A professor at London’s Royal College of Art,
Andrzej Klimowski is best known (to those
who know about such things) as a designer of
posters and book jackets (and to give that a bit
of context, he does the last for works by authors
such as Milan Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa and
P.G. Wodehouse). Following the publication of
two graphic works, The Depository (1994) and The
Secret (2002), Horace Dorlan marks something of
a departure for Klimowski in that it fuses written
and visual narratives (sometimes a chapter of text
followed by a chapter of images, at other times a
visual sequence interrupting a written chapter).
The end result is an idiosyncratic, introspective
(in the sense that you can’t help feeling that this Pisa. As the date approaches, it transpires that his
is a book about the territory in which a poster or lecture will be a musical performance inspired by
book jacket designer operates) meander through entomology (the ghost of Kafka haunts this book).
the (evidently) foggy space between a visual and You should feel free at this point to think about the
a literary world. Perhaps you could call that space relationship between art and science. In case that
‘the imagination’, or even ‘the mind’, if you really wasn’t obvious, while looking at the blueprints for
wanted. And reading this book you get a sense Dorlan’s performance, one character states: ‘the
that that’s what Klimowski would like. drawing was clear and functional, in contrast to all
Klimowski’s narrative is wilfully bewildering. the artistic talk’. And of course you’re supposed to
He sets up gaps and confusions (switching start thinking about the difference between word
narrators and narrative voices, for example, or and image here too.
giving visual clues to, but not proper descriptions The ultimate effect of all this is to create an
of, important but unwritten events in the story) experience that is rather like wandering into a hall
that require the reader to intuit key elements of the of mirrors – each new page reflects, distorts and
plot. Like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ confuses the contents of those that preceded it. In
stories, this is a work in which the reader is forced this kind of territory Klimowski is a clever operator
to play an active part. The basic plot concerns – a man who knows how to initiate all manner of
Professor Horace Dorlan, a man who increasingly games – and if you are the kind of person who
seems to be suffering some sort of mental trauma likes a book that functions as a launch pad or
in the run-up to delivering a scientific lecture in provocation for a meditation about perception, reality and the relationship between word and
image, art and science, and the ‘problem’ of the
real, then this is a very rewarding read. But this kind
of cleverness can be annoying too. Klimowski is no
Kafka, and his attempts to manipulate the reader
can sometimes feel like being poked in the ribs
with a stick. Furthermore, you can’t help wondering
whether Klimowski deploys images to make up for
what he is unable to write. Mark Rappolt
HORACE DORLAN
By Andrzej Klimowski
Faber & Faber, £12.99 (paperback)
p143 Books AR May07.indd 143 3/4/07 04:50:53
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