Life On A Dead Planet

by Frank Kuppner

Kuppner returns with more philosophical contemplations in his latest novel. Momentary, internalised dilemmas are the author's stock-in-trade and his work sparkles with lateral and highly astute observation on human behaviour.

198 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1994

About the author

Frank Kuppner was born in Glasgow in 1951 and has lived there ever since. He has been Writer in Residence at various institutions, currently at Strathclyde. Carcanet have published six books of his poetry: A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (Scottish Arts Council Book Award, 1984), The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987), Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! (1989), Everything is Strange (1994), Second Best Moments in Chinese History (1997) and What? Again? Selected Poems (2000).

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Scots novel is closer to those vintage American postmodern narratives I love so dear—a sardonic, interrogative third-person narrator describes various nameless characters committing various obliquely delineated acts that question the representation of reality in fiction—than your typical historical yarns about identity, Scottishness and politics. Kuppner’s bad-tempered narrator brings to mind the cranky humour of Sorrentino and Foster Wallace as a clinically depressed young philosophy student. Unfortunately, this writer has a poet’s sensibility, so his quest for the well-turned phrase supplants the lightly metafictional frolics and humour. Those kept me more interested than the baffling manoeuvrings of whatever whoever on the page is doing . . . if he’s (she’s) doing something at all. (Whatever something means. Whatever means means). A muddled fuddle worth the struggle.

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book for me was profoundly boring. I'm not sure if it was because there wasn't a constructed plot but I just couldn't engage. Not to mention I found the character's traits and behaviours to be quite misanthropic which isn't the best when trying to capture the reader's attention. Although the book itself was quite drab, Kuppner's prose style is something beautiful in both descriptive and observational usage. I feel this novel was too long for its own good and I was glad when I finally finished it, surprised in fact. I picked this book up in a charity shop and that is where it is heading yet again, most likely for the same reasons someone donated it to begin with.