A Quotable Love Story

 

 "A prefatory note describes the rules Whitaker followed in writing the book. The quotations come from some 500 books in his own library. “Whitaker limited himself to using 300 words per book (in accordance with Fair Use), never taking two sentences together and never making any changes, even to punctuation.”

To put something into quotation marks is, paradoxically, to make it your own, as though inverted commas were the fingers with which you picked it up: the quoted words are not just mentioned now, but assimilated to your own aesthetic expression.

Eleanor. David. Joe. Roy. These are the names of the central characters, and the fact that they have individuating proper names means that Whitaker’s sentences are identical to sentences about various different people with those names in various other books. Many Joes, and they are all stylistic, emotional, literary ancestors of the Joe this book’s narrator adopts, just as (says Emerson), “Every book is a quotation … and every man is a quotation of his ancestors.”

read the review by William Flesch > 

A Quotable Love Story | The Los Angeles Review of Books: