Dead Souls
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem
'Full of clever postmodern flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian
'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation
'I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...'
Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.
In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's story of his spectacular fall from grace.
A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.
A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.
A story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...
A story that will take the entire night - and the remainder of the novel - to tell.
'Reading Dead Souls feels like discovering the British Bolaño, and not just for the gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard, author of The Transition
'Elegant, ambitious, very serious and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field
'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In poet Riviere's provocative debut novel (after Kim Kardashian's Marriage), poetry enjoys a booming market and the London literary world is run amok with scandal. Publishers have instituted a plagiarism detection program to judge and decipher submissions, resulting in the punishment of poet Solomon Wiese. The unnamed narrator, an editor of a literary journal and failed poet, encounters Wiese in a bar and listens to the story of his rise and fall and how he got in trouble for appropriating large swaths of other poets' work ("He wanted to regurgitate all this meaningless rubbish, that he'd accumulated, just by reading poetry, so he had simply thrown it up onto the page"). What follows is a potent slipstream of the narrator's conversations with others and interior monologue about the performative aspect of public readings and the potential merits of Wiese's retreat from London ("He was even prepared to believe this calculated withdrawal would provide him with the necessary circumstances to renew his artistic endeavours"). The book's single paragraph, which calls to mind Thomas Bernhard not only for its form but its rhythm and cadence, becomes increasingly demanding on the reader, but it gains traction with criticisms of a calcified literary canon. This esoteric crisis-of-craft story will appeal to fans of Kate Zambreno's Drifts.
