'Windows on the World: 50 writers, 50 views' by Matteo Pericoli

Pericoli’s exquisite line-drawings show us what writers around the world (including Orhan Pamuk, Etgar Keret, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Nadine Gordimer, Tim Parks, Daniel Kehlmann, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rana Dasgupta, Richard Flanagan, Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, Elmore Leonard, and Tatiana Salem Levy) see from their windows when they look up from their desks. The writers each contribute a short text which intimates the relationship between their writing and their quotidian surroundings, ranging from those who use speculation about the people passing their windows as a source for stories to those who use their view as a means to clear their mind of words so as to start afresh. When I look out my window (below) it becomes a wider border of myself; the space (the house) I inhabit becomes an extended self. Home is relaxing because the External, the Other, isn’t always pressing right up against my eyeballs and against my skin. My window and the familiar (but always changing) plants beyond (Brugmansia candida, Fatsia japonica, the geriatric peach tree) provide layers of recession which leave me feeling less assailed.

April 2015