WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), Madeline Gins, 1969
recommended by Eva Moulaert
Word Rain is about a reader. The novel enacts the act of reading itself. Before the title page, a spread appears on which the background of the apartment is printed. The pages are unnumbered, and the book bulges with typographic interventions: a point that keeps hanging, words and paragraphs that suddenly appear in capitals, underlined or struck through, incomprehensible mathematical formulas. Language is pushed to the foreground as material. In Word Rain, language behaves like a horde of revolting parasites and reading becomes alchemical, synesthetic, uncontrollable. What I find extraordinary is how this book activates a reading that involves the whole body and truly engages all the senses. The reader-protagonist pays close attention to the sensory qualities of the manuscript: she feels the texture of the paper, smells the page, notices how the sun falls on certain words. Word Rain reminds you that reading goes far beyond the purely intellectual comprehension of words. Reading is a multisensory experience.