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MUEUM
A novella of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, SJ Fowler’s MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.
Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion.
Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.
Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit?
Following the tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (“one who dirties their own nest,” vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), in Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.
Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion.
Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.
Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit?
Following the tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (“one who dirties their own nest,” vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), in Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.
153 pages, Paperback
Published June 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 5, 2022
As an artist, Steven J. Fowler is operating on a different level than everyone else. His work transcends disciplines and, although still in his 30s, Fowler has published over ten volumes of poetry, written two full length plays, and contributed work to countless collaborations and other projects, including performance, visual art, sound poetry, and fiction. Much of his recent poetry has moved toward the asemic; the bibliography on his website lists his recent poetic work under the heading "Art Books." It is no surprise then that MUEUM, his first novel, is not a traditional novel - and what a wild ride it is. A surface reading yields an allegorical story about a museum which exists after a cataclysmic event has dislodged social memory from the time before the event so that the objects in the museum no longer hold context or traditional meaning. The story is narrated by one of the guards who is guarding . . . no one knows what exactly, and certainly not why. Formally, MUEUM is cutting edge avant garde fiction that exists in conversation with theorists and artists alike. Fowler uses the work as a vehicle to play with the semantics of fiction. Just as objects in a museum lose meaning when divorced from context, so also does a word, sentence, or paragraph lose meaning when traditional narrative is interrupted. The reading experience is not unlike viewing a work of visual art that deconstructs the meaning of visual art itself. Highly fascinating for those keen on the experience.
August 29, 2022
These fragments I have shored against my ruins~ The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
A fascinating piece of experimental writing that will either seduce or frustrate you (or both!) for its tantalising and deliberative obscurity: is this the British Museum? Are we in London and when? Has some sort of apocalyptic break with our present taken place... or is this our reality, just shifted a turn and looking scarily, productively, different from this new angle?
Fowler keeps this short but sustains a text that is hovering somewhere on the asemic spectrum but which still utilises real writing, real words and real sentences but somehow severs the linguistic and contextual bonds which usually allow hermeneutic processing to take place. We are set adrift, as it were, but not wholly without a map.
One of the clever things for me is the way in which this radical reimaging of narrative disrupts expected stabilities and yet also thematises fragmentation and envisages a sort of cultural wreckage which itself becomes a commentary on the shards of our history which are displayed at our museums and packaged as a sense-making chronicle of our past. Shorn as these objects are from themselves (bits of headless statues, ragged stone limbs, incomplete papyri, frescoes prised from the walls upon which they were produced, wood and ironwork doors and gates ripped from their doorways and held now in mute space), from their cultural and chronological frames, yet treated on display almost as if they are whole in and of themselves.
Inevitably, for all its of-the-moment-ness, as a text this also looks back at its forebears, another form of history, continuity and disruption: the linguistic experimentation of Joyce's Ulysses is here (and probably his Finnegan's Wake), the 'linguistic turn' of mid-twentieth century literary theory (did Barthes discuss this kind of deformation of language where form is fractured from significance?), the avant garde experimentation of Kathy Acker (especially her Blood and Guts in High School) - but the key reference for me is one which is almost exactly a hundred years old: T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland ~ 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.
Expect to be confused - and dazzled. To flounder - and to see the merest remnants of 'story'. This is a piece of writing where each reader will likely see and read something different, and I can't wait to see what other people have found in this.
March 16, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland
The reference points here, Gombrowicz and Thomas Bernhard, are people whose humour is so black, is so naturally reflective on the idiocy and strangeness of the world.
Sj Fowler in an interview with Gareth Evans 'on & around a novella called MUEUM.'
I first came across S J Fowler, writer and highly creative poet, in the vitally important anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature edited by Britain's most exciting author Isabel Waidner, where he contributed a short story. He had also previously been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
Both stories form part of this debut novella, MUEUM, based on the author's experience as a guard, or 'visitor' host, in the British Museum from 2007-2014.
In lesser hands this might have been a darkly wry 'confessions of a museum guard' style book, and indeed there are elements of that in the highly enjoyable story. But Fowler is known for his highly innovative poetry (including concrete and asemic), and his novelistic inspirations are drawn from the European modernists, and this is so much more. The novel's epigraphs come from the aforementoned Gombrowicz and from Gustav Heyrink's The Green Face as translated by Mike Mitchell:
You can get a sudden attack of nausea by staying too long in an art gallery as well. It must be some kind of illness—museumitis —unknown to medical science. Or could it be the air of death surrounding all things man-made, whether beautiful or ugly?
Meyrink was writing in the aftermath of the Great War, and MUEUM begins with a city (London?) wiped out by a cataclysmic event, a suggestion of a combination of a flood, volcanic eruption and (man-made or nature's revenge?) explosions.
It was not the darkness of a cloudy night or a night where there is no moon. But darkness as if the light has gone out in a room that is locked and sealed. A deep ocean darkness, above water. You could see all around you on that horrible land the shrieks of people, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Who died first? Who last? Who was left to care? It was a time of petty revenge, and relative discretion. The dead were the heroes of their own stories, legends of their own bathtubs. The living were unexpected
As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it’s said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place. Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth’s experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.
The narrator of the novel, one of the survivors of the aftermath, works (although it's unclear that he has any choice in this) as a guard in a museum, dealing with the hierarchies of the staff but also the masses who come to visit (again it's unclear whether at their choice) to see the exhibits that speak of a pre-cataclysm history but may in fact have been manufactured ('is it real' Fowler has noted as one of the three most common questions he was asked in his job, alongside 'where are the toilets' and 'is this all you do').
And what we are reading is his account of his experience, one where violence is never far from the surface, his own desire to punish visitors who transgress the rules (for example by touching the exhibits) as well as a growing sense that the whole edifice of the museum needs to crumble.
They do not form an account. And everyone knows. They know I might’ve written one, a record. But they’d just put that on display. Nameless of course. A biography or something. But I do not mention the past. And what could I say of the future? And the present cumulates into featurelessness. There is no account. Which pleases them. It’s not worth their trusting a sought-after spot to someone accounting when they should be just standing. They let me scribble. They think it offsets my other predilections. Not only harmless but useful. That’s a theory they manage by. Allow a little to save a lot. As long as the writing isn’t complete. Inconclusive, not consistent. Not all sense. They have a little black heart to let me compose. Mostly it isn’t words. It’s like words. I’m literate. It’s my handwriting. They probably think I’m trying to write a new language for them. To pretend it’s from the past. And they know it is seven hard years of serving at the feet of an unpredictable brutishness. One that cannot be predicted, and avoided, and now, cannot be lost. That is the dread crowd. The dead hands. The visitors. The public. I have come to know the Museum as one enormous case against people collecting in groups. And that is why I scribble my notes. For that is the record of the crowd. And it is all even worse if they gather to just look. At things.
Powerful and impressive and I'd point you also to reviews by some of my Goodreads friends:
David: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Roman Clodia: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The book is published by the small independent Tenament Press:
Recommended. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
The reference points here, Gombrowicz and Thomas Bernhard, are people whose humour is so black, is so naturally reflective on the idiocy and strangeness of the world.
Sj Fowler in an interview with Gareth Evans 'on & around a novella called MUEUM.'
I first came across S J Fowler, writer and highly creative poet, in the vitally important anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature edited by Britain's most exciting author Isabel Waidner, where he contributed a short story. He had also previously been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
Both stories form part of this debut novella, MUEUM, based on the author's experience as a guard, or 'visitor' host, in the British Museum from 2007-2014.
In lesser hands this might have been a darkly wry 'confessions of a museum guard' style book, and indeed there are elements of that in the highly enjoyable story. But Fowler is known for his highly innovative poetry (including concrete and asemic), and his novelistic inspirations are drawn from the European modernists, and this is so much more. The novel's epigraphs come from the aforementoned Gombrowicz and from Gustav Heyrink's The Green Face as translated by Mike Mitchell:
You can get a sudden attack of nausea by staying too long in an art gallery as well. It must be some kind of illness—museumitis —unknown to medical science. Or could it be the air of death surrounding all things man-made, whether beautiful or ugly?
Meyrink was writing in the aftermath of the Great War, and MUEUM begins with a city (London?) wiped out by a cataclysmic event, a suggestion of a combination of a flood, volcanic eruption and (man-made or nature's revenge?) explosions.
It was not the darkness of a cloudy night or a night where there is no moon. But darkness as if the light has gone out in a room that is locked and sealed. A deep ocean darkness, above water. You could see all around you on that horrible land the shrieks of people, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Who died first? Who last? Who was left to care? It was a time of petty revenge, and relative discretion. The dead were the heroes of their own stories, legends of their own bathtubs. The living were unexpected
As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it’s said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place. Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth’s experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.
The narrator of the novel, one of the survivors of the aftermath, works (although it's unclear that he has any choice in this) as a guard in a museum, dealing with the hierarchies of the staff but also the masses who come to visit (again it's unclear whether at their choice) to see the exhibits that speak of a pre-cataclysm history but may in fact have been manufactured ('is it real' Fowler has noted as one of the three most common questions he was asked in his job, alongside 'where are the toilets' and 'is this all you do').
And what we are reading is his account of his experience, one where violence is never far from the surface, his own desire to punish visitors who transgress the rules (for example by touching the exhibits) as well as a growing sense that the whole edifice of the museum needs to crumble.
They do not form an account. And everyone knows. They know I might’ve written one, a record. But they’d just put that on display. Nameless of course. A biography or something. But I do not mention the past. And what could I say of the future? And the present cumulates into featurelessness. There is no account. Which pleases them. It’s not worth their trusting a sought-after spot to someone accounting when they should be just standing. They let me scribble. They think it offsets my other predilections. Not only harmless but useful. That’s a theory they manage by. Allow a little to save a lot. As long as the writing isn’t complete. Inconclusive, not consistent. Not all sense. They have a little black heart to let me compose. Mostly it isn’t words. It’s like words. I’m literate. It’s my handwriting. They probably think I’m trying to write a new language for them. To pretend it’s from the past. And they know it is seven hard years of serving at the feet of an unpredictable brutishness. One that cannot be predicted, and avoided, and now, cannot be lost. That is the dread crowd. The dead hands. The visitors. The public. I have come to know the Museum as one enormous case against people collecting in groups. And that is why I scribble my notes. For that is the record of the crowd. And it is all even worse if they gather to just look. At things.
Powerful and impressive and I'd point you also to reviews by some of my Goodreads friends:
David: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Roman Clodia: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The book is published by the small independent Tenament Press:
Tenement Press, cousin to a magazine called Hotel (see here), is an occasional publisher of experimental; esoteric; accidental; and interdisciplinary literatures. Founded in 2020, the press works to forge a space for new voices and critical approaches to literary forms with an eye on actively ignoring the borderline between creative, critical, poetic and political practices.
Recommended. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
December 27, 2022
Another one from the Mookse group favourites of 2022 list, this one is an experimental short novel whose surface events seem to be set in a museum that is either post-apocalyptic or a surreal nightmare. For me, though an interesting read, it didn't entirely work, but maybe some of it was lost on me, and others I respect liked it more, so I wouldn't want to deter anyone from reading it.
August 28, 2022
The sort of book it’s hard to feel fully prepared to write comments about as the way it’s constructed unbalances the reader, challenging them to understand a text that feels as if it is from a slightly shifted reality. The setting is a world that has experienced some kind of radical break with our known one, for uncertain reasons, and the plot unfolds on a small stage that combines the recognizable and the strange, and much of the latter is intentionally presented without any of the “detailed world-building” that is highly valued in mainstream commercial novels that do this sort of thing. In this sense it reminded me of Haydn Middleton’s The Actual Whole of Music, which does something similar. The result is to leave the reader feeling somewhat unmoored, uncertain of a reality that is open to different possible interpretations.
Mueum adds another layer to the challenge in its unusual prose, which bends and shapes itself in ways that are far from straightforward, paragraphs often benefiting from multiple readings in the formation of sense-making in the reader’s mind. It’s an innovative poetic approach to prose, and in this sense Mueum reminds me of Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood.
To say something of the plot, it is set in a museum and amid the museum’s guards, who patrol the galleries watching out for visitors who attempt to touch the exhibits. The museum has been reconstructed after the continuity breaking event with our known world, and this offers up many possible questions about the presentation of history, genuineness versus falsity, violence in the construction of manufactured rule and order, surveillance, mob psychology in both the acquiescence and rebellion against an imposed order, and more.
In sum I’d say this is a challenging work in both form and content, on the experimental edges of current literature, and well worth the time spent with it if you might enjoy such things. 4.5 rounded up for me.
Mueum adds another layer to the challenge in its unusual prose, which bends and shapes itself in ways that are far from straightforward, paragraphs often benefiting from multiple readings in the formation of sense-making in the reader’s mind. It’s an innovative poetic approach to prose, and in this sense Mueum reminds me of Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood.
To say something of the plot, it is set in a museum and amid the museum’s guards, who patrol the galleries watching out for visitors who attempt to touch the exhibits. The museum has been reconstructed after the continuity breaking event with our known world, and this offers up many possible questions about the presentation of history, genuineness versus falsity, violence in the construction of manufactured rule and order, surveillance, mob psychology in both the acquiescence and rebellion against an imposed order, and more.
Even the visitors know this is the new Museum, where you can’t needle a guard and expect nothing. They may argue, as all do, that they were not provoking me, and that my feelings are incidental. Either way, just as I have no one to report my confusions to, so the visitors have no one to complain to. There is no self- broadcasting now, to protect them from themselves. In this regard the world has turned twice over. Like it says in the Spangler Gallery, everything has changed since we were children.
In sum I’d say this is a challenging work in both form and content, on the experimental edges of current literature, and well worth the time spent with it if you might enjoy such things. 4.5 rounded up for me.
July 14, 2023
4.5 rounded up
March 12, 2023
this made me feel uneasy, doubting my uncertainty n the uncertain regularity of the narrator’s work. was perfectly written: im terrified and impressed
April 28, 2023
My difficulty with experimental fiction is that I want to like it but am so rarely rewarded with satisfying reading experiences.
Mueum is a story about a museum in a post-apocalyptic city, told largely from the perspective of a guard. The novel is atmospheric and at times intriguing but, lacking a coherent plot, or at least one that I was able to discern, was ultimately unsatisfying.
Mueum is a story about a museum in a post-apocalyptic city, told largely from the perspective of a guard. The novel is atmospheric and at times intriguing but, lacking a coherent plot, or at least one that I was able to discern, was ultimately unsatisfying.
February 26, 2023
I read this book because it is on the 2023 longlist for the UK & Ireland Republic of Consciousness Prize. It is a prime example of what I think of as an RoC book -- experimental, thought-provoking, and confusing. Before my review, the book had six reviews from individuals who are GR friends or who I follow on GR. They were all instructional for me in appreciating the book and deciding how to write a review of the book. All should be read.
I learned a new word from these reviews -- asemic. It took reading a few definitions and some commentary on asemic writing for me to understand the connection between the word and the book and to conclude it was a perfect descriptor for the book. Reviewer Roman Clodia uses it best when she says the writing in the book is "hovering somewhere on the asemic spectrum." One will recognize most of the words in the book, understand the punctuation, and still be completely confused.
As David says in his review, "A surface reading yields an allegorical story about a museum which exists after a cataclysmic event has dislodged social memory from the time before the event so that the objects in the museum no longer hold context or traditional meaning. The story is narrated by one of the guards who is guarding . . . no one knows what exactly, and certainly not why." And that is exactly how the book begins, but then it swerves abruptly to what Gumble's Yard calls an "interlude" in which, as GY puts it, the "misspelt diary of a museum worker" is read, before returning to our museum guard narrator. This "interlude" was the part of the book I least liked. I interpreted the misspelt diary as belonging to and having been written by the museum guard with no understanding of how it fit into what David calls the story one gets from a "surface reading."
After the interlude we return to the museum guide narrator but things get stirred up because suddenly he is confused with his own actions -- how did he not go see what his assignment was before coming to breakfast? And the confusion, for him and for me, continues. What is going on?
In his review, Lee says about the writing style: "The result is to leave the reader feeling somewhat unmoored, uncertain of a reality that is open to different possible interpretations." "Unmoored" is an excellent description of how I felt as I was reading. And while I still felt unmoored when done reading, it was no longer unsettling to be unmoored.
Reviewer Paul Fulcher includes a quote near the beginning, the end of which remained with me as I read the book:
It was not the darkness of a cloudy night or a night where there is no moon. But darkness as if the light has gone out in a room that is locked and sealed. A deep ocean darkness, above water. You could see all around you on that horrible land the shrieks of people, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Who died first? Who last? Who was left to care? It was a time of petty revenge, and relative discretion. The dead were the heroes of their own stories, legends of their own bathtubs. The living were unexpected
As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it’s said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place. Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth’s experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.
Those last two lines brought to my mind how, to a great extent, the history we learn in school is history written by the winners. And that thought was one through which I continue to appraise the book, although I do not think anyone wins at the end of this book or that the winner is not yet known. And that thought takes me to into thinking about the future that will arise -- who will be the victor?
That's all I have. I've almost convinced myself that I should rate this book 5 stars instead of 4 stars, but I'll leave it as is for now.
I learned a new word from these reviews -- asemic. It took reading a few definitions and some commentary on asemic writing for me to understand the connection between the word and the book and to conclude it was a perfect descriptor for the book. Reviewer Roman Clodia uses it best when she says the writing in the book is "hovering somewhere on the asemic spectrum." One will recognize most of the words in the book, understand the punctuation, and still be completely confused.
As David says in his review, "A surface reading yields an allegorical story about a museum which exists after a cataclysmic event has dislodged social memory from the time before the event so that the objects in the museum no longer hold context or traditional meaning. The story is narrated by one of the guards who is guarding . . . no one knows what exactly, and certainly not why." And that is exactly how the book begins, but then it swerves abruptly to what Gumble's Yard calls an "interlude" in which, as GY puts it, the "misspelt diary of a museum worker" is read, before returning to our museum guard narrator. This "interlude" was the part of the book I least liked. I interpreted the misspelt diary as belonging to and having been written by the museum guard with no understanding of how it fit into what David calls the story one gets from a "surface reading."
After the interlude we return to the museum guide narrator but things get stirred up because suddenly he is confused with his own actions -- how did he not go see what his assignment was before coming to breakfast? And the confusion, for him and for me, continues. What is going on?
In his review, Lee says about the writing style: "The result is to leave the reader feeling somewhat unmoored, uncertain of a reality that is open to different possible interpretations." "Unmoored" is an excellent description of how I felt as I was reading. And while I still felt unmoored when done reading, it was no longer unsettling to be unmoored.
Reviewer Paul Fulcher includes a quote near the beginning, the end of which remained with me as I read the book:
It was not the darkness of a cloudy night or a night where there is no moon. But darkness as if the light has gone out in a room that is locked and sealed. A deep ocean darkness, above water. You could see all around you on that horrible land the shrieks of people, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Who died first? Who last? Who was left to care? It was a time of petty revenge, and relative discretion. The dead were the heroes of their own stories, legends of their own bathtubs. The living were unexpected
As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it’s said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place. Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth’s experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.
Those last two lines brought to my mind how, to a great extent, the history we learn in school is history written by the winners. And that thought was one through which I continue to appraise the book, although I do not think anyone wins at the end of this book or that the winner is not yet known. And that thought takes me to into thinking about the future that will arise -- who will be the victor?
That's all I have. I've almost convinced myself that I should rate this book 5 stars instead of 4 stars, but I'll leave it as is for now.
March 17, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
An intriguing novel which starts as a post apocalyptical version of Magnus Mills meets Museum Memoir (via Susanna Clark), takes a short story detour down a Joycean junction before ending in a more dystopian denouement.
The publisher is Tenement Press “an occasional publisher of experimental; esoteric; accidental; and interdisciplinary literatures [which] … with an eye on actively ignoring the borderline between creative, critical, poetic and political practices” and that last part of their mission fits well with this debut novel from the author, a London based writer and poet interested in areas such as “collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and performance”.
And while this is in form a fairly conventional novella, in substance it has more of the borderline/experimental blend that both publisher and writer favour – and the author’s interest in curation is particularly pertinent.
Even more pertinent is the author’s 7 years (2007 to 2014) working at the British Museum as a visitor host (which role mainly consisted of directing visitors to the toilet and absolutely not being trained about the exhibits) – a time that was formative to his own literary and artistic development (as he used the considerable down time to explore literature and the museum) but also to this book which is to a large extent a literary examination of the very role of museums and curation but even more fundamentally of the nature of what the reality of objects (the very common question to museum employees “is this real or a fake/replica” being particularly key).
The novel begins with a cataclysmic society altering event which either follows or precipitates a period of armed conflict in which our first party narrator was involved. As part of the rebuild of the City in which the narrator lives a museum has been built on the site and along the lines of its pre-holocaust predecessor (this museum is very clearly the British Museum) to which visitors come in search it seems of some kind of connection with their past, a search which often drives them to physical interactions with the ancient exhibits (this level of obsessive touching of precious exhibits being among many satirical elements from the author’s own museum experiences). The narrator’s role as a guard seems to largely consist of protecting the exhibits – albeit much of the wider aspects of the role (and the other members of the museum hierarchy) is unclear to us and largely it seems to him.
The first part of the novel is part description of the Kafkaesque workings of the staff (with heavy Magnus Mills overtones) and part exploration of the museum’s complex physical form of halls, passageways, vaults and statues (reminiscent in its part prison like overtones of Piranesi and “Piranesi”).
A brief interlude is based on the White Review Short Story shortlisted entry which was the genesis of the novella (https://www.thewhitereview.org/poetry...) – which starts as a misspelt diary of a museum worker (perhaps one who disappears in the first part) before venturing into Ulysses-style language.
The third party of the novel then returns to the first party narrator but with more of a concentration on some of the museum exhibits (including a section on alchemy and another on phantasmagorical depictions of the seven deadly sins) before descending into some bizarre scenes as the museum staff put into action plans for its destruction.
Overall a distinctively atmospheric book which more provokes ideas and questions than it does provide any real coherence or answers.
As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it's said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place.
Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth's experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.
An intriguing novel which starts as a post apocalyptical version of Magnus Mills meets Museum Memoir (via Susanna Clark), takes a short story detour down a Joycean junction before ending in a more dystopian denouement.
The publisher is Tenement Press “an occasional publisher of experimental; esoteric; accidental; and interdisciplinary literatures [which] … with an eye on actively ignoring the borderline between creative, critical, poetic and political practices” and that last part of their mission fits well with this debut novel from the author, a London based writer and poet interested in areas such as “collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and performance”.
And while this is in form a fairly conventional novella, in substance it has more of the borderline/experimental blend that both publisher and writer favour – and the author’s interest in curation is particularly pertinent.
Even more pertinent is the author’s 7 years (2007 to 2014) working at the British Museum as a visitor host (which role mainly consisted of directing visitors to the toilet and absolutely not being trained about the exhibits) – a time that was formative to his own literary and artistic development (as he used the considerable down time to explore literature and the museum) but also to this book which is to a large extent a literary examination of the very role of museums and curation but even more fundamentally of the nature of what the reality of objects (the very common question to museum employees “is this real or a fake/replica” being particularly key).
The novel begins with a cataclysmic society altering event which either follows or precipitates a period of armed conflict in which our first party narrator was involved. As part of the rebuild of the City in which the narrator lives a museum has been built on the site and along the lines of its pre-holocaust predecessor (this museum is very clearly the British Museum) to which visitors come in search it seems of some kind of connection with their past, a search which often drives them to physical interactions with the ancient exhibits (this level of obsessive touching of precious exhibits being among many satirical elements from the author’s own museum experiences). The narrator’s role as a guard seems to largely consist of protecting the exhibits – albeit much of the wider aspects of the role (and the other members of the museum hierarchy) is unclear to us and largely it seems to him.
The first part of the novel is part description of the Kafkaesque workings of the staff (with heavy Magnus Mills overtones) and part exploration of the museum’s complex physical form of halls, passageways, vaults and statues (reminiscent in its part prison like overtones of Piranesi and “Piranesi”).
A brief interlude is based on the White Review Short Story shortlisted entry which was the genesis of the novella (https://www.thewhitereview.org/poetry...) – which starts as a misspelt diary of a museum worker (perhaps one who disappears in the first part) before venturing into Ulysses-style language.
The third party of the novel then returns to the first party narrator but with more of a concentration on some of the museum exhibits (including a section on alchemy and another on phantasmagorical depictions of the seven deadly sins) before descending into some bizarre scenes as the museum staff put into action plans for its destruction.
Overall a distinctively atmospheric book which more provokes ideas and questions than it does provide any real coherence or answers.
At the beginning, I've been told people like him were sought out, given fat payments. Those who could remember the objects, and partial fragments of the catalogue, from the old Museum. They were then, once in, teased and tortured into a pool of facts and memories that could be trusted. And when that appeared too lean, others were sought. Others who hadn't been so badly harmed, who could help recreate a history culture, to explicitly connect those two things. To bring back to life the unforeseen, unknown, unintelligible, almost unthinkable, into a massive throbbing establishment. One so amazing to witness that no visitor could get to asking whether it was genuine. The pasts reanimated before they were forever forgotten. Thought up by these obviously important people, who in their renovations, after a time, when the eye became lax, allowed new interpretations of their history.
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