Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group, and the New York school. Jeremy Over mixes collage, doodles, erasures, findings, and mistranslations to create unlikely meetings between, amongst others, the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou and G.K. Chesterton, the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki and Tommy Cooper, Steve Reich and Dan Maskell. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary. Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Živojinovic; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with ‘O’, an open-mouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty seventh letter of the alphabet: ‘a.
