Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object

Carol Mavor
Hardback, 224 pages
9781789149500

The sadness, as well as the joy, of unexpected discoveries.

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.