Tell
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
‘I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just ha ve to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?’
Tell is a probing and compelling examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s. Jonathan Buckley’s novel is structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared.
The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.
Praise for Jonathan Buckley:
‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’ — Michel Faber, The Guardian
‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’ — Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This mesmerizing page-turner from Buckley (Live; Live; Live) takes the form of a transcribed interview with a woman employed as a gardener for a fabulously wealthy self-made Englishman who might be dead. The form, which has the feel of a talking head interview for a documentary but isn't explicitly framed, creates instant suspense, and the dramatic opening—"Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place," says the unnamed interview subject—draws readers quickly into the story of her employer, Curtis, the founder of a high-end retail chain. Key elements of that life story include a difficult upbringing in various foster homes in England's gloomy Midlands and complicated romantic entanglements (be it his sincere attachment to his late wife who died young or his long-running affair with a Swiss art buyer whose pretensions the gardener hilariously satirizes). The gardener also lays bare the wastrel tendencies of Curtis's children in anecdotes about their drug abuse and bitcoin investments. As Buckley gradually winds toward the details of the aforementioned crash, which took place while Curtis was in Cambodia on business, he asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It's a deliciously fraught tour de force.
