
This book is…what, exactly? It’s not a novel; it’s not poetry; it’s not a short fiction collection. On paper, it’s an assortment of anecdotes, short dialogues, quotations, and other miscellania, given headings and ordered into an alphabetical index. The letter “B” includes “Body”, “Boredom”, “Bowles, Jane”, and “Breakfast”. “F” has “Feminaissance”, “Fetish”, “Fireworks”, “Flu Shot”, and “Forty”. Yet out of these details emerges a beautifully-crafted picture of the life of the book’s central (and unnamed) character. Even though all we ever get is glimpses, we understand he career, her marriage, her struggle with mental illness, her affair, and her experience of motherhood. It’s also fascinating to experience how this book manages to make clear the extent to which life exists beyond the accumulation of details; it’s possible a understand a lot from a little, but impossible to understand all despite any amount of information.
This is a tiny, slender volume, and my actual reading time probably clocked in at under an hour. Nevertheless, it took almost a week to actually read, because although nothing about the content is inherently difficult, this is a book that demands its own space to grow and be understood. I finished it a couple of days ago, and have been wondering ever since what I can actually say about it. I guess it comes down to this: if you like literature, and have any interest at all in the shifting boundaries of the form of the novel, this is a mandatory text. Apart from everything I’ve said, it’s lovely, elusive, haunting and hypnotic.