Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object

by Carol Mavor

Carol Mavor’s first ‘happy accident’ occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature. The book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War; Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra. Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic – but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 5, 2025

About the author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour; Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.

Reviews

[Susan Lenz · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I am hardly an intellectual scholar or student of literature, I found my mind wandering a little too much while reading. Is this book more poetry than prose? What's the difference? Are the author's occasions for serendipity the result of her deep knowledge of art and art history, seeing similar objects/images and musing on her own thoughts that seem to connect them (as in several artworks depicting dead hares)? Are these connections her joy in learning something that was already intentionally there (as in several references to metamorphosis and to butterflies)? Is she trying to communicate a deeply personal memory of her mother by comparing a brief cassette recording to Anne Frank's diary and to Chantal Akerman's grandmother's diary and later filmwork? Is her notion of an "afterlife" of an object her own emotions generated from the connections she sees? As a visual artist whose studio practice is grounded in the concept of "giving second life" to found objects and who has personally experienced very significant occasions of serendipity, I found the title a bit misleading (but that's probably just me!) The writing style also surprised me but it shouldn't have. The back flap of the dust jacket (written by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford) describes it as "dizzying flights of fancy". I enjoyed the book, especially since I bought it at the Getty Museum gift shop a week before much of Los Angeles went up in flames, but I can't say that I'd recommend the book to anyone else. I think my impression comes from a place where I can relate to Mavor's selected objects and especially Sally Mann's photographs (because I've read almost every book Sally Mann has written) because of my own, limited studies of art history and external reading. Without a background in art history and without a curiosity that has delved into objects as if keepers of time and memory, I think this book wouldn't captivate most of the people to whom I might recommend it. I'm glad I read it though.