Museum Hours

  Orbital  by Samantha Harvey is a short book about which the only complaint is perhaps that it should be even shorter, so that the lapidary sheen on this multifaceted jewel might be yet more polished for even greater effulgence; a confit for which even slower cooking might have reduced the constituents into a yet deeper and more refined reflection of their parts. As a piece of fully immersive metaphysics, Orbital probes away at our perspective on ourselves and our planet, on our simultaneous insignificance and grandeur, and on the need for a true sense of awe rather than the gimcrack variety applied in a ludicrous diminished form to the flashy and superficial attention grabbing detritus of modern existence. So why would a short piece about six people orbiting the earth in a space module open with a reproduction of Velasquez's 'Las Meninas'?  In short, because it is a 17th century painting (more on the baroque sensibility later) profoundly concerned with perspective, in whi