Aby

Marie de Quatrebarbes drew inspiration for her novel from the life and work of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), a pivotal 20th-century thinker, born into a wealthy Jewish banking family in Hamburg. Despite being the eldest son, at the age of thirteen he relinquished control of the family business to his brother Max, on the condition that Max would buy him any book he requested. This childhood pact fueled the art historian's voracious appetite for collecting, and by the end of his life, he amassed nearly sixty thousand volumes in his library, the precursor to the prestigious Warburg Institute in London. Meanwhile, tormented by the devastation of the Great War, Aby descended into madness and was institutionalized. Drawing on, among other documents, Warburg's clinical record compiled by psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger at the Bellevue Clinic between 1921 and 1924, the author delves into the depths of the schizophrenia, paranoia, and phobias that gripped him until his recovery. In a text written in a montage style, reminiscent of the Mnemosyne Atlas, and through prose punctuated by lyrical flashes and brimming with electrifying associations of ideas and images, the author situates us in an era of dizzying and paradigmatic change: the telegraph, X-rays, the theory of relativity, and the First World War. This world's speed is opposed by Warburg's mental time, who conjured away madness and chaos by devoting himself to the study of the images and books he so painstakingly collected, and who embodied like no other the figure of the collector as defined by Walter Benjamin: "Perhaps the ultimate motive of the collector is this: to wage a battle against dispersion. From the outset, the collector is disturbed by the chaos and dispersion in which all things in the world are found."