Review: Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

I can’t remember where I saw this book, but I was intrigued by the format of it. It is essentially an auction catalogue, with items from a relationship. Through these items we get the story of a couple, how they met and how they broke up. This format of a story told through items interested me as it is new and different, at least to me. 

I must say the format led me down a little. This is literally an auction catalogue with pictures and descriptions of the items for sale. As a reader you have to piece together the story yourself from the bits and scraps of information you get from the rather short and austere catalogue descriptions. And that is a bit hard to do. Among the items for sale there are a few letters and notes giving you some insight to the tale of this relationship, and a few times the description will veer away from the neutral and give a statement such as “given to Morris by Doolan to bring on travels, but Morris insisted it was too heavy” (this is not a direct quote, but an example of how this would be done). Through these few sentences we would catch a glimpse of the relationship. But I found that by far most of the items didn’t really have a very tangible connection to a story as such. Many of the descriptions would just be something like “11 gray T-shirts owned by Doolan” and then a description of the brands and sizes etc. No hint as to why these t-shirts mattered, or even if they did. And there was no indication as to why these items were up for sale. It seemed like they were selling their entire lives; t-shirts, knick-knacks, jewelry, books, notes etc. so what happened to the two of them?

Ultimately I think the concept was interesting but it fell flat for me. I couldn’t connect with the characters through the very (very!) short glimpses we got, and without a narrative structure the items just seemed like a jumble of unconnected things. I recently read another story told through items, “Why We Broke Up” by Daniel Handler, but these items were accompanied by a letter and I think that helped understand the narrative and the characters better. Not that I liked that book any better, but that was for different reasons. 

I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, based on the fact that I liked the idea of concept, but not the execution.