There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

If nothing else, this wide-ranging exploration of rust – what it is, how it manifests itself, its implications and significance – will make me more aware of it, but overall I found this book just a bit too discursive and the author’s attempts to overlay a natural process with a whole load of meanings just all felt a bit too pretentious for comfort. I’ve discovered since reading the book that Rabaté is a leading literary theorist and it shows. I so much more prefer the volumes in this Object Lessons series that keep to the facts rather than wander off into airy-fairy speculations. Not a bad read, though, and my horizons have been expanded. Which is the whole point, I suppose.

A very... odd little book.

I'm not sure why I decided to read this one, other than the fact that it looked mildly interesting. It wasn't.

Look, I'm not sure exactly who the target audience is for this story. It's sort of artsy, in an erudite, pretentious way. I like a good intellectual book of musings as much as the next girl, but most of the book felt like overblown filler. It had moments where it was interesting, but most of the stories failed to excite me.

*Copy provided in exchange for an honest review*

Rust is the exact opposite of Souvenir: as much the latter is concrete, the former is focused on a philosophical reflection that takes the rust as metaphor of other things.

The Object Lesson books are always aesthetically appealing, but their content is like a bet, there is no hint on how the author decided to deal with the topic. Unfortunately for Rust, I like better a more scientific and practical non fiction, with respect to the philosophical one.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me the copy necessary to write this review.

I’m not sure what exactly my expectations were from this book (or this new series), but it really wasn’t…this. It’s just not a very interesting book or subject to read about. I went in with a open mind and there were definitely moments that make you go “hmm that’s something” but ultimately it’s a book I could’ve easily lived without. Sadly, this is not a series suited for my taste.

This series seems to be self-consciously launched out of Barthes' Mythologies, each one offering up a riff on a common, often pedestrian, mundane, and over-looked object - here rust,

It sounds like a hard sell, but Rabaté does a fabulous job of using the central concept to range widely over ideas: from the paint invented to stop Naval ships from rusting to literary connections between ‘rust’ and ‘rustication’, via blood diseases that essentially ‘rusts’ organs.

Packed with personal anecdotes and wit, and at around 120 pages, this is perfect for a thoughtful and entertaining commute.

Did this ever happen to you in school? You were assigned a report with a fixed number of pages. You quickly realized that you did not have enough material to complete the assignment. So you threw in anything even remotely related to the assigned topic to fill out the required page count.
That’s the feeling I got from reading Jean-Michele Rabate’s book, Rust. It’s the latest volume in Bloombury’s Object Lesson series, where writers opine on everyday objects and processes - in this case, the oxidation of iron.
Writing a compelling, popular book on rust is a challenge, but Rabate opens with some charming stories about boyhood encounters with rust in Bordeaux. He then goes on to tell the story of the Eiffel Tower and how its iron structure is under constant threat of corrosion.
Things take a sudden turn when our author begins a literary analysis of a novel called, A Fine Color of Rust by P. A. O’Reilly. Then there is a review of a nine-hour Chinese documentary film about abandoned factories. Then we have a review of a dystopian Si-Fi novel by the South African author, J. M. Coetzee.
Next, we have a length dissertation on G.W.F. Hegel’s long discredited theory on rust and blood. While there is iron in red blood cells, the process of blood oxygenation is not the same as the rusting of metallic iron. In any event, I advise my students, when they encounter 19th Century German philosophy, to run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible.
After immersing us in dialectics, Rabate treats us to a discussion of Victorian art critic, John Ruskin’s ideas about the role of rust in producing colors, which , somehow manages to become a critique of capitalism.
We then return to Rabate’s boyhood, and an account of how he was forced to drink raw horse’s blood in an ill-advised attempt to cure his anemia. This tale then segues into a lecture on the role of hemoglobin in the blood.
All of the previous was in the first half of the book. Later we get references to Franz Kafka, Japanese haiku, circumcision, Danish architecture and botanical “rusts” , which are actually fungal infections that have nothing to do with iron corrosion.
The entire time I was reading Rust, I couldn’t help but wonder who this book is targeted at , and what were the author's intentions were. Is is a surrealist ,tour de force , or a frantic attempt to fulfill a book contract. Read Rust, if you dare, and decide for yourself.

Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté is another addition to the growing Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury Academic.  Rabaté is one of the world's foremost literary theorists. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound, and Joyce.

For anyone that lives in the former industrial north, rust is simply a fact of life.  Car bodies rust through with the help of winter salting.  Rust stains concrete and leaves it mark on steel structures.  Rust is the oxidation of iron in specific but Rabaté takes it to a deeper level.  The Eiffel Tower gets painted regularly to prevent rust.  Rabaté sees more rust in America than in Europe and Japan, equally industrialized areas.  Others go through the trouble to hide rust that Americans do not.  Rust even caused the collapse of Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut in 1983.

Rust takes on other manifestations. It is a plant disease.  Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was once a coffee producing region until a rust killed off all the coffee trees.  That change Ceylon from a coffee producing nation to a tea growing nation.  I benefit I personally enjoy.  Being a primarily a literature professor, and a professor of modernist literature he includes a book by J.M. Coetzee the Life and Times of Michael K.  Here is where modernism describes rust and rustication.  A very interesting and appreciated twist.  He even includes a review of a Japanese Movie entitled Rust.  Hegel and Kafka are even brought into the lesson.

This is perhaps the most free-ranging lesson in the series.  It takes a bit of modernism and stream of consciousness to give the broad range explanation of the subject.  It is not a straightforward chemical process but covers how deeply the word has entered of vocabulary and mindset.  Rust is a disease. It is a color.  Its color describes other objects. It is in the Bible and the Koran.  Rabaté gives a comprehensive and cultural look at the idea of rust more than the chemical reactions.

A beautiful cover but this book didn't keep my interest.

I suspect I don't really understand the purpose of such a melange of ideas across disciplines. I feel such deeply specialised writings needed to be properly digested and re-interpreted by an editorial writer to make them attractive and comprehensible to the general reader.

A very highbrow cultural study of some highbrow things that refer to rust. Again this series frustrates, as this is definitely not one for the average man on the stereotypical omnibus.