Haunting vignettes of alienation and paranoia and an ice-cold examination of the horrors of having a mental illness before people understood mental ilHaunting vignettes of alienation and paranoia and an ice-cold examination of the horrors of having a mental illness before people understood mental illness. Stunning, chilling prose. ...more
A solid slab of eighties social realism featuring a glittering array of class schisms, strikes, well-meaning wishy-washy liberals, and an unsound careA solid slab of eighties social realism featuring a glittering array of class schisms, strikes, well-meaning wishy-washy liberals, and an unsound care-home orphan nicknamed Orph around which the zeitgeist revolves. Perfect for fans of vintage eighties violence à la Alan Clarke and early Mike Leigh....more
A watery comedy concerning the peepage of mermaids by two honeymooners and a marine biologist, and a corporation’s speedy attempt to harness said mermA watery comedy concerning the peepage of mermaids by two honeymooners and a marine biologist, and a corporation’s speedy attempt to harness said mermaids for their own shilling enhancement. A sassy, witty female narrator is your companion across this wry, unfocused novel, a frolic in the froth that lacks an incisive satirical chomp....more
Published in 1940 between Brave New World and 1984, Swedish novelist and poet Karin Boye’s steely, unshowy dystopian novel has now at last been PenguiPublished in 1940 between Brave New World and 1984, Swedish novelist and poet Karin Boye’s steely, unshowy dystopian novel has now at last been Penguinized and takes its place alongside those two monsters of terrifying presage. In this hellscape, Boye subverts H.G. Wells’s utopian vision of a World State into a totalitarian nightmare, where scientist Kall invents a truth serum—an anti-soma administered by injection—that forces the recipient into a confessional state for several minutes, exhuming all their negative thoughts on the regime. The novel imagines concepts such as the thought police and various menacing ministries before Orwell made them popular, and opts for a flatter, more icy prose style, with Kall as a less odious Mengele figure. While not as stylistically interesting as Huxley or Orwell, and with more mysticism and reliance on characters making long speeches to expand the scope of the imagined world, Kallocain is still a formidable vision of hell and worth discovering....more
An oppressive, airless last-people-on-earth novel with a cast of incestuous siblings all torturing the obese, legless Dolores, who spends most of her An oppressive, airless last-people-on-earth novel with a cast of incestuous siblings all torturing the obese, legless Dolores, who spends most of her time crawling through mud in an amateur reenactment of Beckett’s How It Is. In an encampment overseen by a coolly tyrannous Matriarch, the interchangeable vile characters have an unlimited stream of abstract and intellectual sensations and vibes that pour forth in relentless, smothering blocks of prose that sweat hard to elevate this grim tableau of nothing-much-happening into a monolith of poetic grandiloquence and “powerful imagery”. The characters, allowed no room to reveal themselves as humans, are ciphers swaddled in their cloaks of breathless prose, wafting around committing incest and violence and in their downtime soaking in long baths of breathless what-the-fuck-does-that-even-mean prose that sacrifices coherence for the vibes and the feels. A frustrating novel that with a little more breathing space for the characters and less smothering the reader in a swamp of surreal, abstract images, could have been a more satisfying vision of desolation....more
A singularly unpleasant and gruelling read, Trieste rambles through the fictional history of an Italian-Jewish woman in a narrative that reviewers areA singularly unpleasant and gruelling read, Trieste rambles through the fictional history of an Italian-Jewish woman in a narrative that reviewers are contractually obligated to describe as Sebaldian. The similarities to W.G. Sebald’s novels start and end at the insertion of low-res photographs into the text—narratively, Drndić’s style is more restless, patchwork, and less conservative in its graphic descriptions of horror. Riddled with fascinating stories drawn from years of painstaking research, concise information on the lesser-known Nazi war criminals whose butcheries deserve a public airing, and a moving 40-page list of those Italian Jews murdered in the holocaust, Trieste provides a striking and original insight into the endless excavation of horror that is WWII history. My only real issue with the novel is the digressions gradually consume the fictional story of Haya Tedeschi which remains (intentionally?) unresolved....more
A mordant tragicomedy of the fractious familial fumbling between a guardian angel saleswoman and her terminal mother told with Rudan’s uncompromising A mordant tragicomedy of the fractious familial fumbling between a guardian angel saleswoman and her terminal mother told with Rudan’s uncompromising waspish prose panache. As in her other (better) novels Night and Love at Last Sight, the novel explores grim themes—in this instance child sexual abuse, the capriciousness of caring for burdensome relatives, and violence (child and domestic)—with a flip and bitter humour that puts the reader at remove from the narrator, whose endless stream of sardonicism becomes tiresome and less amusing as the story rambles repetitively onward....more
An amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced wiAn amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced with or inspired by (more interesting) quotes from Baudelaire, Zola, and other Gallic Greats, and in tone are the very epitome of très charmant, mademoiselle. Bland and uninspired prose wrapped in an Oulipian kimono—this is super-lightweight fare from the once-peerless Dalkey Archive....more
Shot through with a lexicographer’s love of words, the stories in this collection veer from the playfully surreal to the poignantly poised to the overShot through with a lexicographer’s love of words, the stories in this collection veer from the playfully surreal to the poignantly poised to the overindulgently twee and/or smug. As someone similarly prone to caressing the cute carcasses of words to ludicrous lengths, any complaints I may have about the attention Williams draws to the words in her stories, and the delight with which she tantalises the reader with her unrelenting wordplay, are blatant hypocrisy. The strongest stories are those where Williams reins in the verbivoracity—too many read like someone mainlining the Britannica for 24 hours and heaving up factoids onto the page like a coked-up QI elf—while alluding to an ex-lover/ex-friend who has seemingly walked out in exasperation at the narrator’s irritating overeagerness. Also, the marvellous opening story ‘The Alphabet’ encapsulates her talent so perfectly that the other stories seem to sit in its shadow or strive to recreate its magic....more
