“I’ve spent six or seven years reading The Man Without Qualities—sometimes I read it all the way through and sometimes random excerpts of it. I’ve returned to it many times. This book has proven to be an exercise in ambience applied to reading. It exists, sporadically at times, in the various rooms that I read it in, at different moments in my life. Each chapter resolves, if that is the word for it, around an anecdote. This anecdote might be about the weather, the occurrence of a love affair, a communications medium, or a note on factory production, which is followed by a meditation or an essay. The essay is not an interruption of the fictive armature because it is part of a work that treats fiction as life.”
—Tan Lin, author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking
(Wesleyan University Press, 2010)
Photo credit: Clare Churchouse