collect between your breasts and at what point, exactly, they begin their journey south, it wants to know if your eyes open wide or close at orgasm, if at that time your partner is holding your hand with his hand or your gaze with her gaze. […] …it wants to stay informed, your love is its business.”
I was put off from reading this collection sooner because of a review that suggested a repetitiveness across the stories, which turned out to be far from true for me. In fact, there was enough polyphony to keep me consistently engaged. The Borgesian academia and Rabelaisian humor of “Dildo,” the Saunders (which is to say DFW lite) quirkiness of “Phlegm,” the British folk-speak and slight interview frame of “Blood,” some postmodern tics like the writer’s guide excerpts in “Milk,” etc. There are two types of story collections: those that are wildly eclectic and those that are connected by recurring themes. The Melancholy of Anatomy is the latter yet avoids any damning redundancy, and to complain about thematic repetition is akin to complaining that Calvino’s Invisible Cities has too much architecture in it.
“Be careful when you say the words mildew, Bilbao, bibelot, billet-doux, or even peccadillo, that you do not accidentally summon a dildo, for truly, you do not know what will answer your call.”
Jackson is a kindred spirit and even my wife said that these stories sound like the fiction I would write, which is a great compliment, that’s for sure. Read it and make it a part of your anatomy.
“The hair is a subtle spirit, and noose to our passions.”
The astronomy of hearts, the zoology of sperm, the theology of fetuses, the sociology of phlegm, the hydrology of blood, the meteorology of sleep, the omnipresence of hair, and more, all enwrapped in the melancholy of anatomy.
“One reads of a dark, greasy, subterranean sleep, which seeps out of solid rock and hardens into strange fungal forms, and plugs underground rivers with a glassy but flexible mass that can be reliquefied by one blow of a pickax. Miners have staggered out of shafts and told tales of slow-motion tsunamis of sour treacle.”
These are highly imaginative and fairly macabre Calvino-esque tales with at times a veneer of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyone with even a passing interest in the human body (and who wouldn’t be interested?) would be both disgusted and fascinated by these stories. Jackson’s prose is contemplative, sometimes soft-spoken, other times snappy, though always conscious of language’s music and riddled with evocative metaphors. Her lexicon isn’t exactly wild but she’ll occasionally use a word that’s as precise as it is strangely beautiful, such as cicatrix and pinguid and atomy. The stories generally lack a powerful ending, though they make up for that with everything before the end, and although some stories were better than others, this collection is as close to perfection as possible, especially since I prefer novels over stories. This is easily right up there with Ficciones and Patricia Eakins’ The Hungry Girls.
“Sperm are ancient creatures, single-minded as coelacanths. They are drawn to the sun, the moon, and dots and disks of all descriptions, including periods, stop signs, and stars. They worship nail heads, doorknobs and tennis balls. More than one life has been saved by a penny tossed in the air.”
“Fœtus” reminded me a bit of the video game Death Stranding and an unpublished story of mine titled “The Infant King,” and in short it was both disturbing and hilarious, and probably one of the best stories I've read period.
“The fœtus floats outside your window while you are having sex. It wants to know how many beads of sweat collect between your breasts and at what point, exactly, they begin their journey south, it wants to know if your eyes open wide or close at orgasm, if at that time your partner is holding your hand with his hand or your gaze with her gaze. […] …it wants to stay informed, your love is its business.”
I was put off from reading this collection sooner because of a review that suggested a repetitiveness across the stories, which turned out to be far from true for me. In fact, there was enough polyphony to keep me consistently engaged. The Borgesian academia and Rabelaisian humor of “Dildo,” the Saunders (which is to say DFW lite) quirkiness of “Phlegm,” the British folk-speak and slight interview frame of “Blood,” some postmodern tics like the writer’s guide excerpts in “Milk,” etc. There are two types of story collections: those that are wildly eclectic and those that are connected by recurring themes. The Melancholy of Anatomy is the latter yet avoids any damning redundancy, and to complain about thematic repetition is akin to complaining that Calvino’s Invisible Cities has too much architecture in it.
“Be careful when you say the words mildew, Bilbao, bibelot, billet-doux, or even peccadillo, that you do not accidentally summon a dildo, for truly, you do not know what will answer your call.”
Jackson is a kindred spirit and even my wife said that these stories sound like the fiction I would write, which is a great compliment, that’s for sure. Read it and make it a part of your anatomy.
“The hair is a subtle spirit, and noose to our passions.”
December 31, 2013
This is my penultimate disastrous book choice at the end of 2013. I had recently heard of Shelley Jackson through reading “The Long Meanwhile: Stories of Arrival and Departure, edited by Molly McQuade”. This comprised “an anthology of poignant short stories about change” and because it included Rikki Ducornet, one of my favourite authors, I decided to read it. Well one thing lead to another and I read this absolutely remarkable short story called the “Egg” by Ms Jackson and I saw that it was included in the above book. Logically, my reasoning was that the other short stories by her also had to be excellent and so I was determined to read the above book.
What an absolutely disastrous mistake. I stand by my choice of the brilliance of the “Egg” but it’s all a very contradictory situation for me here. I’m slowly becoming fascinated with experimental fiction, especially after reading two wonderful and exquisite books by Christine Brooke-Rose but “The Melancholy of Anatomy” by Ms Jackson, well that’s a different ball game altogether.
Yes, it is indeed very well written and Ms Jackson’s works are remarkable but really I find them all quite insane and beyond the understanding of my somewhat eclectic mind. This book takes one on a crazy marathon journey both inside and outside the body.
It’s split up into sections:
Choleric (comprising Egg, Sperm, Foetus); Melancholic (Cancer, Nerve and Dildo), Phlegmatic (Phlegm, Hair and Sleep) and finally Sanguine (Blood, Milk and Fat).
And the odd thing to me anyway was that the best stories were at the beginning but slowly became more and more distasteful as the book spirals and relentlessly weaves its way to its own melancholic and interminable death.
Shelley Jackson is supposedly “one of the most poised and original talents of her generation who, very playfully, very disturbingly, takes the body apart and puts it back together again, always in startlingly imaginative ways. These tales of the anatomy's ludicrous sorrows are deliciously crafted, maintaining always a fine balance between outrageous comedy and profound melancholy.-Robert Coover”.
The LA. Times review also stated: “I've been waiting for the next Rikki Ducornet, and here she comes, whistling around the corner as if writing stories was just a question of stringing words together on a good thick thread. But where Ducornet has an ornate, Byzantine, highfalutin, sometimes medieval shimmer to her prose, Shelley Jackson is mistress of bawd; more cockney, more Chaucer, more gobbledygook."
I personally feel that there is no comparison to Ducornet who is excellent but then that’s a question of taste.
Ms Jackson may you enjoy the clouds and hopefully in the future I will find a book of yours that I will love. I know that it will be there somewhere but the contents on the whole of this particular book, with the exception of the “Egg” did not suit my digestive juices, thinking processes nor the flow of my blood. And as for my poor heart.
What an absolutely disastrous mistake. I stand by my choice of the brilliance of the “Egg” but it’s all a very contradictory situation for me here. I’m slowly becoming fascinated with experimental fiction, especially after reading two wonderful and exquisite books by Christine Brooke-Rose but “The Melancholy of Anatomy” by Ms Jackson, well that’s a different ball game altogether.
Yes, it is indeed very well written and Ms Jackson’s works are remarkable but really I find them all quite insane and beyond the understanding of my somewhat eclectic mind. This book takes one on a crazy marathon journey both inside and outside the body.
It’s split up into sections:
Choleric (comprising Egg, Sperm, Foetus); Melancholic (Cancer, Nerve and Dildo), Phlegmatic (Phlegm, Hair and Sleep) and finally Sanguine (Blood, Milk and Fat).
And the odd thing to me anyway was that the best stories were at the beginning but slowly became more and more distasteful as the book spirals and relentlessly weaves its way to its own melancholic and interminable death.
Shelley Jackson is supposedly “one of the most poised and original talents of her generation who, very playfully, very disturbingly, takes the body apart and puts it back together again, always in startlingly imaginative ways. These tales of the anatomy's ludicrous sorrows are deliciously crafted, maintaining always a fine balance between outrageous comedy and profound melancholy.-Robert Coover”.
The LA. Times review also stated: “I've been waiting for the next Rikki Ducornet, and here she comes, whistling around the corner as if writing stories was just a question of stringing words together on a good thick thread. But where Ducornet has an ornate, Byzantine, highfalutin, sometimes medieval shimmer to her prose, Shelley Jackson is mistress of bawd; more cockney, more Chaucer, more gobbledygook."
I personally feel that there is no comparison to Ducornet who is excellent but then that’s a question of taste.
Ms Jackson may you enjoy the clouds and hopefully in the future I will find a book of yours that I will love. I know that it will be there somewhere but the contents on the whole of this particular book, with the exception of the “Egg” did not suit my digestive juices, thinking processes nor the flow of my blood. And as for my poor heart.
October 29, 2019
A magical little thing of the bodily and gross and weird. There's a lot of slimy, gooey stuff in here, but somehow the stories never take the ickiness too far, perhaps because how brief most of these stories are: few get past the 10 page mark, and the book is well shy of 200 pages in all.
Experimental in their execution and vision, Shelley Jackson's slim collection is a mediation on our bodily phobias in tones spanning the satirical to the sexual and all highly surreal.
The books form is broken into the four humors of the classical era: choleric, melancholic, phlegm, sanguine. Each section then features three shorts with titles like "Blood," "Sperm," "Milk." Each story has a similar conceit: the bodily fluid of title is enlarged to create a subversive look at modernity; e.g. in "Phlegm" the protagonist questions the cultural norm of exchanging and sharing and playing with one another's effluvium, which plays a part in ritualistic customs, such as introductions or business settings.
I will be checking into Jackson's other work after experiencing the weird pleasure of this one.
Experimental in their execution and vision, Shelley Jackson's slim collection is a mediation on our bodily phobias in tones spanning the satirical to the sexual and all highly surreal.
The books form is broken into the four humors of the classical era: choleric, melancholic, phlegm, sanguine. Each section then features three shorts with titles like "Blood," "Sperm," "Milk." Each story has a similar conceit: the bodily fluid of title is enlarged to create a subversive look at modernity; e.g. in "Phlegm" the protagonist questions the cultural norm of exchanging and sharing and playing with one another's effluvium, which plays a part in ritualistic customs, such as introductions or business settings.
I will be checking into Jackson's other work after experiencing the weird pleasure of this one.
Read
January 27, 2023A million people on the Internet love prattling on about bodies and gazes and other such pablum based on their own misinterpretations of English-language misinterpretations of the legitimate insights of Foucault et al. But how many of these dumbs have had the courage to actually gaze at their own bodies and examine the weirdness and potential they indeed possess? Shelley Jackson has no such issues. For her, anatomy is both a grotesquerie and a playground (as it should be). These stories? They're the jizz in the coiffed hair of modern American writing, and I mean that as the highest of compliments.
July 12, 2023
I have some qualms with this book—occasional repetitiveness, the odd boring paragraph—but they are too inconsequential to matter. It’s easy to make a simple metaphor out of the body, but Jackson refuses to render it anything simple. The stories vary in tone, character, and perspectives on the world, but always have this sense of exploration, an anthropologist’s eye. Particular love to the stories Sleep, Foetus, and Blood. It’s so frequent to paint menstruation as gross or monstrous, but Jackson is nothing but kind.
“The universe, we know now, is far from that chill, mechanical model so unaccountably adored by physicists past. The world that gave rise to feathers, pill bugs, cookies, and whales is silly, showy, comfy. Above all it is kind.”
“The universe, we know now, is far from that chill, mechanical model so unaccountably adored by physicists past. The world that gave rise to feathers, pill bugs, cookies, and whales is silly, showy, comfy. Above all it is kind.”
September 11, 2007
Loved these stories. Loved them all, except for the one titled Phlegm that I could not read all the way through because it made me want to cry and die. The stories are arranged in sections by Humor, and each one is about something that is inside the body, or part of the body (like hair), being outside. Like a giant fetus floating around creeping everyone out, London having a monthly menstrual flow through the whole city, fat taking over a house. There was also an awesome dildo story, which I guess also qualifies as something that should be totally in a body. Why should it ever not be? Oh, and the sperm story has a sperm recipe. Some of the sperm are big as bulls, fyi. So, the back of the book has blurbs from Ali Smith and Samuel Delany, and comparisons to Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. I totally agree with those comparisons. These writers are constantly called transgressive, and I love that Shelley Jackson literally transgresses bodily boundaries, letting things seep through the walls of bodies. I am normally squeamish and unhappy about inside body stuff. Eew. But these stories are so beautiful and kind of surreal and really fucking hilarious and so I didn't mind getting grossed out. Except for the phlegm. Ugh. They poodled their phlegm. I don't even know. GOD.
August 9, 2024
In some ways clearly an early work by a great mind who hadn't unlocked their full potential for brilliance yet - I'm particularly thinking about a few of the more formalist touches in a couple of the middle stories not feeling as necessary as they should - but nonetheless this is overall yet another testament to the criminally overlooked talents of Shelley Jackson. A lot of these stories would probably fit the definition of narrative prose poetry each centered around a central symbol that is played around with and Abstractified in varying ways, in part the intention seems to be interrogate and de/re-construct the association behind words and their meanings. In "Anatomy" all that traditionally causes disgust or aversion is cast in a light of kindness, compassion and curiosity that challenges conceptions we ascribe to the physical form, how the body is not The Enemy but instead something to be worked with... as a chronically sick person that is the philosophical question that I think most about in my life, coming to varying conclusions on my own terms depending on how I'm feeling, but at this point in my life I'm finding such an empathic approach as Jackson's to be much more palatable than the kind of cynical nihilism that features more often in this stripe of literature. Only problem now is idk where to go from here!! Jackson's non-traditional format works are harder to get my hands on than her novels and collections, but I will have to find a way to get my claws on 'em because she's one of the few authors who I feel compelled to read absolutely everything from.
July 4, 2021
April 2009
Shelley Jackson dismembers the body and scatters its parts across the land, so that sperm and fetuses (feti?) float freely and willfully; vast fields of nerve clusters cover the Great Plains, the oceans teem with milk, and the earth itself bleeds once a month.
Overall, the ideas presented here are weird and fascinating--as ideas, that is. The stories themselves don't quite hold up, and start to sound repetitive after a while. Cancer or fat or an egg appear in the house, grow, start to take over, repeat. I started to lose interest after a while. None of the stories are bad, though; the ideas are still pretty interesting. "Foetus" and "Blood" are probably the best of the collection.
Shelley Jackson dismembers the body and scatters its parts across the land, so that sperm and fetuses (feti?) float freely and willfully; vast fields of nerve clusters cover the Great Plains, the oceans teem with milk, and the earth itself bleeds once a month.
Overall, the ideas presented here are weird and fascinating--as ideas, that is. The stories themselves don't quite hold up, and start to sound repetitive after a while. Cancer or fat or an egg appear in the house, grow, start to take over, repeat. I started to lose interest after a while. None of the stories are bad, though; the ideas are still pretty interesting. "Foetus" and "Blood" are probably the best of the collection.
January 10, 2025
Some books become classics, some just fade into obscurity. This is one that can fade away and I don't think society would lose anything because of it.
July 18, 2016
this is the most interesting & original book I've read in a while. short stories set in a world where the old view of bodily 'humors' has survived into the modern day. it looks at our own world with a critical eye.
it's story seems somewhat supernatural, very surreal, but also intimate and vaguely sexual. the stories tell of Jack Sprat and his wife; of a herd of sperm running wild across the countryside; of workers who mop up blood from the sewers monthly; a mans obsession with a nerve....
Definitely recommend this book. it will almost certainly contain at least one story that you will not forget
it was also one of the few books i've seen that seems to reverse the prominence of sexuality in its pronouns. as in, the default pronoun seems to be the feminine, instead of the masculine, and females play a much more prominent role in the society found in her stories.
it's story seems somewhat supernatural, very surreal, but also intimate and vaguely sexual. the stories tell of Jack Sprat and his wife; of a herd of sperm running wild across the countryside; of workers who mop up blood from the sewers monthly; a mans obsession with a nerve....
Definitely recommend this book. it will almost certainly contain at least one story that you will not forget
it was also one of the few books i've seen that seems to reverse the prominence of sexuality in its pronouns. as in, the default pronoun seems to be the feminine, instead of the masculine, and females play a much more prominent role in the society found in her stories.
September 13, 2012
This collection is the inversion of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
If you have a morbid bone in your body or if you posses even a dram of humour, do yourself a favor and read this book. It's wild.
One of the stories (a false history of the dildo) is available via the author's site. check it out!
If you have a morbid bone in your body or if you posses even a dram of humour, do yourself a favor and read this book. It's wild.
One of the stories (a false history of the dildo) is available via the author's site. check it out!
May 30, 2013
To put it mildly: the quality of the stories in this collection is uneven. "Egg" is fantastic, as is "Blood." Other stories, though less moving, managed to hold my attention: among them, "Heart," "Nerve," and "Sleep." As a whole, however, the book read like a bad graduate school creative writing project.
August 19, 2023
5 stars for chapters blood, milk, hair, etc but some chapters could have been more, nerve especially. also would read a full length book on blood !! need everyone to read the blood chapter & attempt to feel diving into blood
August 24, 2023
so weird
March 15, 2025
bizarre bizarre bizarre in a way that was new even for me. running w it tho
January 15, 2019
3.5 stars in actuality.
Video review https://youtu.be/AOKDLJku9fA
Video review https://youtu.be/AOKDLJku9fA
January 12, 2022
I picked up this book out of curiosity and the unexplained tendency of mine to read anything medicine related that sounds slightly less boring, what with me being a medical student and all.
I don’t know what I expected going into it. I didn’t read the ‘plot summary’ or anything like that. I just liked the title. Melancholy is an alluring word in itself.
I somehow dragged myself through the first story with a mix of disgust, weirded-out-ness and curiosity to see what would ensue. The next story was the ‘Sperm’ story. This one, I found funny because it was ridiculous. I even sent the excerpt about deep frying sperms in a group chat as a ‘what the fuck is this? i thought this was hilarious’ excerpt. It didn’t really garner a response except a ‘wtf’. And so by this time I had cultivated this notion that the book was supposed to be an ironic reading. It was lightheaded despite its title and the heavy wording was just fluff. The fetus story was a little unsettling but the introduction of religious elements corroborated my assumption.
However, as I went on, story after story, from Nerve to Cancer to Phlegm, I started reading it in hopes of finding obscure multiple meanings and innuendos in simple writings. I felt very kafkaesque but also pretentious. And I don’t like feeling pretentious.
But then as I got to the final stretch of the book; Hair, Sleep, Blood, Milk, Fat. I came to the conclusion (which I think was timely) that all of these stories are literally just stories, written in beautiful prose. There are metaphors and there are just empty pocket phrases. It’s a wonderful idea and by the time I finished fat, I wished there were more: Spleen, Lung, Bile.
P.S. The ‘Skins’ project by the same author fascinated me so much after I googled her and read about her other works.
I don’t know what I expected going into it. I didn’t read the ‘plot summary’ or anything like that. I just liked the title. Melancholy is an alluring word in itself.
I somehow dragged myself through the first story with a mix of disgust, weirded-out-ness and curiosity to see what would ensue. The next story was the ‘Sperm’ story. This one, I found funny because it was ridiculous. I even sent the excerpt about deep frying sperms in a group chat as a ‘what the fuck is this? i thought this was hilarious’ excerpt. It didn’t really garner a response except a ‘wtf’. And so by this time I had cultivated this notion that the book was supposed to be an ironic reading. It was lightheaded despite its title and the heavy wording was just fluff. The fetus story was a little unsettling but the introduction of religious elements corroborated my assumption.
However, as I went on, story after story, from Nerve to Cancer to Phlegm, I started reading it in hopes of finding obscure multiple meanings and innuendos in simple writings. I felt very kafkaesque but also pretentious. And I don’t like feeling pretentious.
But then as I got to the final stretch of the book; Hair, Sleep, Blood, Milk, Fat. I came to the conclusion (which I think was timely) that all of these stories are literally just stories, written in beautiful prose. There are metaphors and there are just empty pocket phrases. It’s a wonderful idea and by the time I finished fat, I wished there were more: Spleen, Lung, Bile.
P.S. The ‘Skins’ project by the same author fascinated me so much after I googled her and read about her other works.
August 16, 2017
diviso nei quattro temperamenti della teoria umorale (immagino che a conoscerla meglio saprei anche identificare meglio la divisione delle sezioni), "la melancolia del corpo" è una sorta di enciclopedia in cui particolari anatomici (dal cuore -unico fuori dalla quattro sezioni- al grasso passando per nervi, spermatozoi, il cancro, il sangue mestruale, ecc...unico protagonista artificiale è il dildo) assumono dimensioni e caratteristiche particolari o si ritrovano una loro personalità o si trovano ad avere significati nuovi e impossibili. immagino si capisca che se si è schizzinosi è meglio lasciar perdere ("catarro" potrebbe disgustarvi per mesi) ma se si vince la forza di mollare la pagine ad ogni descrizione può anche piacere. e sinceramente a me è piaciuto. "latte" poi mi ha fatto pensare a "le città invisibili" di calvino: la sto sparando grossa? non lo so, però se qui se esistessero i mezzi voti avrebbe tre stelle e mezzo, ed è nella scelta tra tre e quattro è stato proprio quel racconto a farmi puntare verso la scelta finale.
February 17, 2009
This book was one like many other books that I really really like. It is abstract, brilliantly written, and thoroughly disgusting. However, it seemed a little weird to me that many of the stories were so entirely similar. Each of the stories takes a part of the body (though some of the parts are dubious as parts of the body) and describes it as some outside, usually part-hostile, part-obsessive force. The problem here is that many of the parts behave in the same way, and it seems that there could have been much more variety between them. That there is variety in the format of the stories, some reading like essays, some like interviews, some as first-hand narratives, is to this book's benefit.
I suppose that each individual story in this book would have received a higher rating from me than the collection of all of the stories. The idea is great and the writing is great, I just feel like it got a bit repetitive.
I suppose that each individual story in this book would have received a higher rating from me than the collection of all of the stories. The idea is great and the writing is great, I just feel like it got a bit repetitive.
September 11, 2019
4.7/5
i contemplated giving this book legit 5 stars for the sheer weirdness and originality of it, along with the fact that i was completely blown away by the first story, "heart". rating things feels really weird anyway because i settle on a number that seems like it sounds okay and then I look at the way i’ve rated other books and i think “how could I have rated this book as being better than this one??” whatever. this book was seriously weird as hell, and kind of gross at times, but i really enjoyed it. it felt really profound at times and i loved the section and subsection titles and the language felt awfully poetic. it’s extremely well written and the first story i’m still head over heels in love with but honestly, as the book continued on i became more and more disenchanted. i kinda hated the phlegm story. this book is generally great and absurd though, and even in the stories i wasn’t fond of i love the way Jackson writes so much that i could get through it and still enjoy it.
my favorite quotes, divided into their stories:
HEART
There are hearts bigger than planets: black hearts that absorb light, hope, and dust particles, that eat comets and space probes. Motionless, sullen dirigibles, they hang in the empty space between galaxies. We can’t see them, but we know they’re there, fattening.
The heart warps everything around it. Where nothing is, emptiness itself is twisted, its features distorted beyond all recognition. This is why people rail against the heart. It is bad enough to change everything that is, but when nothingness itself is altered, something must be done.
EGG
I use Crest and buy candles cheap at Walgreens, but I like to look at the jewel-like soap we sell, and the girls who ginger it while gazing somewhere else entirely, as if waiting for a sign. I rarely speak to them. I’m not like them: they are sincere, optimistic, gentle.
All the incomplete and damaged ventures of my life came to mind one after another.
I loved her, in a deep unpleasant way, but I kept out of her bed. I survived her shifting passions by never becoming the object of them.
Perhaps I had misunderstood, and the egg’s rejection of me was itself a rite of passage I had not recognized because I had my own idea of what translation should feel like. But there was nothing different about me except for this checking itself—the flinching and squinting and double takes in the mirror. Maybe disappointment was enlightenment, and this acquaintance with futility was the closest I would come to God.
SPERM
Yes, they’re cute! You may be tempted to try to keep young sperm as pets, and it’s true that hatchlings will remain small almost indefinitely if kept in a small bowl or terrarium. But you must not forget that these so called bonsai sperm are not the bumbling infants they resemble. They are cunning and they hold a grudge. It is neither human nor prudent to keep them from answering “the call of the wild.”
FOETUS
Since the fœtus arrived, none of us has loved without regret, fucked without apprehension, yearned without doubt. We break out in a rash wihen a loved one comes near us because we know the fœtus is there too, waiting for us to prove to it everything it already knows.
You will continue loving because that is our human agenda, what is set for us to do, though we know the fœtus who we also love is suffering in its straps. Indeed, we make the fœtus suffer again and again, though we are full of regret and pity, and these feelings swell in our chest with greater force, so we seem to hear the fœtus;s giant cry, deafening, every time we slam together. We love cruelly, and in pain.
NERVE
“It was cruel,” George told his therapist. “But children are cruel, aren’t they?” Not evil, but nonchalant about pain. I was interesting in salting slugs, swatting flies.
Not that pain is the worst thing in the universe. Interesting things happen when you adopt pain for your own. This thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information.
“Boys don’t do this,” thought George, his soft breasts shrinking, parallel horizontal creases appearing in his stomach, a strange side effect of weight loss, his ribs appearing, knuckles appearing. “This is what girls do”; then he was filled with pity for girls, and admiration for their love of will over appetite.
PHLEGM
Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are to find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.)
I stand at the window. It is more of a mirror than a window. It is so dark outside with the phlegm closing in that I can only see my face. I see what my face is thinking. It is thinking, This does not work for me.
SLEEP
Sleep is falling. The crumbs run in drifts down the street, collect in the gutters.
My children are already dreaming. So young! At their age, I kept telling myself, A better time will come. I can endure this moment. And when the next moment came, I found I could endure that one too, and so on, to this day. But I don’t think less of them for making their escape. We are all waiting for our chance. Out of care and duty leaps the shocking blossom of the new.
I am not shocked. Is that dreadful? She could not endure the demands of our love and she left. I understand this as I have understood other surprises she has given me in the past. I feel lonely, and yet in a curious sense, there is something right about this. I have spent my life in adoration of sleep. I may have loved in better—more carefully, more knowledgeably—than I’ve loved the people in my life. Its beauty, its mystery. The evidence it bears of a universe capable of mercy. Now when I say I love sleep, I can also say I love nothing else. Everything I love is made of it.
MILK
Go outside. You don’t know how to make the sky notice you? Don’t worry. The sky already touches you. Your least movement is a caress.
i contemplated giving this book legit 5 stars for the sheer weirdness and originality of it, along with the fact that i was completely blown away by the first story, "heart". rating things feels really weird anyway because i settle on a number that seems like it sounds okay and then I look at the way i’ve rated other books and i think “how could I have rated this book as being better than this one??” whatever. this book was seriously weird as hell, and kind of gross at times, but i really enjoyed it. it felt really profound at times and i loved the section and subsection titles and the language felt awfully poetic. it’s extremely well written and the first story i’m still head over heels in love with but honestly, as the book continued on i became more and more disenchanted. i kinda hated the phlegm story. this book is generally great and absurd though, and even in the stories i wasn’t fond of i love the way Jackson writes so much that i could get through it and still enjoy it.
my favorite quotes, divided into their stories:
HEART
There are hearts bigger than planets: black hearts that absorb light, hope, and dust particles, that eat comets and space probes. Motionless, sullen dirigibles, they hang in the empty space between galaxies. We can’t see them, but we know they’re there, fattening.
The heart warps everything around it. Where nothing is, emptiness itself is twisted, its features distorted beyond all recognition. This is why people rail against the heart. It is bad enough to change everything that is, but when nothingness itself is altered, something must be done.
EGG
I use Crest and buy candles cheap at Walgreens, but I like to look at the jewel-like soap we sell, and the girls who ginger it while gazing somewhere else entirely, as if waiting for a sign. I rarely speak to them. I’m not like them: they are sincere, optimistic, gentle.
All the incomplete and damaged ventures of my life came to mind one after another.
I loved her, in a deep unpleasant way, but I kept out of her bed. I survived her shifting passions by never becoming the object of them.
Perhaps I had misunderstood, and the egg’s rejection of me was itself a rite of passage I had not recognized because I had my own idea of what translation should feel like. But there was nothing different about me except for this checking itself—the flinching and squinting and double takes in the mirror. Maybe disappointment was enlightenment, and this acquaintance with futility was the closest I would come to God.
SPERM
Yes, they’re cute! You may be tempted to try to keep young sperm as pets, and it’s true that hatchlings will remain small almost indefinitely if kept in a small bowl or terrarium. But you must not forget that these so called bonsai sperm are not the bumbling infants they resemble. They are cunning and they hold a grudge. It is neither human nor prudent to keep them from answering “the call of the wild.”
FOETUS
Since the fœtus arrived, none of us has loved without regret, fucked without apprehension, yearned without doubt. We break out in a rash wihen a loved one comes near us because we know the fœtus is there too, waiting for us to prove to it everything it already knows.
You will continue loving because that is our human agenda, what is set for us to do, though we know the fœtus who we also love is suffering in its straps. Indeed, we make the fœtus suffer again and again, though we are full of regret and pity, and these feelings swell in our chest with greater force, so we seem to hear the fœtus;s giant cry, deafening, every time we slam together. We love cruelly, and in pain.
NERVE
“It was cruel,” George told his therapist. “But children are cruel, aren’t they?” Not evil, but nonchalant about pain. I was interesting in salting slugs, swatting flies.
Not that pain is the worst thing in the universe. Interesting things happen when you adopt pain for your own. This thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information.
“Boys don’t do this,” thought George, his soft breasts shrinking, parallel horizontal creases appearing in his stomach, a strange side effect of weight loss, his ribs appearing, knuckles appearing. “This is what girls do”; then he was filled with pity for girls, and admiration for their love of will over appetite.
PHLEGM
Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are to find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.)
I stand at the window. It is more of a mirror than a window. It is so dark outside with the phlegm closing in that I can only see my face. I see what my face is thinking. It is thinking, This does not work for me.
SLEEP
Sleep is falling. The crumbs run in drifts down the street, collect in the gutters.
My children are already dreaming. So young! At their age, I kept telling myself, A better time will come. I can endure this moment. And when the next moment came, I found I could endure that one too, and so on, to this day. But I don’t think less of them for making their escape. We are all waiting for our chance. Out of care and duty leaps the shocking blossom of the new.
I am not shocked. Is that dreadful? She could not endure the demands of our love and she left. I understand this as I have understood other surprises she has given me in the past. I feel lonely, and yet in a curious sense, there is something right about this. I have spent my life in adoration of sleep. I may have loved in better—more carefully, more knowledgeably—than I’ve loved the people in my life. Its beauty, its mystery. The evidence it bears of a universe capable of mercy. Now when I say I love sleep, I can also say I love nothing else. Everything I love is made of it.
MILK
Go outside. You don’t know how to make the sky notice you? Don’t worry. The sky already touches you. Your least movement is a caress.
February 20, 2023
this book was so weird!! but fun and one that makes you look at the author and wonder how they came up with half that stuff
quotes:
“Then I curled around the egg and took comfort in its warmth against my stomach, though it was not a cold night.”
“Maybe disappointment was enlightenment, and this acquaintance with futility was the closest I would come to God.”
“We should have noticed the resemblance, but we resisted the idea that the fœtus was only a transient resident.”
“Even after we knew the fœtus caused the marks, a mystery clung to them. For everything the fœtus did, though, there was someone to praise it.”
“Behind one another’s eyes, it is the fœtus we love, floating in the pupil like a speck, like a spy. It’s looking over your shoulder, making drinks even colder, and it doesn’t care what promises you’ve made. We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggled for breath. Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhumane.”
“I love you because flesh is stupid, like everything we build in imitation of the flesh: concrete blocks, sofas, airbags, all these hunks of dumb stuff that protect us. You’re the cure for this sinus infection that stands in for a life, all the gluey textures of social intercourse and the bland obstructions. I’d carve off my own flesh in strips, leaving only the nerves, to spend one moment in pure apprehension. I want the skinny.”
“Love’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“When it is a matter of putting your fingers inside someone’s mouth, accidents will happen.”
“I am surprised to find myself rooting for the fat-bottomed chick.”
“Yield to these impulses, but if you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern, slow down. Do not name the pattern to yourself. Stay with the phlegm. Let it teach you what it wants to become.”
“There is vast room for variation in the love act. True it is just this latitude that terrifies beginners.”
“You will have to get used to the texture of it; the sky is so soft, it accepts everything you do.”
“It is almost dew point. Forget technique. The sky loves you. The clouds are massed above you. Do you want milk? Just cup your hands, and tell the sky I love you.”
“No, I can hear you saying some things just aren’t meant to work out, pull yourself together.”
“I expect the mouse has the same problem. It’s a bond between us.”
quotes:
“Then I curled around the egg and took comfort in its warmth against my stomach, though it was not a cold night.”
“Maybe disappointment was enlightenment, and this acquaintance with futility was the closest I would come to God.”
“We should have noticed the resemblance, but we resisted the idea that the fœtus was only a transient resident.”
“Even after we knew the fœtus caused the marks, a mystery clung to them. For everything the fœtus did, though, there was someone to praise it.”
“Behind one another’s eyes, it is the fœtus we love, floating in the pupil like a speck, like a spy. It’s looking over your shoulder, making drinks even colder, and it doesn’t care what promises you’ve made. We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggled for breath. Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhumane.”
“I love you because flesh is stupid, like everything we build in imitation of the flesh: concrete blocks, sofas, airbags, all these hunks of dumb stuff that protect us. You’re the cure for this sinus infection that stands in for a life, all the gluey textures of social intercourse and the bland obstructions. I’d carve off my own flesh in strips, leaving only the nerves, to spend one moment in pure apprehension. I want the skinny.”
“Love’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“When it is a matter of putting your fingers inside someone’s mouth, accidents will happen.”
“I am surprised to find myself rooting for the fat-bottomed chick.”
“Yield to these impulses, but if you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern, slow down. Do not name the pattern to yourself. Stay with the phlegm. Let it teach you what it wants to become.”
“There is vast room for variation in the love act. True it is just this latitude that terrifies beginners.”
“You will have to get used to the texture of it; the sky is so soft, it accepts everything you do.”
“It is almost dew point. Forget technique. The sky loves you. The clouds are massed above you. Do you want milk? Just cup your hands, and tell the sky I love you.”
“No, I can hear you saying some things just aren’t meant to work out, pull yourself together.”
“I expect the mouse has the same problem. It’s a bond between us.”
January 29, 2021
What can one say about a collection of stories that are meant to pummel your senses? To read this anthology is to enter a universe created to be enigmatic, shocking, curious, reviling, and wholly original. There are passages in this book that are stomach-turning. Descriptions like fetid smells, thin, blood-streaked pus, and sentences like, I was jealous of the flies that licked its crown, the ants that were already tasting its effluvium, are certain to evoke strong reactions from the reader, and that’s only the first story! To immerse yourself into this weird world of the body outside of its normal purview is to enter the surreal and the visceral. There were moments within some of these stories where I had no idea what was happening or why. How does one create living, breathing, lyrical, disturbing entities out of body parts and not enter the ridiculous or absurd? And yet, this is what Jackson does so creatively in this book. I’ll be honest. I wasn’t enamored of everything I read. There were certain points in my reading where I felt I had to slog through to get to the end. But as a work of art, it’s reminiscent of many creative works I’ve learned to admire. The experimental, particularly in fiction, is so daring and worthy of wonder because it takes a bold risk that most other writers would likely avoid. I don’t know that I could ever write something as anomalous or bizarre but props to Jackson for taking the leap and creating a corporeal world that we never knew we needed.
October 3, 2020
This work is experimental! I can't stress that enough. It does not flow the same way other traditional Modernist stories flow. If it weren't for some rather icky topics whether used as symbolism or not, I'd say 5 stars. It was difficult to step around that revulsion. However, "Egg," "Cancer," "Foetus," "Nerve," "Hair," "Hearts," "Sleep," and "Milk" were all stories that had deep meaning, interesting takes on nature, and especially concerned themselves with *spoilers ahead* suffering, sadness, loss, and death/suicide. "Hair" delved into the cutting of one's hair after the end of a relationship and it's deep yet funny. Deep and funny because * again spoiler * the hair has a life of its own after it was cut off, yet she does not. Jackson often has comedy throughout the story, but ends on a serious yet lyrical note.
March 31, 2019
I recently read of Jackson's short stories, Husband, online and was struck by the inventiveness of her story about a lady drone, the language tight and compelling, and was keen to seek out mor of her work. I was not disappointed with the Melancholy of Anatomy--well-crafted stories grouped according to the 'humors'. Erudite and creative! Dark and unsettling, yet spell-binding. Who would think to write stories about the humors taking on lives of their own? In one, an egg from a tear duct grows and grows. It's made me want to read more of her writing. The subject matter and style won't appeal to everyone, but a great book for anyone looking to read something unique, experimental and celverly written.
February 18, 2025
This is a book I'd expect to find in the library of Jurgen Leitner, and I don't think I have to say which entity it embodies. Each short story is a shuddering, visceral descent into sarcous, distended psychosexual madness surrounding a number of strange circumstances in which certain anatomical features and functions are elevated to an everyday, a copulatory, even a divine status. The way it plays with flesh and what makes us recognizably human is beyond disturbing, and Jackson's gory, swollen, grotesque prose makes my skin crawl in the most delicious way. The cancer and foetus stories were definitely my favorites.
December 31, 2019
Sort of an existentialist lit like Bed by Tao Lin. You have to think about your relationship to and the cultural attitudes toward various aspect of the body such as cancer, menstruation, and fat. Then you’ll get it. I liked the first story then thought I might not continue. But I just sucked it up and it got better. I might assign my students one story depending on the themes of the other readings if I should teach lit one of these semesters.
February 18, 2020
I can't necessarily put my finger on why I hated this book so much. But I hated it. It was well written, and from an admittedly esoteric point of view it has merit in the experimental way it tries to portray bodily aspects and functions as large, world-inhabiting phenomena. But it was horrible. I couldn't get into it, none of the characters were well-developed or sympathetic, and the stories were weird without being truly compelling. Blech.
June 20, 2024
I REALLY wanted to rate this higher.
The concept had so much potential but honestly the stories got repetitive, boring, and I ended up skimming just to finish it. I appreciate the ideas tho, and I feel like I can see why some people might really like it. Maybe I was expecting the short stories to be unique and disturbing, similar to Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca... this is not that.
I guess at the very least it's entertainingly strange
The concept had so much potential but honestly the stories got repetitive, boring, and I ended up skimming just to finish it. I appreciate the ideas tho, and I feel like I can see why some people might really like it. Maybe I was expecting the short stories to be unique and disturbing, similar to Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca... this is not that.
I guess at the very least it's entertainingly strange
Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews