The Book That Can't Wait

Buenos Aires-based bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia (with the aid of marketing agency DRAFTFCB) have created a profoundly ephemeral literary object in the form of El Libro que No Puedo Esperar, or to translate that into English The Book That Can't Wait.

What makes The Book That Can't Wait so unique is that it has been printed using special ink which, once exposed to the air, will begin to disappear.


The book comes securely sealed, air-tight, but from the moment it is opened, the words will begin to vanish. Within two months, the fiction contained in The Book That Can't Wait will seem to be just that - a fiction - having completely disappeared, the book and its blank pages the only surviving remnants of the stories they once contained.



The Book That Can't Wait is actually a special edition of The Future is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction, a collection of short stories by emerging Latin American Writers edited by Diego Trelles Paz. It seems that the motivation for the special edition was to raise awareness of new writers - to make reading their works a priority and to provide them with greater exposure. And on all accounts this seems to have worked! The special edition sold out and certainly had a media-buzz surrounding it. Moreover, the marketing campaign won three Gold and a Bronze Lion at Cannes 2012. Here's the promotional video:

As for me, I'm still getting my head around the idea. Both the publishers Eterna Candencia and the ad agency DRAFTFCB contextualise the design by reference to contemporary anxiety over the death of the book, the threat of extinction to the book as physical object created by digital technologies. The Book That Can't Wait certainly engages in a self-effacing debate about its own materiality and immateriality. Yet as a reader and someone who appreciates the book as artefact, I feel strangely torn. On one hand, the concept of The Book That Can't Wait is beautiful and its transience is surely at the heart of this. But I can't help thinking that in three months from purchase date when I find myself looking down at empty pages, I might feel somewhat cheated. For now, like the future pages of The Book That Can't Wait, I'm lost for words.




(With thanks to my friend Tom Stafford for bringing The Book That Can't Wait to my attention.  Visit his blog Idolect.) 

Why We Broke Up

I recently read the book Why We Broke Up, a fiction written by Daniel Handler and featuring art by Maira Kalman. The novel itself is a story of first love, or perhaps first infatuation is the best way to describe it. Why We Broke up tells the story of Protagonist and geeky old-movie enthusiast Min ("short for Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom" p.18) Green's relationship with high school (American) football jock Ed Slaterton.


Why We Broke Up is a young adult book, and reads like one. I don't usually go for books in this genre (though I loved The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larson) but at the time I wanted something light and this ticked that box. Interestingly, when reading this, there is a sense of incredible hindsight: While I did find it reminiscent of experiences of one's first school boyfriend, what struck me was that although it is written for younger readers, perhaps currently in the throws of their own young romance, there are hints of awareness about the relationship at the centre of the novel that offer an adult retrospective, viewed from an emotional distance that Min couldn't possible have.

There are three things that interested me about the book, forming the motivations for me choosing to read it. Firstly, Why We Broke Up is written as a break up letter from Min to Ed. The letter of course guides the reader through the entirety of their relationship from start to inevitable end. However, this means that it is interesting from a linguistic point of view. In terms of deictics, it is written in first person (the 'I' representing Min) to a story-internal character 'you' (Ed). It also means that the book itself is the (anti-)love letter, and the reader therefore appears to have access to this personal dialogue.

On the left, you can see the opening page. It starts with the epistolary genre salutation, 'Dear Ed'. Typographically, these words are presented as handwriting, thus in academic terms, they are considered to function through discursive import by symbolising the act of hand writing, albeit transposed into the context of a printed book. While the font subsequently returns to a conventional looking typeface, the 'Dear Ed' is presented like this in order to intimate the letter format.


Secondly, Why We Broke Up is multimodal. Each chapter opens with an illustration from artist Maira Kalman. Moreover, the pictures are not mere illustrations. They form part of the narrative world since not only does Min directly comment on them, they are also narrative artefacts, objects that trigger stories in the genesis of Min and Ed's relationship. Indeed, the letter-book itself is supposed to come in a box that Min drops off at Ed's door, together with all these objects of doomed young love. The first image (which opens the second chapter) for instance looks like this:

The image depicts the box in which the letter and associated objects are supposed to arrive. The text, too, directly references it: "The thunk is the box, Ed. This is what I am leaving you" (p.3).

The third reason I chose to read this book was the most persuasive. In marketing Why We Broke Up, the "Why We Broke Up Project" was created.

I first heard about of this through The Guardian's life style pages (see the article I first read here) but it has its own website and is promoted on the back of the novel's dust jacket. The dust jacket states, "Min and Ed's story of HEARTBREAK may remind you of your own" and instead of endorsements about the book, features testimonies by famous authors (such as Neil Gaiman, M. T. Anderson, and Brian Selznick amongst others) about their own experiences of heartache. Similarly, the website says, "That's their break up story - What's Yours?" and invites users to post their own testimonies. As a reader, you can also search the testimonies by categories: "I can't believe how disgusting you were", "I can't believe there was someone else", "I can't believe you did that", "I can't believe you wore that", "I can't believe that's what you thought", "I just can't believe it", and "I'd take you back in a minute".

As such, the book becomes part of a larger dialogue in the form of the Why We Broke Up Project. With confessions that are both funny and tragic by turns, the Why We Broke Up Project offers an intimate yet collective insight into heartbreak, and it is this that I find fascinating.

Why did YOU break up?

In Homage to Graham Rawle...

On my walk into work this morning in Leicester, I encountered a solitary playing card lying on the pavement. Of course, it reminded me instantly of Graham Rawle's forthcoming novel The Card. So I hastily took a photo, and this is my homage to him...

Rawle's The Card isn't released until June of this year, and I am already eagerly anticipating its arrival! It looks likely to be a surreal mystery in which the protagonist Riley finds a card, in a similar way to my own discovery this morning. Riley's card however spurns hidden clues and coded messages that lead him down a secret trail...

Sadly, no such enigmas surround my card, a tattered 6 of diamonds. Even a random found card that Rawle mentions on his blog appears to hold more secrets than mine (read the entry here). Oh well... Perhaps I should inscribe my own message and disgard this card on the streets of Sheffield...? Suggestions on a postcard please... or perhaps that should be, a playing card.

The landscape of the book

Just a quick post on another artist making books into sculptural works of art, Guy Laramee. His books works come in the form of two projects, Biblios and The Great Wall. Interestingly, Laramee conceptualises both projects through a story of civilisations, perhaps in a way that offers links to the work of altermodernist artist Charles Avery (see previous blog posts on Avery's The Islanders and Onomatopoeia).

Biblios is based around an ancient peoples called The Biblios. The Biblios invented words for the world around them, and so that they these words didn't die, they began to collect them in libraries. Moreover, the Biblios believed that words contained the spirit of the thing they designate.

The Biblios, as a people, die out, and according to the legend which Laramee writes, "It is generally agreed that Biblios dies under the weight of their knowledge". To read all of Laramee's commentary on Biblios, visit here.

The Great Wall, on the other hand, is about a civilisation from the future, a Chinese Empire of the 23rd Century keen to chronicle the histories of "The Great Panics" of the 21st and 22nd Centuries. The result was a vast encyclopaedia entitled 'The Great Wall'.

Laramee's work are intriguing objects, blending the bookwork as art, with landscape and fictional archaeology. Interestingly, Laramee's own artistic statement links his bookart projects to the supposed death of the book in the early 21st century. He goes on to say:

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. piles of obsolete encyclopaedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simple IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

The Other Side - Ian Breakwell

Just about to finish in the new year is a showing of Ian Breakwell's (2002) short video projection The Other Side at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield. During his residency at The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea in 2000, Breakwell was apparently struck by the Pavilion's community, and particularly the tea dances held on the terrace. It is upon this dancing that Breakwell's film focuses.

According to the exhibition material, Breakwell wrote of the Pavilion tea dances: "There was this whole atmostphere with the setting sun, calm sea, cheesy music and old people gracefully dancing. It was almost kitsch but at the same time there was something almost magical about it." Watching Breakwell's film certainly evokes such kitsch magic.

In the film we see the terrace as the sun goes down, the camera moving back and forth while the old couples dance outside on the terrace. All of this is set to music from Schubert and features occasional close-ups of the couples in silhouette.

The movement of the camera, classical music, graceful slow movements of the dances and the soft colours of the setting sun make watching The Other Side a mesmerising experience. It lulls the viewer into a state of serene reflection.

When the film ends, the image fades to black and the music dies, replaced instead by the sound of the sea and gulls. In itself, such sound would not be unsettling; it might be calming perhaps. However, because the preceding film offers a hypnotic lullaby, the ocean sounds are disruptive. They puncture the tranquility and evoke a melancholic contemplation on our mortality and the paths of our human lives...