A Book Lover’s Journey: Literary Archaeology and Bibliophilia in Tim Bowling’s In the Suicide’s Library

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Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Abstract

A native of the Canadian West Coast, Tim Bowling is widely acclaimed as one of the best living Canadian authors. A Book Lover’s Journey (2010) explores how a single object —a tattered copy of Wallace Stevens’s Ideas of Order that he finds in a university library— can render the past visible and tangible in its pure materiality. On the front flyleaf of Stevens’s book, Bowling finds the elegant handwritten name of its previous owner, Weldon Kees, an obscure American poet who apparently took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Finding this signed copy of Stevens’s masterpiece is just the beginning of Bowling’s lyrical meditation on books as art objects, on suicide, the relationships between fathers and daughters, the history of printing and bibliophilia, while pursuing an archaeology of the American literary past with an astounding level of artistry and lyrical intensity. 

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Section

Literatura

How to Cite

A Book Lover’s Journey: Literary Archaeology and Bibliophilia in Tim Bowling’s In the Suicide’s Library. (2016). VERBEIA. Revista De Estudios Filológicos. Journal of English and Spanish Studies, 2(1), 201-216. https://doi.org/10.57087/Verbeia.2016.4194