All her life, DePaul professor Kathleen Rooney was a fan of Belgian painter René Magritte. A writer herself, Rooney describes Magritte as “a writer’s painter. His work is very literary and poetic.” In July 2014, her friend and fellow faculty member Eric Plattner suggested they go see “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Little did she know that this trip to the museum was the beginning of a project that would consume the next two years of her life.

The French publisher Flammarion had released Magritte’s Écrits Complet (Complete Writings) in 1979, but no English translation of the complete or selected writings seemed ever to have existed. The only thing Rooney could find was a listing in WorldCat—an online database of library collections—for an English translation of Magritte’s selected writing from 1987. But though the listing and ISBN (international standard book number) were there, Rooney couldn’t track down any physical copies, which led her to surmise, correctly, that the publication had been planned but fell through before it came out.

“We don’t know—we may never know—why the manuscript ended up there,” Rooney says. “But it was superexciting when Andre wrote back and said, ‘Yes, it’s here.’” The single typewritten copy of the book had been sitting in the French abbey, most likely since the late 1980s. Gallenzi arranged for Derval to scan the 391-page manuscript and forwarded it on to Rooney.

“One of the cool things in the text is to see Magritte over the decades return to this idea of mystery,” Rooney says. “He hated mystification, he hated bullshit, but he loved mystery. The world is so full and so incapable of being taken in all at once or efficiently, we have to constantly approach the things we know and not take them as a given. I like the surrealists, but of all them I think Magritte is the one who has the most literary sensibility, the biggest heart, the biggest desire to convey meaning.”

Although initially uninterested, Gallenzi decided that Alma would publish the book in the UK after seeing the manuscript as Rooney worked on it. That left Rooney to find a U.S. publisher. “So in addition to becoming Magritte’s coeditor, I’m also his agent,” she says. “It was interesting, a lot of places were like, ‘Nah, definitely don’t want Magritte.’ It made me feel better as an author myself.” Having gone through the process of finding publishers for her own work, she’d had her fair share of rejections. “I was thinking now that I’m basically Magritte, no one will say no,” she says. “People still said no.”

For now, Rooney may be leaving art-history detective work behind. Her next novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, which she worked on concurrently with the Magritte manuscript, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017.

Edited by Eric Plattner and Kathleen Rooney (University of Minnesota Press)

Plattner and Rooney will discuss the book on Wed 9/21 at 6 PM 57th Street Books 1301 E. 57th 773-684-1300semcoop.com Free

Plattner and Rooney appear for a reading and book signing on Thu 9/22 at 7 PM Art Institute of Chicago 111 S. Michigan 312-443-3600artic.edu

Free for Illinois residents and DePaul students and faculty