what a book!!!

... fantastic. As if the literary world were incapable of coming up with new propositions and impulses...


Indeed, these new impulses ARE rare, and it IS difficult to come up with something (almost) totally new, and I am NOT talking about pure literary experimentalism here (I was so into experimentalism when I was at university, and now I find it really rather dull, in a way, the constant effort to define oneself through form - only think of the formal constraints that the French nouveaux romanciers inflicted upon themselves...)


... so anyhow, Leanne Shapton's fabulous book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is really quite something. I came across it when I listened to the astoundingly unpretentious (at least in Austrian terms) radio show (which I really and truly adore) Open Book hosted by Mariella Frostrup on BBC's Radio 4.


What Leanne does, she basically puts together an auction catalogue with all the objects that were piled up and collected throughout a fictitious relationship, the one between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, and inventorising and cataloguing them by adding little explanatory notes as you would find them in any auction catalogue. Surprisingly, these tiny fragments from two human lifes gradually, and little by little, turn into a bigger picture.


An absolutely interesting literary proposition, and a good read, too (maybe one you'll like to conduct in parallel with a "real" novel, but mind you, not far from being a "real" novel...)...