Perhaps a bit heartlessly, I was indifferent to/irritated by the love story — the narrator, a curmudgeonly museum director, is fixated on the memory of his now dead lover, a charismatic actress. This is the kind of thing I normally would be into, were it not so smugly presented (the author misses no opportunity to remind us that these two are not like other people, who are portrayed as conventional and prudish, smartphone wielding self improvers with no time for longing & other nonutiliarian things).

Having gotten that out of the way…the writing and ideas are frequently lovely. I particularly enjoyed the parallel between the novel’s fragmentary narrative and the eclectic museum collection over which the narrator presides: the book as a container/vitrine for memories which, removed from the flow of time, become endowed with luminosity and pathos. Also worth reading for an invented oeuvre of erotic arthouse costume drama and excerpts from Roman philosophers (Lucretius on insatiable desire, various others on suicide).

As an aside, Buckley’s live; live; live—a wonderfully oblique novel about a medium (yes)—is similarly preoccupied with the dead and with language as a medium through which we strive to transmit and inevitably distort the inexpressible (both commenting on, and skillfully deploying layers of, metaphor). I also think it works better as a novel, with characters who feel intriguingly resistant to being known and a real sense of duration.