A beautiful leitmotif running through Heather Rose’s impressive 2016 novel, The Museum of Modern Love, is the imagery of the guardian angels overlooking artists and other creative people. Readers enjoying this aspect of the novel might also appreciate Wim Wenders’ haunting and haunted 1987 film Der Himmel Über Berlin, known in English as Wings of Desire. Such a beautiful film, so sensual and emotive, yet deeply rooted in the physical reality of the historical world.
I read the closing chapters of The Museum of Modern Love yesterday. Rose takes the reader to the seventy-fifth and final day of Marina Abramović’s performance piece, The Artist is Present, from the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Rose has transformed this gruelling three-month endurance of the artist into a very moving and complex thread in Australian literature. Her commitment to truth in art is evident throughout the novel in her understanding and description of Abramović’s achievement and her allusion to Tolstoy in the naming of her central fictional character: Levin. A very fine read indeed.
by Adrian D’Ambra
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english literature teacher 
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