S. Calle, Exquisite Pain

Perhaps it speaks more to the particular hybrid household I grew out of--a delicate admixture of vestigial Victorian values inculcated in late colonial India with Midwestern immigrant yeoman reserve--than to the qualities of this book/project, but all I thought while reading this work was: "Why do the broken-hearted feel entitled to the endless indulgence of people they hardly know?" 

Sophie Calle got dumped, and hard, and then put together an artsy examination of people at their most traumatized.  In addition to her own break-up story, she sprinkles in the painful memories of friends and acquaintances.  The composition, the editing, the images--they are all evocative and, as the title indicates, exquisitely rendered.  But ultimately, I agreed with this respondent to Calle's poll of pain:

Even if I had some fresh flesh of unhappiness I wouldn't give it to you.  A few things happened in the past but decency forbids that I tell you.  It would be overdoing it to turn them into a story. (233)