Interior
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Haunting, a book of ghosts and a book of this moment." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
A comic experiment in sociology and self-absorption, the award-winning author Thomas Clerc’s autobiographical Interior is a unique invitation into a professor’s preoccupations and possessions within the rooms of a small Parisian apartment.
Composed of bite-size vignettes, remembrances, and digressions, and filled with lighthearted transitions from pure description to quirky reminiscence and back, this meticulous tour through the rooms of Clerc’s home reveals fascinating insights into the author’s obsessions, desires, and frustrations. Each space is described in painstaking detail, sometimes down to the centimeter, and the history of every object and appliance is fully excavated with self-deprecating wit. From the ideal varieties of bathroom reading material to the color of his dish rack to the chaos of his sock drawer, Clerc happily and shamelessly guides us through the most intimate crannies of his home, as well as through all the strata of his existence as a bourgeois city dweller approaching middle age.
Playful and irreverent, as well as a sly commentary on materialism, Interior finds drama in the domestic and dark humor in every doomed attempt to express individuality through the things that we own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This autofiction novel from Clerc (The Man Who Killed Roland Barthes) is a tour of the author's Paris apartment. Composed of small vignettes listing in detail every item within each room, it's an experiment in narrative form and narcissism that, though clever, overstays its welcome. Beginning with the abode's entryway and concluding in the bedroom, the author sifts through file cabinets, office drawers, and shelves to examine gadgets, books, and ephemera accumulated during his decade-long residency. Clerc or his fictional counterpart laments the tossing of a worn sponge and offers his thoughts on new wave music while periodically being interrupted by a ringing doorbell that reveals an empty front doorway. Along the way, traits emerge, from the author's germophobia to his sexual proclivities, but moments of self-reflection and diversion at one point, the author spots meat hanging on a plastic hanger in his neighbor's window rarely last more than a paragraph and are eschewed in favor of over-intellectualized tangents. Too often, pages of navel-gazing muddy scenes of genuine interest. The author claims to be the first to commit such an exhaustive walkthrough to paper, yet he never stops to consider whether his task is worth its labor, beyond complaining about the three years it takes to complete.
