Enfilade

From Éditions Monelle Hayot:

Monelle Hayot and Antoine Maës, Le Comte d’Angiviller: Directeur des Arts sous Louis XVI (Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau: Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 979-1096561421, €60.

Gentilhomme de la manche, le comte d’Angiviller (1730–1809) élève le futur Louis XVI et ses frères. Dès son accession au trône en 1774, Louis XVI le nomme directeur des Bâtiments. Son rôle est immense. Fondateur du musée du Louvre il orchestre les travaux et constitue les collections en acquérant des œuvres majeures. Il est responsable de tous les bâtiments royaux, achète Rambouillet pour le roi. Angiviller préside au sort des manufactures de Sèvres et des Gobelins, dirige l’Académie de peinture et de sculpture, ainsi que l’Académie de France à Rome.

L’époque révolutionnaire fait de lui un témoin oculaire majeur de faits historiques auxquels il participe. Le roi lui demande d’émigrer en Espagne. D’une fidélité sans faille, il revient pour aider le roi en danger, mais sa tête est sur la liste des aristocrates à décapiter. Il part pour l’Allemagne dont il ne reviendra jamais.

Angiviller avait un secrétaire, Narcisse, qui recopiait toute sa correspondance avec le roi. Il fut le témoin de sa vie et émigra avec lui. Sur ses vieux jours, Narcisse écrit ses mémoires pour la marquise de Capellis qui vit au château de Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, lieu de naissance d’Angiviller. Ce manuscrit inédit est entièrement retranscrit à la fin de cet ouvrage.

Published in October by Faton:

Michèle Bimbenet-Privat, ed., La Tabatière Choiseul: Un monument du XVIIIe siècle (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-2878443721, €49.

Acquise en 2023 par le musée du Louvre, la tabatière Choiseul est incontestablement la plus originale et la plus célèbre des tabatières du XVIIIe siècle. La précieuse monture en or de l’orfèvre Louis Roucel sert d’écrin à six miniatures de Louis Nicolas Van Biarenberghe mettant en scène le flamboyant duc de Choiseul, le grand ministre de Louis XV, au faîte de sa gloire. Toutes les facettes de la vie quotidienne de ce personnage généreux et arrogant s’y succèdent, soulignant son travail acharné, parfois solitaire, indissociable de l’exercice du pouvoir. La tabatière Choiseul séduit aussi par sa description minutieuse du cadre de vie raffiné du ministre, de son immense collection de tableaux et d’objets d’art, esquissant ainsi une réflexion sur les relations entre art et pouvoir. Elle offre enfin une multitude d’énigmes à résoudre sur son origine, ses possesseurs successifs, la signification des scènes, l’identification des lieux et des personnages représentés.

From Other Press, where one can also find a playlist for the book:

Ariel Dorfman, Allegro: A Novel (New York: Other Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1635424485, $18.

This thrilling historical mystery starring Mozart tells of friendship and betrayal, and how music allows us to defy death—from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum.

In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor? Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Widows, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

The shortlist for this year’s International Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday. Included is the first installation Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel On the Calculation of Volume. As noted by Hilary Leichter in her review for The New York Times (25 January 2025), the central character is an antiquarian bookseller “specializing in illustrated works from the 18th century.” I’ve not yet read the book, but that feels just about perfect to me. –CH

From New Directions:

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Part I, translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland (New Directions, 2024), 160 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0811237253, $16.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book’s logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

Solvej Balle was born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with Lyrefugl, and she went on to write one of the 1990s’ most acclaimed works of Danish literature, According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (praised by Publishers Weekly for its blend of “sly humor, bleak vision, and terrified sense of the absurd with a tacit intuition that the world has a meaning not yet fathomed”). Since then, she’s published a book on art theory, Det umuliges kunst, 2005, a political memoir Frydendal og andre gidsler, 2008, and two books of short prose Hvis and Så, published simultaneously in 2013. On the Calculation of Volume is Solvej Balle’s major comeback, not just to Danish or Nordic fiction, but―expanding the possibilities of the novel―to all of world literature.

Barbara J. Haveland (born 1951) is a Scottish literary translator, resident in Copenhagen. She translates fiction, poetry, and drama from Danish and Norwegian to English. She has translated works by many leading Danish and Norwegian writers, both classic and contemporary, including Henrik Ibsen, Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann, and Carl Frode Tiller.

Coming soon, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Geoffrey Tyack, with photographs by Dan Paton, Oxford Libraries: Architecture (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2025), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1851246052, £50 / $80.

Curated illustrations of the architectural design and history of the most beautiful libraries in Oxford and a close look at the artistic prowess of the architects responsible.

The libraries of the colleges and the University of Oxford are among the finest, but also among the least-known, buildings in the city. Ranging in date from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they embody successive changes in internal design and architectural taste. Libraries were originally established as repositories of knowledge in the form of manuscripts and printed books, and until fairly recently, they were used only by scholars. Over time, the University’s libraries, and those of the constituent colleges, attracted wealthy donors, some of whom, like John Radcliffe, gave generously to the provision of impressive and architecturally innovative buildings in which to house the books. These buildings are still among the most impressive features of Oxford’s architectural landscape, helping to define its visual identity. Architectural styles range from medieval wooden stalls to the concrete and glass of twentieth-century Brutalism, and notable architects include Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, James Gibbs, Sir Edwin Lutyens, and Arne Jacobsen. With specially commissioned photography, this profusely illustrated book invites readers through the doors of over fifty beautiful and iconic libraries, revealing how they are steeped in history, learning, and cultural change.

Geoffrey Tyack is an emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and the Director of Stanford University Centre in Oxford.
Dan Paton is a commercial photographer specialising in architecture, lighting, interiors, and the built environment, as well as portrait, PR, and event photography.