DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
IN LIVING with Buildings, Iain Sinclair’s deceptively uncomplicated storytelling conceals an erudite situationist sensibility, with the narratives subtly subverting habitual perceptions and challenging intellectual complacency.
He embarks on a series of expeditions — through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides — seeking out the relationship between sickness and structure, social planning and health and encounters between distinct cultures.
His findings are, according to Robert Macfarlane, “at once disorientating and illuminating” and disorientating they certainly are. But the effort required to connect the Sinclair dots is inevitably liberating.