This book is not fiction. It is an experiment written over many years, and while someone might read it in a day, in a week, it was years in the making. Patterns occurred, themes returned, as with anything that one observes over a long enough period. Surely this is part of the reason death hurts us. We want to stay and look longer, to conduct our experiments, to see the patterns repeat and confirm what we might have suspected all along: In the distance, this makes sense and even more than sense, in the distance this makes beauty.
The Unwritten Book is kind of a memoir, with author Samantha Hunt describing her life and her family and looking for hidden patterns in the influences that shaped her. This is highly literary — with Hunt often quoting from a broad range of novelists — but the author also draws heavily from art and film and music (even a relatably engaging essay on One Direction), getting to the essence of what makes us all unwritten works. This does have the feeling of an experimental project — which may not have universal appeal — but I found Hunt to be thoughtful and likeable and it did work for me. Rounded up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I carry each book I've ever read with me, just as I carry my dead — those things that aren't really there, those things that shape everything I am.
After Hunt’s father (an editor at Reader’s Digest and an aspiring novelist) died, she found an unfinished manuscript on his computer, and she shares the existing few chapters throughout this book — including countless footnotes that explain where he sourced names for people or places, what real life events would have prompted him to include certain details. The manuscript itself is interesting and well-written, but I guess it’s most valuable as a way for Hunt to demonstrate the countless influences that any artist brings to their craft. Hunt writes:
Nick Cave, the artist, created his first Soundsuit in 1992 after Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Cave’s suits are assemblages of twigs, toys, sweaters, buttons, beads, pot holders, globes, stuffed animals, afghans, cookie tins, ceramic birds, sock monkeys, baskets. Cave’s care-full constructions translate these objects into something more meaning-full than their original purpose. More meaning-full because the bits that make up his Soundsuits are now in relation with other objects.
And it’s the patterns and relation of bits that Hunt seems most intrigued by. She notes that W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn “references so many books, people, and histories I’ve never heard of before that the question of what is fiction or nonfiction, though always present, becomes in some way unimportant”; the first time she saw Patti Smith in concert, "I recognized in her elements of Borges’s definition of the aleph: that which contains everything in the universe seen from every point of view simultaneously" ; she references (among many others) the collage qualities of the Hauntings installation by filmmaker Guy Maddin, The Kept Private, a multisourced historical play written by Jeremy Davidson, and the Song Dong piece Waste Not, “which makes order from his mother’s collections''. We learn that Hunt’s own mother is an artist (whose collections might be in need of order), and although her father had become sober before his death, his years of alcoholism sound messy and disordered. Hunt describes her current life as a writer and a teacher, a wife and a mother to three young girls, and we can see how the influences she describes rattle around inside her, waiting to be written.
What book do you use as oracle? What book don’t you use that way? What book is not a work of reference, pointing in the direction of every book our author has read, job her parents have worked, meal she’s eaten, film she’s seen, road she’s walked, rock she’s kicked, microbe she’s never even imagined?
Filled with interesting references and thoughtful consideration of them, this is much more than a personal memoir (although it is that, as well). I particularly liked Hunt's father’s manuscript and her dissection of it, and while this whole might be too experimental for wide appeal, I did enjoy it and hope it finds its niche.
