An Eclectic Catalogue

...The final two chapters, on maps and on museums and catalogues, are small gems that should be anthologized...

...Two technical decisions have made matters even worse: There are no photographs or reproductions of the paintings, cities, gardens, and buildings (many of them quite obscure) that are discussed, leaving the reader to take a deep breath and trust in the descriptions before him...

...His book is far too leisurely and civilized to be burdened with a thesis, but if it had one it would be that art of all kinds only appears to be about nature—it is really about the artist...

...What he says about the incompata-bility of words and pictures, and the ultimate arbitrariness of catalogues, explains some of the peculiarities of his own book: "Most paintings cannot live up to the expectations catalogues arouse...

...Beyond this, Eccentric Spaces represents the kind of humanistic and wide-ranging literary enterprise that is particularly welcome now...

...The majority of the spaces Robert Harbison has chosen to write about are creations of the 19th century, and that is fitting, too...

...the late novels of Henry James as human consciousness rendered in intricate geometric terms...

...The next chapter, "Cities Dark Places," treats Naples, Venice, the two Sicilian towns of Erice and Agrigento, Siena, and Rome, making provocative connections between each place and the painters and sculptors who interpreted it...

...The former reminds us that maps are wonderful and odd...

...Harbison offers a fascinating discussion of indoors and outdoors in Sherlock Holmes?Doyle's idea of evil is basically an idea of the invasion of the home by a foreign force"—and we realize how often the villain in these stories is someone just back from some distant imperial war, and how comforting are the rooms at 22IB Baker Street...

...Deeply concerned with art, with living and with the relations between the two, Harbison has written a philosophical/art historical/literary critical exploration of some of the more intriguing worlds man has made for himself...

...Kafka's The Castle as an architectural metaphor for the unknowability of the world...

...With academic and journalistic criticism seemingly entrenched in their respective cubby holes—the former chattering on in a series of rarified, obscure, mutually exclusive jargons, the latter toadying to the pop—there is almost no one left who is willing to address the eternal questions in an engaging manner...

...Hawthorne's The Marble Faun as that Puritan writer's grappling with the Catholic temptations of Rome and image-making...

...Reading his book is a task, but upon finishing it one understands why Harbison is so attached to Sir John Soames, Conan Doyle, John Rus-kin, Walter Pater, Henry James, and other eminent Victorians who created worlds apart that were individual, eccentric and unique...

...Like man, he begins with the garden...

...Still, he piques our interest and impresses upon us that these dialogues between the artificial and the natural are models for his concerns...

...He then moves indoors, in a chapter that views homes and rooms as sanctums against the world...

...and the historical novels of George Eliot, Flaubert and Walter Pater as varied attempts to domesticate to the 19th-century mind the mysterious cities of the past...

...They too are mediations of nature, works of art, and not merely useful photographic mimickings: "Nothing seems crasser to the lover of maps than being interested in them only when you are traveling, like saving poetry for bus rides...

...In the sentence above, for example, we want to know what takes art as its subject, the book or the world...

...Add to this cavalier disregard for antecedents a severely limited use of punctuation (especially commas, with which Harbison refuses to enclose parenthetical phrases), plus a complex authorial turn of mind, and you have a very difficult book to read...

...The main sorrow is Harbison's writing style—it leaves a great deal to be desired...

...Now for the charms of Eccentric Spaces, and they are many...

...In a series of luxurious yet cogent transitions, Harbison moves from railroad stations, to the esthetic power of suspension bridges?almost more than airplanes, [they] cut man's ties, take away his body, and entrust him to a void"—to the nature of metal, to Renaissance armor (which turns the body to metal), to the subtly mechanical paintings of Paolo Uc-cello and Piero della Francesca...

...Harbison's remarks on catalogues—a form he takes to include Tristram Shandy, Alice in Wonderland and Finnegans Wake, as well as Sears' voluminous inventory?make a fitting conclusion because they help define Eccentric Spaces...

...The second part of the book concentrates on literature, to consistently good effect...

...Harbison comes at them indirectly, but they are very much on his mind...

...Harbison sees the gothic novel as a "spatial riddle where the heroine must guess the proper alignments, where villains work spatial malice on her...

...Chapter three takes up something that we often forget is also man-made—the machine...

...And is it the world's, art's or integrity's products that we can explain to ourselves...

...That opening sentence of Robert Harbison's suggests both the joys and sorrows of his new book...

...and the book has been set in Palatino, a type face that Knopf assures us is "beautifully balanced and exceedingly readable," but that I found exceedingly unreadable, almost dizzying...

...It is appropriate that most of his examples are the creations of the British: Their pubs testify to the national attachment to protected, cozy places, and even their subway cars have "warm varnished wood and red and green plush...

...Reviewed by Ben Yagoda "This is a book about trying to live in the world which takes art as its subject because there the integrity can be assumed, and hence we believe we can explain its products to ourselves...

...I shall dispense with the bad news first, because it is more immediately apparent, and because it is of far lesser moment...

...and later, "catalogues are finally inconclusive," and are functions more of the cataloguer than of the objective world...

...For he has written a book in the 19th-century mode, one with the value of being beholden not to an order or plan, but only to the impressive range of one writer's eclectic fancy...

...The initial chapter is not one of the more successful ones, however, if only because most of us have never been to the Boboli in Florence, to Bomarzo near Rome, to Jean Dubuffet's giant sculpture Jardin d'emaille in Holland, or to Stowe or Stourhead in England, and Harbison's evocations do not wholly rise to the occasion...