"Sometimes God, sometimes nothing"

Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first job and began by using company paper to describe the scrub on the slopes beside a motorway as seen from a car. I never got any further.No doubt the idea was prompted by a chance encounter late one night with Remembrance of Things Past and a lasting intrigue with its elaborate and apparently excessive descriptions combined with an apparent lack of a story. I think of it now after reading Anna Arno's biography of Paul Celan in an English translation by Soren Gauger, half-wishing that I hadn't. Not that I have any criticism of it as a biography. At over 400 pages it may well be as comprehensive as the form allows, and, if you need a comprehensive review, the LA Review of Books has one. My wish is due not to the tendency of literary biographies to conflate life and work – an inevitability and precisely why we pick up such books – but because its limits…