The Embers of Love

The Museum of Innocence is more than a novel, and more than a museum; at the same time, however, it’s neither of these things alone. It’s a magnificent work of (actually realized) conceptual art, designed to make explicit the real and fictional “nature” of the “stories” that surround us, and to tell us that everything can be narrated, literary and artistic and still be life, reality. It’s an ode to objects and their persistence, a return to a lost time in which the evocative permanence of artifacts, however commonplace, remains frozen. And it addresses the magic of life, the magic of literature, and the inscrutable power of art to bring them together. Perhaps this is precisely its secret.