One of the things that keep a person reading a book is “suspense” – you don’t know what’s going to happen next and you want to know. Or there’s a general feeling of tension that mysteriously holds you. I hate this in a book. It feels like eating salty chips. No, you can’t eat just one. You eat more and more without wanting to. But so what? When I turn the pages of a book that quickly, it’s often because what I’m reading feels as bad for me as a chip. I don’t admire the author’s technique. I resent the suspense for keeping me there, when I would rather be somewhere else (or, if I love the book, for not letting me linger on what I’m loving; for forcing me to rush).

In Sophie Calle’s The Address Book, created in the 1980s in France and now being released as a book in English for the first time, one turns the pages that fast. You gobble it up like a bag of chips, but instead of it being bad for you, it’s just bad. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I mean, it’s wicked. It’s wonderful, brilliant, breathtaking – but bad.

In 1982, the artist Sophie Calle found on the streets of Paris a man’s leather-bound address book. She was curious about its owner, but that curiosity didn’t lead her to call him up, meet him face-to-face, and return the book. Instead, she decided to make appointments with the people whose names he had collected in the book, and ask them about him, taking notes, writing up briefs of the interactions. Each meeting became its own article, published in the prominent French newspaper, Libération, over the course of a month.

This is how she did it: she would call someone up, explain that she had found an address book in which their name was written, and ask to meet with them to talk about the owner, saying she would disclose the name of the book’s owner only at the meeting. She called former lovers, friends, family, distant acquaintances. Some reacted with outrage at the call, others agreed to meet. One has feelings about these people by their initial reactions. (I felt most admiring of those who yelled at Calle, suspecting I would not be one of the yellers.)

The suspense and tension in The Address Book comes from seeing someone do something so outrageous, so morally suspect, so ethically questionable. Does the artist have the right to do whatever she wants if it adds to our understanding of who we are (which this book does)?...