I love the impossibility of the place and the way its mysteries are narrated by a whole town. I don’t think you can read the story without wanting to visit the museum but its appeal goes deeper than that, I think. It’s a story about reading—it’s about going in, getting lost, exploring looking searching, letting yourself in for experiences, finding your way maybe, or perhaps never really knowing what the hell is going on but accepting the chance to wander through a hall of curios anyway, and with any luck accepting that maybe that’s the point. The story appears in Millhauser’s collection also called The Barnum Museum and it’s tempting to read it as a metaphor for the book as a whole, as a guide (or anti-guide) for any selection of wonders.
First published in Grand Street , Summer, 1987 and available to read via JSTOR here; collected in The Barnum Museum, Poseidon Press, 1990
A Personal Anthology 