![]() ![]() She was awarded a fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and has profited from the association – the objects she describes exist either in the Wellcome’s collection or in London’s Science Museum: the cloud mirror, the jealousy glass, the bone skate – the dull density of the latter in contrast to her characters: bone versus flesh. Iris is a museum curator and the novel a series of object lessons – its fascination partly in the unsettling interplay between museum objects and Greenlaw’s subjects. The writing is present-tense choreography, as easy to read as gliding across parquet. She shows how we respond to the tiniest signals – a syllable, a gesture, a glance. She writes about the recognition, the second it takes to “know” someone unknown, the stirring of what one might not register as memory. Lavinia Greenlaw does not spell out what she is writing about until we are at the point where we could say it for her: love at first sight. This is a beautiful, unforced novel about an old subject made new. ![]() T he title reads like a bad translation – it has too many nouns – and what does it actually mean? But once past this obstacle, one is in the clear. ![]()
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