M HKA Ensembles

Artist Novel, 12 x 19 cm, language : English, 236 p., publisher : MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, London, ISBN: 978-1-910055-65-6.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2031/6).

Literary sinopsis

Part metafiction, part design criticism, with a touch of armchair psychoanalysis, Objektophilia begins in London in 2014, where a nameless design critic and her partner X reside in a decrepit but Grade II listed tower block. It ends some months later among the fin de siècle wonders of Vienna in an echo of the successive encounters of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Possessed by the ruins of social housing and its accompanying ideologies, but nonetheless in possession of those ruins’ original brushed-steel light-fittings, the critic soon discovers that her craving for these and similarly ‘undemanding things’ has usurped her more conventional—or fleshly—desires.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Each of Susan Finlay's novels is its own thing, often unfashionably realist and written in the past tense. However, the author doubts that she would produce the books she does if she hadn’t been to art college. Film is a huge influence on everything she writes, as is the nouveau roman.

Novel's website