Wigrum

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 ofstring, 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 listsand 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.

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 studioDNA 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.Canty's first book, +ètres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, he co-directed the poetry magazine C'est Selon. He has contributed to three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (2009), on sleeping.Canty directed Antipodes , a short film on painter Rafael Sottolichio, as well as two experimental shorts, Méduse and Hôtel dela Mer . In fall 2013, he will shoot the short film Cinéma des Aveugles ( Cinema for the Blind ).

ISBN: 9780889227781
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
Publisher: Talon Books Ltd
Published: October 15, 2013

“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“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.”
– Mélanie Robert, Voir