Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (tr. Jennifer Russell)
Review by Jess Moody
‘I am Penelope, but not the faithful wife. I weave and unravel a tapestry while I long and waver.’
The loom, our narrator tells us, is an ancient technology. But one, perhaps, not so far removed from modern math and computing as we might think, for ‘weaving an image, unlike drawing with your finger in the sand, requires planning and logical thinking.’ With planning comes choices: what to do, what to create, what image you wish the world to see. We are reminded that The Odyssey’s Penelope existed permanently in that space of decision making and unmaking. She wove her tapestry by day, but unpicked the threads by night, so putting off the suitors who waited upon the promise of completion. Sitting in this space of women planning and unplanning our futures, Thread Ripper is a contemporary caution in regard to ‘progress’ and consequence.
Amalie Smith’s first English-translated novel, Marble (Lolli, 2020) was a hypnotic exploration of surface and depth: of images of stone, code, screens and memory across history, all told though the eyes of a living statue. Thread Ripper reads very much as a companion piece, another quiet ode to attentive contemplation of the world from someone who feels at a distance from it. This time her protagonist – a ‘digital tapestry weaver’ embarking on an artistic commission in 2017 – gives her attention to the coded creations threading through our lives. Genetics and reproduction. The algorithms of Ada Lovelace. The Google generation’s digital neural networks. The weaver sits at the nexus of art and science, and of indecision in her life and relationship. She is a modern-day Penelope, wavering in curiosity, looking for signs of hope across borders and time zones over the nine-month lifecycle of her project.
Her meditations – and they are meditations, floating in prose-poetry, pausing to make space for archival images drifting across white space – deepen their meaning through an experimental form. Thread Ripper is in fact, two texts. The weaver’s dated diaries flow down the left page. The knowledge and history of the project – and sometimes, the voice of Ada Lovelace herself, remade again in the narrator’s computer – flow down the right. To read this double text together is to feel the pattern: warp and weave, absences and presences, precarious balances and imbalances.
For those wary of too dry a philosophising, rest assured that Smith’s work is very much concerned with the human heart. There is a tenderness rippling through the book in the weaver’s thoughts of her partner William (sharing the name of Ada’s husband), their relationship, the question of children, the question of putting up with melancholy and absence:
‘I love him in slow motion and in my sleep.
And yet – the feeling that if he were to break up, I would be the first to get up and grab my coat’
Other connections with living contemporaries – her AirBnB host Keisuke in Japan, her co-worker Stef at textile factory – are discussed casually alongside her musings on historical figures: Lt. Grace Hopper leading the work on the ‘Mark II’ computer; Byron speechifying on Jacquard and the Luddites; and the genius, translator and mother, Ada Lovelace herself, threading her own genius into translation and footnotes, while children and illness erode her time like quietly corrosive code.
The reader begins to understand the complex relationships between virtual horizons and the real-world toil and mundanity of everyday life. Smith shows us the physical bug (a moth, actually) fluttering in one of the world’s first computers. She explores how a piece of fabric draped over J-Lo forever changed the way computers understand images. She traces the journey of the most intimate artefacts – letters, diaries – through the archive into futures unimaginable: imprinted histories travelling through time. This interest in how the physical and digital worlds interact is grounded by clear, considered prose that is attentive to the material: of human hand, and nature’s patterns.
‘In the garden, I can hear a gust five or six seconds before it whips through my books on the table’
Smith’s project feels at once expansive in its scope – the state of human connection and technologies, the tangled net of women’s histories – and yet so quiet and thoughtful in its singular voice. This is a writer to pay attention to, with a novel that holds many warnings and wonders within its folds. It’s a slim, perfectly sculpted text giving space to one woman, and the poetry of her pause:
‘A mild summer evening asks:
Where are you going?’