Dead Souls
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this "sublime" and "delightfully unhinged" metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums).
A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night--and the remainder of the novel--to tell.
Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with "nothingness," a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, 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 narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated.
Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?
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.
