Dead Souls plainly takes inspiration from two writers: Thomas Bernhard, king of the single-paragraph novel, and Roberto Bolaño. It is undeniably a smart book, and, in certain ways, a good one. Riviere is sharp and funny, and he fills his novel with insights that are both rude and correct. In general, I feel similarly toward Dead Souls.

As a critic who strives to be completely honest, I can't help but take this proclamation as a bit of an insult - what am I, chopped liver? - but still, I know it holds truth. In the sycophantic poetry community, Wiese declares, praise springs from 'monstrous insincerity,' and is, therefore, deadly. And he grasps that, in the era of endlessly networked art and emotion, all culture may come to resemble the poetry subculture: gossipy, parochial, panic-prone, intimate, addictive, yet somehow never really there.

He’s wickedly sharp about the pious deceits, and self-deceptions, that fuel the culture industry like oil. Once you catch the spuming surf of his prose – and, as with Bernhard or Marías, it does take a little time – you’ll want to ride the wave to the shore. Civilian readers might also wonder why they should care about an upscale coterie entertainment – especially one prompted by the rumoured narcissism and paranoia of this corner of the literary scene. Then it cunningly aligns them into a remix of the dystopian literary satire that both reflects and distorts the way we live (and read) now. Dead Souls – Its Gogol-ian title alone a hubristic act of theft, like calling your fiction debut Tristram Shandy or Moby-Dick – puts all these forces into play again. Read Full Review >ĭead Souls belongs to a moment when art, money and technology now tangle. It’s become a guilt verdict on his countryfolk worthy of Thomas Bernhard. By the novel’s end, Riviere has extended his satiric range far beyond the monstrous poetry scene. Time after time, the reader is brought to a point of soul horror – the horror of doubleness, nothingness, meaninglessness. But the novel goes deeper than flesh wounds. The cumulative effect is exhilarating: Riviere has turned paranoid pub talk and midnight doubts into a prose poem of laceration. I’d say it was satire, and it is that, but it’s also a meticulous analysis coming from a place of despairing intimacy. The writing is merciless the rage is genuine. Within a couple of pages this subject matter became clear and I thought, 'Oh God, why bother?' But a hundred pages later, I was thinking, 'Why bother with anything else? Why bother with lunch?' This is a brilliant and brilliantly entertaining novel. It is a single-paragraph novel, written in raging, recursive prose, about the small world of English poetry. Dead Souls is Sam Riviere’s Thomas Bernhard phase.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere