This book by Marijn Bax is about Mar, a headstrong lady who smoked like a chimney into her 103rd year, living in a house in which the walls, the things she made of old fabrics and the always inventively patched-up clothes she wore combined to create a multicoloured and layered whole, a Gesamtkunstwerk and witness to a self-willed and original personality. Bax’s meandering conversations with Mar led her to go in search of ‘a book that like a pack of cards can always fall apart when dropped and be put back together in any arbitrary order’. Together with Bax, Linda van Deursen has turned this idea into a cahier of unbound sheets folded several times and held together by an elastic band. It can indeed be read when taken apart, then folded back into itself in any order. What this produces is an infinite succession of new image combinations, interpretations and storylines. That the spectator should influence the work – in this case the book – is precisely what Bax intends. This performative aspect of taking it apart and putting it back together was also employed at a reading/performance by Bax in the Stedelijk Museum. Thus the book reinvents the very concept of what a book is. The intimacy of the friendship between Bax and Mar adds up to a beautiful counterpart to another famous book about intimacy, growing old and antidotes to modern life: Julian Germain’s For Every Minute You Are Angry You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness. And that’s a compliment.