The Museum of Modern Love is the seventh novel by Australian writer Heather Rose. The book won three literary awards, including the 2017 Stella Prize.
Rose was influenced by performance artist Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present, where the latter sat for eight hours a day for 75 days at the Museum of Modern Art in New York while spectators watched.
Plot
The main character, Arky Levin, composes soundtracks for movies. His wife, Lydia Fiorentino, has a degenerative illness and, fearing his inability to care for her, has moved into a full-time care facility. Arky finds himself drawn to the Museum of Modern Art, where he watches Marina Abramovic's daily performances. Other visitors to the exhibition become part of the narrative as do his colleagues and friends. The book details his search for meaning in his life.
Major themes
The chair of the 2017 Stella Prize judges, Brenda Walker, claimed the book was full of "such dazzling and subtle explorations of the importance of art in everyday life". Reviewer Camilla Nelson describes the book as "a fictional exploration of the power of art to transform individual lives, written in exquisite prose, with rare and subtle insight".
Publication history
2016, Australia, Allen & Unwin , 24 August 2016, paperback
2018, USA, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018, Catalan edition, Editorial Les Hores, translated by Carme Geronès
Literary significance and reception
The Museum of Modern Love was the first book by Rose to be published in the United States. It was also the first of her books to be set outside her home state of Tasmania. Rose was honoured when Abramovic agreed to launch that edition in the Museum of Modern Art in 2018.
Kirkus Reviews concluded that it was a book "that attempts to walk the thin line between the trite and the profound—and sometimes succeeds".
Awards and nominations
Winner, Stella Prize, 2017
Winner, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, 2017 Winner, Margaret Scott Prize, Tasmanian Literary Awards, 2017 Shortlisted, ALS Gold Medal, 2017 Shortlisted, University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards, 2017 Longlisted, International Dublin Literary Award, 2018
Adaptations
A theatre adaptation by Tom Holloway premiered at the 2022 Sydney Festival.