This kind of storytelling is cropping up in literature, too. I noticed it first in “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry,” in which Leanne Shapton charts the arc of a fictional relationship through the form of an auction catalog. It’s in “The Folded Clock,” by Heidi Julavits (who sometimes collaborates with Shapton), a diary partly organized around the recurrence of talismanic objects. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s recent cycle of books inspired by the seasons is largely broken into short essays on his relationship with natural phenomena and other objects, from head lice to bubble gum.

You can see the appeal. Our possessions are revealing, especially when it comes to our fantasies about ourselves (they also invariably reveal more than we intend). And with more and more of our lives spent online, how reassuring it feels to tether ourselves again to the world, to the solidity and bluntness of objects. What’s curious is how often full-length books inspired by objects offer many of the same pleasures as shorter lists — often written in bite-size pieces, they’re easy to consume; they’re very much taken with questions of taste and they invite a glancing intimacy.

Image Thomas Clerc Credit... Jean-Baptiste Millot

“Interior” is, very grandly, none of these things. It is a work of committed, almost magnificent tedium. I had to bully and bribe myself across the finish line. I suspect Clerc did, too: “I’d never have undertaken this massive documentation of myself if I weren’t convinced that archives, like capital L Literature, tell the truth.”

Great collectors are often great proselytizers for their obsessions — think of Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Wayne Koestenbaum, the photographer Sara Cwynar, some of whom feel present in this book. But Clerc cannot transmit his enthusiasm to us. In Jeffrey Zuckerman’s admirable and confident translation, the narrator comes across as calm, morose — and inexplicably reluctant. He cannot riff, he cannot persuade us of his “lust for possessions.” The fetishism feels fake, forced. “I’d like not only to give my readers a guided tour of the museum-of-sorts that I consider my apartment, but also to make them rub their fingers over every inch of it,” Clerc writes. How much more effective to kindle our desire, to make us want to touch, to rummage and snoop.