CAROUSEL

A pointillist exploration of the panorama.

Unfolding across a series of one-page vignettes that flow like a professor’s slide projector, Minor (Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, 2021, etc.) coordinates a masterful meditation on memory and seeing. Playfully narrated in a detached third-person perspective, the book loosely follows an academic as she delivers a lecture on the “History of the Panorama.” Minor balances personal memories with digressions about historical wonders—all of which deftly contribute to readers’ understanding of how we see and process points of interest in our lives. In 1952, while on top of the Eiffel Tower, Roland Barthes pondered the difficulty of processing a panoramic view: “the experience of seeing a landscape from a great height,” Minor elaborates, “rolled out like a carpet, would always be a type of seeing broken down into smaller moments.” It’s quickly apparent that the narrative’s choppiness is meant to exemplify Barthes’ observation, and it’s the perfect approach for a “jumpy professor known for tangents.” Like Olga Tokarczuk in Flights (2007), Minor writes like she’s building a cabinet of curiosities: Each seemingly disparate fragment buzzes with profundity, and, together, they form a dizzying whole. Visions of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 225-foot illustrated textile from the year 1100, recur throughout the book, alongside digressions on Eadweard Muybridge, 19th-century balloonists, and other esoterica. Much of the book circles around René Magritte’s painting La durée poignardée (1938), which features a train emerging from a fireplace. A head-spinning probe into the title’s difficult translation further unlocks the book’s array of moments: Magritte disdained the commonly used “Time Transfixed,” and Minor sinks into the meaning of durée (which alludes to temporal limitations) and poignardée, which translates definitively to “stabbed with a dagger.” This revelation profoundly recodes the book’s single-page moments and proposes a vision of history as a series of stabs in time. “The gaze La durée poignardée returns,” Minor writes, “is a carousel of blades; a quality of time pierced by the train, by the old clock’s sharpened hands.”

A poignant examination.