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Interior
Interior: A Novel | Thomas Clerc
4 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
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.
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Interior: A Novel | Thomas Clerc

I don‘t know how to make things work, so I‘ve focused my energy on words; I don‘t have a practical bone in my body, so I‘ve become contemplative instead. Sometimes I just look at my shirts and their fine colors, admiring them instead of reaching for them.

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shutupsmalls
Interior: A Novel | Thomas Clerc

A pronounced destitution hovers over my alimentary domain. Or, to put it another way, there‘s never anything to eat at my place.

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shutupsmalls
Interior: A Novel | Thomas Clerc

I‘m caressing the curtain‘s slightly quilted texture; I‘d like not only to give my readers a guided tour of the museum-of-sorts that I consider my apartment, but also to make them run their fingers over every inch of it; literature moves me because it respects nothing.

quote
shutupsmalls
Interior: A Novel | Thomas Clerc

The persistence of keys throughout human history astonishes me: unlocking a door remains a terribly human, antiquated gesture forever haunted by the risk of failure.