Interior: A Novel

"Haunting, a book of ghosts and a book of this moment." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

A comic experiment in sociology and self-absorption, the award-winning author Thomas Clerc’s autobiographical Interior is a unique invitation into a professor’s preoccupations and possessions within the rooms of a small Parisian apartment.

Composed of bite-size vignettes, remembrances, and digressions, and filled with lighthearted transitions from pure description to quirky reminiscence and back, this meticulous tour through the rooms of Clerc’s home reveals fascinating insights into the author’s obsessions, desires, and frustrations. Each space is described in painstaking detail, sometimes down to the centimeter, and the history of every object and appliance is fully excavated with self-deprecating wit. From the ideal varieties of bathroom reading material to the color of his dish rack to the chaos of his sock drawer, Clerc happily and shamelessly guides us through the most intimate crannies of his home, as well as through all the strata of his existence as a bourgeois city dweller approaching middle age.

Playful and irreverent, as well as a sly commentary on materialism, Interior finds drama in the domestic and dark humor in every doomed attempt to express individuality through the things that we own.