The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors - Softcover

Hollis, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619025620 ISBN 13: 9781619025622

Publisher: Catapult, 2015

Synopsis

A brilliant, ambitious follow-up to The Secret Lives of Buildings, in which Hollis turns his focus from the great architectural constructions of the past to the now-vanished chambers they once contained.

The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. one day, the structures will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they contained will persist. In this dazzling work of imaginative reconstruction, edward Hollis takes us to the sites of great abodes now lost to history and piecing together the fragments that remain, re-creates their vanished chambers.

From Rome’s palatine to the old palace of Westminster and the petit Trianon at Versailles, from the sets of MGM studios in Hollywood to the pavilions of the Crystal palace and the author’s own grandmother’s sitting room, The Memory Palace is a glittering treasure trove of luminous forgotten places and the alluring people who lived in them.

About this title

Review:

Rich and poetic, this is the kind of non-fiction that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious. --Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

As with his first book, The Secret Lives of Buildings, Hollis proves a refreshing thinker. He reaches beyond aesthetics and into more unusual territory. The Memory Palace houses a great deal of thought expressed in succinct asides that punctuate the storytelling. --Daily Telegraph

Hollis gives us some brilliant illuminations: the chapter on Versailles is a wonderful fusion of physical and metaphysical descriptions whose combinations of distinct facts and elegantly wrought fictions are hypnotic. Hollis tempts us, charmingly, to remember the art of remembering. --Independent

Defiantly uncategorisable and nuanced... On the surface, The Memory Palace is a literary cabinet of curiosities: a collection of fabulous objects and eccentric interiors, many now lost. With a poet's sensibility and a historian's delight, Hollis elegantly uncovers how we use objects and space to define ourselves through memory. --'Books of the Year', The Sunday Times

Hollis gives us some brilliant illuminations: the chapter on Versailles is a wonderful fusion of physical and metaphysical descriptions whose combinations of distinct facts and elegantly wrought fictions are hypnotic. Hollis tempts us, charmingly, to remember the art of remembering. --Independent

About the Author:

Born in London in 1970, Edward Hollis studied Architecture at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before joining a practice, working first on ruins and follies in Sri Lanka and then on villas, brewiers and town halls in Scotland. He teaches at Edinburgh College of Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1619025620
• ISBN 13: 9781619025622
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 362