Sensitive matter

"Without knowing exactly how, you end up with a house overflowing with water": that's how it begins The magnet and thingsThe unclassifiable first book by artist, teacher, and philologist Mateu Coll (Pollença, 1962). Not surprisingly, objects and the idea of collecting (or accumulating) are some of the central themes of the volume, which explores the relationship we have with the things we own or want. "You go after them, the searches, the objects," says Coll. "I've bought and collected like crazy, as if the world were ending, an ark in the middle of a flood, a pair and more of every kind." And so he draws us into a discourse that oscillates between a highly personal memoir and an essay, between deeply personal thought and almost poetic prose.

The volume, published by Lleonard Muntaner, Editor and with photographs by Jean Marie del Moral, joins the list of essentials in the 'Speculum Mundi' collection, where the reader can also find the dazzling essay Translate how to transhumance, by Mireille Gansel (translated by Dolors Udina), or Corfu, Cabrera, Martinique...the delightful compendium of real and imagined islands by the poet, translator, and illustrious Anglophile Miquel Àngel Llauger. And that, which at first might seem anecdotal, makes perfect sense, because if these three titles have anything in common, beyond the collection, it is their commitment to capturing obsessions, fixations, and ways of being in the world in exquisitely rare books.

In The magnet and thingsColl takes the reader on a journey through houses, wandering and haggling at flea markets, revisiting the most intimate memories we hold of our belongings. "Because collecting is an exercise in enthusiasm," he says, "and frustration, too," and the idea of a collection, what one owns, is as present as those things one doesn't own, the "invisible collection," which "embraces not only the objects that are no longer there, but also those you would have liked to have, the but-in-the-moment things, those you didn't buy and those you were left with, those you were told you'd get but never received, those you discarded." The photographs that someone once cropped or scratched beyond recognition. The story of his godfather, a barber trained in France, and that of his godmother, Margalida Coll, who worked as a maid in Alcover's house. Portraits of strangers. Yellowed and not-so-yellowed trousseaus that speak in a grammar that can no longer be fully understood. The guests at dozens of parties and dinners, recorded in a menu album by cultural journalist Enric Vives at the beginning of the 20th century. What is known and remembered, and all that will never be known, but which can still be felt and experienced.

In the book's final section, Mateu Coll declares that he unfurnished his home to write it, that he wanted to empty it completely. Readers who dare to look, whether peeking through the tiny gaps in a lace curtain or passing through the grand entrance, will find a book they will hardly ever want to part with.