Awards
- Short-listed for Alcuin Award for Book Design in Canada ( Fiction category) 2014 (Canada)
- Winner of Grafika Grand Prize (Typography) 2012
Overview
It's October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through more than one hundred everyday objects he has left behind. Wigrum's bequest is a meticulously catalogued collection of the profoundly ordinary: a camera, some loose teeth, candies and keys, soap, bits of string, hazelnuts, and a handkerchief. Moving through the inventory artifact to artifact, story to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike narrative bricolage determined as much by the objects' museological presentation as by the tender and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum's impulse to collect them. With its traces of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, Daniel Canty's graphically arresting Wigrum explores the limits of the postmodern novel. Having absorbed the logic of lists and the principles of classification systems, the Wigrumian narrative teeters on the boundary between fact and fiction, on the uncertain edge of the real and the unreal. Readers venturing into Sebastian Wigrum's cabinet of curiosities must abide only the following maxim: If I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you.
Full Product Details
Author: Daniel Canty ,
Oana Avasilichioaei
Publisher: Talonbooks
Imprint: Talonbooks
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.40cm
, Length: 22.80cm
Weight: 0.326kg
ISBN: 9780889227781
ISBN 10: 0889227780
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 16 January 2014
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
In Wigrum, the reader should expect plenty of humour and a very special cabinet of curiosities. This most original work is difficult to characterize as a novel. Rather, it takes a truly literary approach that will satisfy the curious reader. - Melanie Robert, Voir This is a new novel genre. An inventory! ... The inventory is a list of more or less fantastic objects - sometimes computer-based, electronic, historical, or purely useless - but each finds its place in this collection for one reason or another. In the last part of the book, Daniel Canty mixes fact and fiction, deconstructing our vain attempts to discover the truth. Unique and very exciting! - Shannon Desbiens, Les Bouquinistes
Author Information
Daniel Canty is a Montreal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, and new media. Canty was a member of the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media, in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of _Horizon Zer_o, the Banff New Media Institute's web space on the digital arts in Canada. (2009), on sleeping. ).
