Rodinsky's Room
You know the drill by now: David Rodinsky lived above a synagogue in Princlett Street until, some time in the late 60s, he vanished. Puff! Just like that. Busting into his room twenty years later they found his life fossilised: from the chaos of writings, annotated maps, his books, clothes, right down to an imprint in the pillow. 'The room is a trap', Iain Sinclair warned.
Rodinsky's Room
is part history, part speculation. Sinclair's own - alternate - chapters are marvellous. Words as texture, language contours. Sinclair posits that the disappearance offers a multiverse of possibilities. He understands that Rodinsky's power lies not in facts but in the ability to mythologise, to weave him into a text explaining East End Jewry, recondite scholarship, London itself.30-year-old artist Rachel Lichtenstein has not taken his warning to heart. She fills in lines, colours the backgrounds. She hunts Rodinsky, through his relatives, his leavings, back to Eastern Europe, and, finally, to his own graveside. The myth is both answered and neutered. Lichtenstein builds too much of herself into the journey, reads significance in every tiny detail. Literary thuggery; dinner party Rodinsky. So many answers are simply there in births, marriages and deaths, waiting to be found. We assume Sinclair never looked because he knew. The Rodinsky Heritage Industry stops here.