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Felix Culpa
Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling?
In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron conjures up a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.
It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy’s story, will he lose his own?
Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else’s.
In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron conjures up a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.
It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy’s story, will he lose his own?
Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else’s.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published August 6, 2019
3 people are currently reading
252 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy Gavron
11 books10 followersJeremy Gavron is the author of six books, including the novels The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award, and An Acre of Barren Ground; and A Woman on the Edge of Time, a memoir about his mother’s suicide. He lives in London, and teaches on the MFA at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 9, 2018
Jeremy Gavron's Felix Culpa opens:
Never open a book with weather. Never use the word ‘suddenly.’ If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
These are, although not marked as such, direct quotes from three of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, two of which Gavron proceeds immediately to break. Indeed he later asserts meteorology is not superfluous to the story from the collected maxims of the great W.G. Sebald, as recorded by David Lambert and Robert McGill.
The novel continues:
But what if a story begins with weather? What if a writer goes to work in a prison in a long gypsy summer and the world turns? Suddenly turns.
A modern prison. Red-brick buildings. Lawns, flower beds.
Even a pond in the middle, in which it is said there were once fish until they were caught and fried up on the wings.
A former military airfield – you can still see the shape of the runway cutting across the prison grounds and into the neighbouring cornfield like the ghost of some ancient ley line.
Writer in residence.
Though he does not reside here and does not appear to be much of a writer. He comes into the prison three days a week, wanders the wings, sits with the men in their cells, looking at their writing, but mostly listening to their talk.
Listener in residence, then.
Privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
That last line is a direct quote from The Great Gatsby and the line that inspired the highly innovative technique that Gavron has used to write this book; a technique that violates the third of Leonard's rules, since this is a novel made up almost entirely of writing, writing which is not re-written but rather re-used. As he explains in an Irish Times interview:
The subject of the book - usually 3rd person but sometimes narrated in the 1st depending on what the quotes require - is the writer, or listener, in residence at a prison, this writer who does not write among these men who are here because they have lost the plot, lost the thread of their own lives, but then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold (see above) and shortly after three of the men show him a newspaper story:
Looks down at the newspaper. Takes in a headline about a body found in the snow, the blurry mugshot of an adolescent boy.
That’s Felix, isn’t it.
He was in here until not so long ago.
A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.
What was he doing up there?
Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had seldom been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.
That’s the question.
Not hiking, not dressed like that.
Felix, per his prison records had loose notions concerning the rights of property starting his police record with shoplifting age 11 and was seventeen when, with accomplices unknown, he committed the offences for which he was sent away, a burglary which led to the death of an old woman. Released after almost 5 years in prison on parole he died of exposure on the hills at twenty-two years of age. Last known address a hostel in the east of the city. In breach of his licence.
Our writer goes in search, not of Felix himself, now buried in his grave, but of Felix's story, trying to piece it together and record it from the fragments he discovers. And here the voices from other books start to play a greater role. In the following passage I've added those I can source (I've no doubt missed some), as our writer records what he finds in:
Spidery handwriting full of crossings-out and corrections.
(Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness)
Fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations.
(Saul Bellow, Herzog)
Observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms.
(Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel)
Overhears in the streets.
In the cafe where he sometimes takes his meals.
Eavesdropping, if necessary, and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me.
(Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould's Secret)
Foraging in used bookstores.
(Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy)
Picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him.
(Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness)
Pieces, it seems to him, of other stories, yet to be told.
It is a fascinating technique one which feels like it ought to have been done before Gavron isn't aware of an exact precedent and neither am I, although others have referenced Graham Rawle's Woman's World, assembled entirely from cut-and-paste of words, but not sentences, from women's magazines:
Armen Avanessian's Irony and the Logic of Modernity shows how the masters of modernism, Proust, Musil and Joyce, used quotation, particularly the latter whose scattered unattributed quotations throughout his stream-of-consciousness in Ulysees.
However, Gavron's approach is stricter than that with a strong Oulipan element. And amongst Oulipans, Warren Motte, author of Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, highlights Marcel Bernabou, author of Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books:
As for the sources Gavron uses - 100 books from 80 authors - there is one issue which has to be acknowledged.
On the positive side, there is a good sampling of world literature (and it was pleasing to see the translators named, although some quotes are included untranslated). Around 30% of the authors are in translation, including such names as Aharon Appelfeld, Roberto Bolano, Heinrich Boll, Italo Calvino, Jean Genet, Jean Giono, Gunter Grass, David Grossman, Primo Levi, Patrick Modiano, and Amos Oz.
But, as pointed out in a brilliantly insightful review by Tommi Laine in the Helsinki Book Review, the eighty authors chosen are 95% male. Tommi comments in his review:
Returning to the text, as the quotations take over completely the text becomes increasingly poetic, as the book acknowledges:
Theft whose poem I am writing
Trying to build something out of old stones
Hoped by expressing them in a form that they themselves imposed to construct an order.
(The 1st and 3rd of these being quotes from Genet's The Thief's Journal and the 2nd from Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness).
Our writer isn't so much as detective as a pilgrim, indeed he resists the detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot (from Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake)
but rather journeys to the hills where Felix died, seeking:
Secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown
Fate of Felix
How and why the kid died
Many months this has been my task
(from respectively Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Richard Jeffries's After London, Charles Neider's The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
Having eventually reached the end of his pilgrimage, having found where Felix died, our writer is:
Set loose once more into the world to see what I would make of it.
End is not yet told.
the first a quote from Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and the second from Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. Or at least McCarthy, perhaps Gavron's favourite source of all in this book, is where Gavron found the phrase, but it originally featured in (and was perhaps borrowed by McCarthy from) Louisa May Alcott's A Whisper in the Dark), which can't help but remind this reader, in the very last line, of the overwhelmingly male gender of the authors cited.
But, this reservation aside, this is a brilliantly constructed and surprisingly moving book, and, as with The Fountain in the Forest, one I expect to feature in the Goldsmith's Prize running.
And for a wonderful taste of his approach, Jeremy Gavron contributed to Granta Magazine's Notes on Craft, except his essay was:
Never open a book with weather. Never use the word ‘suddenly.’ If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
These are, although not marked as such, direct quotes from three of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, two of which Gavron proceeds immediately to break. Indeed he later asserts meteorology is not superfluous to the story from the collected maxims of the great W.G. Sebald, as recorded by David Lambert and Robert McGill.
The novel continues:
But what if a story begins with weather? What if a writer goes to work in a prison in a long gypsy summer and the world turns? Suddenly turns.
A modern prison. Red-brick buildings. Lawns, flower beds.
Even a pond in the middle, in which it is said there were once fish until they were caught and fried up on the wings.
A former military airfield – you can still see the shape of the runway cutting across the prison grounds and into the neighbouring cornfield like the ghost of some ancient ley line.
Writer in residence.
Though he does not reside here and does not appear to be much of a writer. He comes into the prison three days a week, wanders the wings, sits with the men in their cells, looking at their writing, but mostly listening to their talk.
Listener in residence, then.
Privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
That last line is a direct quote from The Great Gatsby and the line that inspired the highly innovative technique that Gavron has used to write this book; a technique that violates the third of Leonard's rules, since this is a novel made up almost entirely of writing, writing which is not re-written but rather re-used. As he explains in an Irish Times interview:
The novel opens with a writer working in a prison, as I once did myself. I was trying to catch the experience of days spent talking to men who had, or so it seemed to me, lost the plot, the thread, of their own lives. As I did so a line from The Great Gatsby came into my mind: “Privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.” I wrote it down and liked how it looked.The result - as per the Author's Note as well as interview:
As I wrote on, other lines appeared almost of their own accord on the page in front of me. “And then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold,” from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “Losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going,” from Nineteen Eighty-Four. I liked the way these fitted into my own story. Liked the resonance they provided. Enjoyed also the challenge of making them cohere, both in meaning and language, with the lines I wrote myself.
The great majority of the lines in this novel are sourced word for word from books, by some eighty authors.The book contains a list of the 100 books used but (perhaps understandably to avoid 2000+ footnotes) not which books particular quotes are taken from, nor even (perhaps less understandably) any typographical indication of which parts are quoted and which are Gavron's own words, leaving the interested reader with a dual detective of spotting then sourcing them.
The story starts mostly in my own voice, with my own lines, but as it goes on the borrowed lines take over – more than four-fifths of the lines are taken from what turned out by chance (honestly!) to be exactly 100 works of literature, including all of the last nine chapters.
The subject of the book - usually 3rd person but sometimes narrated in the 1st depending on what the quotes require - is the writer, or listener, in residence at a prison, this writer who does not write among these men who are here because they have lost the plot, lost the thread of their own lives, but then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold (see above) and shortly after three of the men show him a newspaper story:
Looks down at the newspaper. Takes in a headline about a body found in the snow, the blurry mugshot of an adolescent boy.
That’s Felix, isn’t it.
He was in here until not so long ago.
A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.
What was he doing up there?
Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had seldom been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.
That’s the question.
Not hiking, not dressed like that.
Felix, per his prison records had loose notions concerning the rights of property starting his police record with shoplifting age 11 and was seventeen when, with accomplices unknown, he committed the offences for which he was sent away, a burglary which led to the death of an old woman. Released after almost 5 years in prison on parole he died of exposure on the hills at twenty-two years of age. Last known address a hostel in the east of the city. In breach of his licence.
Our writer goes in search, not of Felix himself, now buried in his grave, but of Felix's story, trying to piece it together and record it from the fragments he discovers. And here the voices from other books start to play a greater role. In the following passage I've added those I can source (I've no doubt missed some), as our writer records what he finds in:
Spidery handwriting full of crossings-out and corrections.
(Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness)
Fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations.
(Saul Bellow, Herzog)
Observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms.
(Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel)
Overhears in the streets.
In the cafe where he sometimes takes his meals.
Eavesdropping, if necessary, and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me.
(Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould's Secret)
Foraging in used bookstores.
(Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy)
Picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him.
(Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness)
Pieces, it seems to him, of other stories, yet to be told.
It is a fascinating technique one which feels like it ought to have been done before Gavron isn't aware of an exact precedent and neither am I, although others have referenced Graham Rawle's Woman's World, assembled entirely from cut-and-paste of words, but not sentences, from women's magazines:
Armen Avanessian's Irony and the Logic of Modernity shows how the masters of modernism, Proust, Musil and Joyce, used quotation, particularly the latter whose scattered unattributed quotations throughout his stream-of-consciousness in Ulysees.
However, Gavron's approach is stricter than that with a strong Oulipan element. And amongst Oulipans, Warren Motte, author of Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, highlights Marcel Bernabou, author of Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books:
Quotations, allusions, and literary references of various stripes color Bénabou’s writing to a degree that mocks our commonly-held notions of intertextuality. You can’t turn around and spit in Marcel Bénabou’s books without hitting an eminent representative of the Western literary canonBut Gavron himself has rejected that label, arguing the story chose the form rather than vice versa:
I didn’t set out to be an experimental novelist – and in fact that term makes me shudder slightly. It conjures images of an eccentric Frenchman disappearing down a cul de sac of his own making.which explains the fact that he allows himself the freedom of using his own lines (other than in the last 9 chapters when he forced himself not to do so), albeit throughout he is scrupulous in not altering, other than minor punctuation changes, the quotes he uses.
As for the sources Gavron uses - 100 books from 80 authors - there is one issue which has to be acknowledged.
On the positive side, there is a good sampling of world literature (and it was pleasing to see the translators named, although some quotes are included untranslated). Around 30% of the authors are in translation, including such names as Aharon Appelfeld, Roberto Bolano, Heinrich Boll, Italo Calvino, Jean Genet, Jean Giono, Gunter Grass, David Grossman, Primo Levi, Patrick Modiano, and Amos Oz.
But, as pointed out in a brilliantly insightful review by Tommi Laine in the Helsinki Book Review, the eighty authors chosen are 95% male. Tommi comments in his review:
I wonder if this was intentional, an ironic statement on “male narratives” (which essentially Felix Culpa is too, as it follows a man’s investigative quest into the wilderness), or, worse, an unconscious decision?My guess was that this was an honest reflection of Gavron's reading (and I fear my own shelves wouldn't look so different, as much as I would wish were the case). From the Irish Times interview, Gavron explains his sources:
I was reaching for the shelves where I keep my favourite books – the ones that have shaped me as a writer, that I am always returning to.This equally excellent review by Enricocionisuggests another fascinating theory, which I will quote:
even if it wasn't deliberate, it fits wonderfully with the idea that the book is about the writer-protagonist's (and by extension most white male middle-class readers') unconscious biases—how the very literature he loves and aspires to contribute to ends up limiting and distorting his perspective.Enricocioni kindly pointed me to a Shakespeare and Company podcast, made following a so-so Guardian review that was more critical of Gavron's sources, where Gavron was asked to address the issue directly. His own explanation was that the sources were not consciously chosen in a particular way, but he thinks largely reflected the nature of the story -given it is about male's loners journeying into the wild, it is perhaps not surprising that Cormac McCarthy is a prime source - and he pointed out that his previous book A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son’s Search for His Mother had a perspective much more rooted in feminist literature.
Returning to the text, as the quotations take over completely the text becomes increasingly poetic, as the book acknowledges:
Theft whose poem I am writing
Trying to build something out of old stones
Hoped by expressing them in a form that they themselves imposed to construct an order.
(The 1st and 3rd of these being quotes from Genet's The Thief's Journal and the 2nd from Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness).
Our writer isn't so much as detective as a pilgrim, indeed he resists the detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot (from Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake)
but rather journeys to the hills where Felix died, seeking:
Secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown
Fate of Felix
How and why the kid died
Many months this has been my task
(from respectively Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Richard Jeffries's After London, Charles Neider's The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
Having eventually reached the end of his pilgrimage, having found where Felix died, our writer is:
Set loose once more into the world to see what I would make of it.
End is not yet told.
the first a quote from Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and the second from Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. Or at least McCarthy, perhaps Gavron's favourite source of all in this book, is where Gavron found the phrase, but it originally featured in (and was perhaps borrowed by McCarthy from) Louisa May Alcott's A Whisper in the Dark), which can't help but remind this reader, in the very last line, of the overwhelmingly male gender of the authors cited.
But, this reservation aside, this is a brilliantly constructed and surprisingly moving book, and, as with The Fountain in the Forest, one I expect to feature in the Goldsmith's Prize running.
And for a wonderful taste of his approach, Jeremy Gavron contributed to Granta Magazine's Notes on Craft, except his essay was:
composed of lines (some slightly altered or elided) written or spoken in interviews by David Markson, Ian McEwan, Svetlana Alexievich, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, David Shields, Jenny Offill, Olivia Laing, Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz, David Mamet, Sven Birkets, Sarah Manguso, Alasdair Gray, Sarah Churchwell, John Hollander, Samuel Johnson, Robert Burton, Charles Simic, Pablo Picasso and Jean Genet.Highly worthwhile.
June 25, 2018
I tried really hard to like this book but in the end the story just didn't connect with me. If anything the story was confusing and almost nonsensical with the narrator and story becoming interchangeable.
I applaud the author's ability to be able to formulate a near cohesive narrative using a minimalist technique encompassing cobbled together lines from other forms of fiction with some originality thrown in. I can see how some readers would lap this up; there are some truly poetic lines in this book but I read for a story, and this just didn't work for me.
My rating: 1/5. I love the idea of using lines from other novels to write a story but unfortunately the story was uneventful and didn't hold my interest.
I applaud the author's ability to be able to formulate a near cohesive narrative using a minimalist technique encompassing cobbled together lines from other forms of fiction with some originality thrown in. I can see how some readers would lap this up; there are some truly poetic lines in this book but I read for a story, and this just didn't work for me.
My rating: 1/5. I love the idea of using lines from other novels to write a story but unfortunately the story was uneventful and didn't hold my interest.
February 20, 2018
Part of me was so drawn to reading “Felix Culpa” simply for the sheer audacity of its creation and out of a curiosity to see how it would work. This is a novel that’s composed almost entirely from the lines of other works of fiction by (approximately) eighty authors as varied as Italo Calvino, Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Mary Shelley. In poetry this is known as a cento where different verses or passages from multiple authors are composed into a new order. Jeremy Gavron forms in this fictional collage experiment a story about a young man named Felix who mysteriously died after he was arrested in a botched robbery. The narrator is a writer/teacher at the prison where Felix was incarcerated and he embarks on a mission to discover more about Felix’s life and what happened to him. Amidst his travels to interview people Felix encountered he slides into his own epistemological crisis and radically alters his life. It’s a moving tale in itself, but through the very nature of its innovative construction it also poses fascinating questions about the meaning of narrative and the way in which readers connect with fiction.
Read my full review of Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron on LonesomeReader
April 4, 2018
In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron picks out sentences from a hundred works of literature and rearranges them in order to craft a story of his own. The end result resembles an antithetical approach to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of a polyphonic novel: Bakhtin talked about Dostoevsky’s ability to write a multitude of different voices into a novel, while Gavron does the opposite by taking voices from the outside for the purposes of his own singular vision.
On a purely narrative level, Felix Culpa follows a writer intrigued by the death of a boy recently released from prison. Throughout his personal investigation, he has only one question in mind: why did the boy freeze to death alone in the hills in the north?
That’s Felix, isn’t it.
He was in here until not so long ago.
A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.
What was he doing up there?
Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had hardly been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.
That’s the question.
This is the premise that leads the writer on a quest to find the truth of what happened to Felix. He peruses documents pertaining to the boy from newspaper clips to inmate release reports. He interviews co-prisoners, a hotel manager, a youth worker, people from the boy’s hometown, anyone who can help him piece together the whole story: the writer has, indeed, a deep “detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot.” Ultimately, the writer ends up in the hills where Felix had died, at a point where the story, towering towards its end, takes on a new tone of survival in the wilderness, not far from the raw atmosphere of Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast.
Almost all of this is executed in Gavron’s borrowings of short sentences from other literary works, interspersed with blank lines like in the passage quoted above (a few of the sentences are purely his own invention, the author has revealed). It is quite a task for a novelist of any amount of experience and skill, but I think Gavron does a very fine job here. Felix Culpa is, after all, a good story, and the innovative idea behind its form works for the story’s benefit. It is a very quick read because of its form, and there resides one of its dangers for the reader: reading it too fast will ultimately downplay the poetic quality of the work, keeping in mind that so much time and energy must have gone into its making, pulling out phrases from a huge body of texts and arranging them successively so that they read smoothly.
This experimental style is less experimental if another similar novel of recent times is taken into account: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which was published last year and has gained a lot of attention after winning the Man Booker, is partly built around the idea of textual borrowing. While Saunders used historical documents to craft his novel, Gavron uses fiction. In a way, I think Saunders’s end result is more impressive, because he creates an intriguing narrative partially out of non-fiction. Nonetheless, together Lincoln in the Bardo and Felix Culpa exhibit an interesting take on what a novel is supposed to be, and it makes me wonder if this literary recycling is vaguely mirroring the Anthropocene, our age of natural disasters caused by humans. Furthermore, could these novels reflect the information overload so that, instead of explicitly contributing to the overload, we recycle the old? Isn’t it a liberating feeling to be able to create new art by recycling the old, less at the Earth’s expense? Yet the difference between ecological recycling and literary recycling is that a physical copy of Felix Culpa will still litter the Earth, if you don’t mind crude phrasing. But perhaps, on a metaphorical level, there’s a connection, a need to show how it’s unnecessary and wasteful to produce completely new products one after another.
Whatever the motives behind the novel’s style, Gavron’s source materials are surprisingly homogeneous if you look at the list of books provided at the back. Out of the hundred or so books that were utilized in the making of the novel, only a handful are written by women, the rest by various great men of the canon. I wonder if this was intentional, an ironic statement on “male narratives” (which essentially Felix Culpa is too, as it follows a man’s investigative quest into the wilderness), or, worse, an unconscious decision? Nonetheless, Felix Culpa is a fresh and, most importantly, captivating reading experience, no matter whether you gulp it down in one go (which is very much possible due to its brevity) or savor its poetic merits unrushed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize later this year. Ambiguous and inventive, this certainly qualifies as innovative fiction: “Storyteller’s task. / Live in the midst of the incomprehensible.”
Written for Helsinki Book Review.
On a purely narrative level, Felix Culpa follows a writer intrigued by the death of a boy recently released from prison. Throughout his personal investigation, he has only one question in mind: why did the boy freeze to death alone in the hills in the north?
That’s Felix, isn’t it.
He was in here until not so long ago.
A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.
What was he doing up there?
Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had hardly been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.
That’s the question.
This is the premise that leads the writer on a quest to find the truth of what happened to Felix. He peruses documents pertaining to the boy from newspaper clips to inmate release reports. He interviews co-prisoners, a hotel manager, a youth worker, people from the boy’s hometown, anyone who can help him piece together the whole story: the writer has, indeed, a deep “detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot.” Ultimately, the writer ends up in the hills where Felix had died, at a point where the story, towering towards its end, takes on a new tone of survival in the wilderness, not far from the raw atmosphere of Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast.
Almost all of this is executed in Gavron’s borrowings of short sentences from other literary works, interspersed with blank lines like in the passage quoted above (a few of the sentences are purely his own invention, the author has revealed). It is quite a task for a novelist of any amount of experience and skill, but I think Gavron does a very fine job here. Felix Culpa is, after all, a good story, and the innovative idea behind its form works for the story’s benefit. It is a very quick read because of its form, and there resides one of its dangers for the reader: reading it too fast will ultimately downplay the poetic quality of the work, keeping in mind that so much time and energy must have gone into its making, pulling out phrases from a huge body of texts and arranging them successively so that they read smoothly.
This experimental style is less experimental if another similar novel of recent times is taken into account: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which was published last year and has gained a lot of attention after winning the Man Booker, is partly built around the idea of textual borrowing. While Saunders used historical documents to craft his novel, Gavron uses fiction. In a way, I think Saunders’s end result is more impressive, because he creates an intriguing narrative partially out of non-fiction. Nonetheless, together Lincoln in the Bardo and Felix Culpa exhibit an interesting take on what a novel is supposed to be, and it makes me wonder if this literary recycling is vaguely mirroring the Anthropocene, our age of natural disasters caused by humans. Furthermore, could these novels reflect the information overload so that, instead of explicitly contributing to the overload, we recycle the old? Isn’t it a liberating feeling to be able to create new art by recycling the old, less at the Earth’s expense? Yet the difference between ecological recycling and literary recycling is that a physical copy of Felix Culpa will still litter the Earth, if you don’t mind crude phrasing. But perhaps, on a metaphorical level, there’s a connection, a need to show how it’s unnecessary and wasteful to produce completely new products one after another.
Whatever the motives behind the novel’s style, Gavron’s source materials are surprisingly homogeneous if you look at the list of books provided at the back. Out of the hundred or so books that were utilized in the making of the novel, only a handful are written by women, the rest by various great men of the canon. I wonder if this was intentional, an ironic statement on “male narratives” (which essentially Felix Culpa is too, as it follows a man’s investigative quest into the wilderness), or, worse, an unconscious decision? Nonetheless, Felix Culpa is a fresh and, most importantly, captivating reading experience, no matter whether you gulp it down in one go (which is very much possible due to its brevity) or savor its poetic merits unrushed. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize later this year. Ambiguous and inventive, this certainly qualifies as innovative fiction: “Storyteller’s task. / Live in the midst of the incomprehensible.”
Written for Helsinki Book Review.
September 8, 2019
This book showed up on a new books list at the library & seemed like it might fall into the experimental writing category. And I liked the cover art. By the time I received a copy from the library, I couldn't quite remember the "hook" for the experimental angle, nor did I go looking for it. I like surprises.
I realized the hook at the end of the book, of course, because the Author's Note says, "The great majority of the lines in this novel are sourced word for word from the hundred or so books, by some eighty authors, listed below. Fourteen of the chapters, including the last nine, are made up entirely of sourced lines."
It's very short, often with each line being a separate paragraph. It's easy to read in one sitting. Gavron does a decent enough job of weaving together the quotes to create a story with a bit of unease, a bit of the unknown.
I think anal-retentive readers will be looking up each line to figure out which ones are original vs. taken from the list in the author's note. Lol. That's not my style & I think, in a way, doesn't fit with the author's end goal vs. his process. In an interview with The Irish Times, Gavron says, "I began re-reading these books with a red pen in my hand. It was thrilling to engage with these old favourites in a new way, to converse with them so actively. I found lines which said what I wanted to say, only in different ways. I found lines that said something I hadn’t thought of – that suggested new ways of thinking about my story, my characters, or new storylines. I found lines that were about one thing and used them for something else – a line about an animal that I used to describe a person, for example, or vice versa."
Many thanks to Paul Fulcher for his review, which gave me an even greater appreciation for this book.
While I liked the story, I still think it's one that I appreciated the *idea of* more than I appreciated reading the story itself.
I realized the hook at the end of the book, of course, because the Author's Note says, "The great majority of the lines in this novel are sourced word for word from the hundred or so books, by some eighty authors, listed below. Fourteen of the chapters, including the last nine, are made up entirely of sourced lines."
It's very short, often with each line being a separate paragraph. It's easy to read in one sitting. Gavron does a decent enough job of weaving together the quotes to create a story with a bit of unease, a bit of the unknown.
I think anal-retentive readers will be looking up each line to figure out which ones are original vs. taken from the list in the author's note. Lol. That's not my style & I think, in a way, doesn't fit with the author's end goal vs. his process. In an interview with The Irish Times, Gavron says, "I began re-reading these books with a red pen in my hand. It was thrilling to engage with these old favourites in a new way, to converse with them so actively. I found lines which said what I wanted to say, only in different ways. I found lines that said something I hadn’t thought of – that suggested new ways of thinking about my story, my characters, or new storylines. I found lines that were about one thing and used them for something else – a line about an animal that I used to describe a person, for example, or vice versa."
Many thanks to Paul Fulcher for his review, which gave me an even greater appreciation for this book.
While I liked the story, I still think it's one that I appreciated the *idea of* more than I appreciated reading the story itself.
February 26, 2018
Is there something to the fact that Felix's story—the story of a marginalised figure, a young, solitary working class man who stumbled early into a life of petty crime, and who was seen as dim by most who knew him—is told through lines taken from classic literature? Felix Culpa is the kind of book that you "get" a bit more every time you read it—in terms of enjoying it more, noticing new things, and having a clearer sense of what the text is doing and saying—and, luckily, it's short enough (190 pages, with those big spaces between lines) that reading it multiple times is a fairly reasonable feat. I've read it twice, enjoyed it both times, and I'm already itching for a third go. However, I did not find an answer to the last question that I was happy with until I started reading another book, Know Your Place, Dead Ink's excellent anthology of writing by working class authors about the working class experience in modern-day Britain. In her contribution, 'An Open Invitation', Kit de Waal writes:
"The truth is, and I heard this more than once, 'literature is a record of the middle classes for the middle classes.' Certainly the definitions of 'literature' and what constitutes 'good taste' are tightly bound up with class. What the working class or underclass produce is rarely included in the canon; street literature, songs, hymns, spoken word, dialect and oral storytelling is nowhere to be found, neither is it taught in schools or universities. [...] Even Jane Eyre, a 'poor' orphan, was well educated, spoke French and played the piano, ultimately and conveniently becoming a rich heiress."
After reading that passage, the idea came to me that Felix Culpa might be about the empathy gap between classes. The protagonist, who appears to be middle class, uses the literature he's familiar with to understand people who have very different life experiences from his own—the inmates at the prison, Felix of course, and Felix's friends and acquaintances—but this literary filter he places between himself and the world may have a more distorting effect than he realises, since it's still produced by middle class white men and meant for other middle class white men. He's like one of the card images in one of my favourite board games, Dixit—a mummy walking obliviously across a stormy landscape, all wrapped up in pages from books (right). By the end, the writer-protagonist may think he "gets" what Felix went through, what his life was like, but does he really?
This also casts a different light on something that bugged me about the novel since before I even read it. At the back of the book, all the texts Gavron sourced his lines from are listed alphabetically, and I noticed straightaway that, out of about eighty authors, only three are women (Willa Cather, Nadine Gordimer, Mary Shelley), and only three are authors of colour (Walter Mosley, Kenzaburo Oe, Akira Yoshimura). At first, I found it jarring and a little depressing to encounter, in 2018, yet another list of classic literature that is written almost entirely by white men, many of whom are long dead. Now, however, I'm more inclined to think it was a deliberate choice, rather than the usual case of a white man forgetting that people who don't look like him also write books. And even if it wasn't deliberate, it fits wonderfully with the idea that the book is about the writer-protagonist's (and by extension most white male middle-class readers') unconscious biases—how the very literature he loves and aspires to contribute to ends up limiting and distorting his perspective.
For my full review (and other reviews), head over to my blog, Strange Bookfellows: https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...
"The truth is, and I heard this more than once, 'literature is a record of the middle classes for the middle classes.' Certainly the definitions of 'literature' and what constitutes 'good taste' are tightly bound up with class. What the working class or underclass produce is rarely included in the canon; street literature, songs, hymns, spoken word, dialect and oral storytelling is nowhere to be found, neither is it taught in schools or universities. [...] Even Jane Eyre, a 'poor' orphan, was well educated, spoke French and played the piano, ultimately and conveniently becoming a rich heiress."
After reading that passage, the idea came to me that Felix Culpa might be about the empathy gap between classes. The protagonist, who appears to be middle class, uses the literature he's familiar with to understand people who have very different life experiences from his own—the inmates at the prison, Felix of course, and Felix's friends and acquaintances—but this literary filter he places between himself and the world may have a more distorting effect than he realises, since it's still produced by middle class white men and meant for other middle class white men. He's like one of the card images in one of my favourite board games, Dixit—a mummy walking obliviously across a stormy landscape, all wrapped up in pages from books (right). By the end, the writer-protagonist may think he "gets" what Felix went through, what his life was like, but does he really?
This also casts a different light on something that bugged me about the novel since before I even read it. At the back of the book, all the texts Gavron sourced his lines from are listed alphabetically, and I noticed straightaway that, out of about eighty authors, only three are women (Willa Cather, Nadine Gordimer, Mary Shelley), and only three are authors of colour (Walter Mosley, Kenzaburo Oe, Akira Yoshimura). At first, I found it jarring and a little depressing to encounter, in 2018, yet another list of classic literature that is written almost entirely by white men, many of whom are long dead. Now, however, I'm more inclined to think it was a deliberate choice, rather than the usual case of a white man forgetting that people who don't look like him also write books. And even if it wasn't deliberate, it fits wonderfully with the idea that the book is about the writer-protagonist's (and by extension most white male middle-class readers') unconscious biases—how the very literature he loves and aspires to contribute to ends up limiting and distorting his perspective.
For my full review (and other reviews), head over to my blog, Strange Bookfellows: https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...
December 5, 2017
Felix Culpa is easily one of the most intriguing books I’ve ever read. The story is comprised of individual sentences rather than paragraphs; including sentences lifted from over 100 different books (which are listed bibliographically at the end of the story).
Over many short chapters the tale of Felix’s death is unravelled, as we track his life, his encounters in the last year of his life and see his final days through his eyes.
I admit, at first this book can be challenging. But, this is true of any book written in a non-recognisable format. I found myself having to reread the initial pages a couple of times before the story began to unfold. It takes a little while (maybe 5 pages) to adjust, but once you do it is a seamlessly told story.
It is a true deconstruction/reconstruction of all of the techniques of the novel, and I found that I enjoyed the oft slipped in recognisable lines from books I’d read enhanced the book; these allusions allowed for a deeper/other sense of meaning to what technically just the same words slotted into a different tale.
If you aren’t yet convinced to step out of your comfort zone, know that it’s also a quick read. I finished in 4 hours spaced over 3 days; but if I’d just sat down and powered through it I could have easily finished it in 3.
If you are considering trying something new, I’d recommend this book whole heartedly.
Over many short chapters the tale of Felix’s death is unravelled, as we track his life, his encounters in the last year of his life and see his final days through his eyes.
I admit, at first this book can be challenging. But, this is true of any book written in a non-recognisable format. I found myself having to reread the initial pages a couple of times before the story began to unfold. It takes a little while (maybe 5 pages) to adjust, but once you do it is a seamlessly told story.
It is a true deconstruction/reconstruction of all of the techniques of the novel, and I found that I enjoyed the oft slipped in recognisable lines from books I’d read enhanced the book; these allusions allowed for a deeper/other sense of meaning to what technically just the same words slotted into a different tale.
If you aren’t yet convinced to step out of your comfort zone, know that it’s also a quick read. I finished in 4 hours spaced over 3 days; but if I’d just sat down and powered through it I could have easily finished it in 3.
If you are considering trying something new, I’d recommend this book whole heartedly.
Read
July 6, 2018Felix Culpa is extraordinary: a wild, beautiful book which patchworks tiny scraps of other novels to create something haunting, resonant and absolutely original.
Olivia Laing, Author of The Lonely City
Beguilingly intriguing … has a strange poetry.
The Mail on Sunday
One of our more innovative, quietly inventive and exciting novelists.
Ali Smith, TLS
Gavron's singular approach nudges his narrative towards the universal.
Stoddard Martin, Jewish Chronicle
[Gavron merges] detective story, mythic romance and medieval quest into a short, affecting parable for modern times … It would be easy to become overly aware of the novel's self-conscious form, but Gavron is too subtle and skillful for that.
Financial Times
Felix Culpa does succeed as a diverting experiment, thanks to Gavron’s talent for coaxing a subtle, individual rhythm out of his affectionate patchwork.
The Big Issue
The way the disparate voices reflect the narrator’s question of identity is just as poetic as the language itself, and creates an immersive representation of the narrator’s experience. This is one for those avid readers who like a challenge, and who can’t get enough of the literary giants of modern history, only this time in a new, repurposed format.
Readings
Olivia Laing, Author of The Lonely City
Beguilingly intriguing … has a strange poetry.
The Mail on Sunday
One of our more innovative, quietly inventive and exciting novelists.
Ali Smith, TLS
Gavron's singular approach nudges his narrative towards the universal.
Stoddard Martin, Jewish Chronicle
[Gavron merges] detective story, mythic romance and medieval quest into a short, affecting parable for modern times … It would be easy to become overly aware of the novel's self-conscious form, but Gavron is too subtle and skillful for that.
Financial Times
Felix Culpa does succeed as a diverting experiment, thanks to Gavron’s talent for coaxing a subtle, individual rhythm out of his affectionate patchwork.
The Big Issue
The way the disparate voices reflect the narrator’s question of identity is just as poetic as the language itself, and creates an immersive representation of the narrator’s experience. This is one for those avid readers who like a challenge, and who can’t get enough of the literary giants of modern history, only this time in a new, repurposed format.
Readings
June 14, 2025
i like the concept of the lines of his narrative coming from other books because he is a writer listening to the stories told by other people and building his own work around that but why did you not add footnotes to tell me what lines are from what! i also think at times it made it very difficult to know what was happening and the jump from third to first person was quite jarring at times
the second half of the book also felt completely unrelated until like the last 2 pages
the second half of the book also felt completely unrelated until like the last 2 pages
June 4, 2020
The Challenges, Pitfalls, and Pleasures of Oulipo
Oulipo is a technique, (or school, or movement, or academic joke), from the 1960's whereby writers are challenged to create works using "constrained writing techniques". Think of those stories written using only words with no "e" in them and you get the idea. The movement can be as fun or as serious as you like, but as you might imagine the scholarly bombast and overkill can get a bit thick sometimes.
Anyway, this book is a variation on that theme, being written primarily with lines drawn from other works, (100 books by about 80 different authors). I admired the fact that rather than just fooling around with the challenge, the author actually tried to write a book that had some content and meaning, and wasn't just an Oulipo amusement.
As to the story, I thought the author succeeded in telling a story, and creating a work, of some depth and feeling. So I was surprised that this worked as well as it did as an actual novel.
As to the underlying gimmick, I appreciated it but found it frustrating over time. Gavron is well read and his sources are not uncommon. But, while there is a list of authors and source books at the end of the work, there are no footnotes identifying the individual lines. The reader has to guess and speculate, and that eventually became tiresome. It also missed a great opportunity for enjoyment, since comparing a line's original use with its repurposed use was the best part of the book's fun. For example, seeing the reuse of Joseph Mitchell's lines about Joe Gould was amusing, (and added some new interest and luster to the original lines), especially in the context of exactly this sort of book.
So, this struck me as fair as a normal novel, good fun as a postmodern lark, but somewhat disappointing as a veiled treasure hunt.
(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
Oulipo is a technique, (or school, or movement, or academic joke), from the 1960's whereby writers are challenged to create works using "constrained writing techniques". Think of those stories written using only words with no "e" in them and you get the idea. The movement can be as fun or as serious as you like, but as you might imagine the scholarly bombast and overkill can get a bit thick sometimes.
Anyway, this book is a variation on that theme, being written primarily with lines drawn from other works, (100 books by about 80 different authors). I admired the fact that rather than just fooling around with the challenge, the author actually tried to write a book that had some content and meaning, and wasn't just an Oulipo amusement.
As to the story, I thought the author succeeded in telling a story, and creating a work, of some depth and feeling. So I was surprised that this worked as well as it did as an actual novel.
As to the underlying gimmick, I appreciated it but found it frustrating over time. Gavron is well read and his sources are not uncommon. But, while there is a list of authors and source books at the end of the work, there are no footnotes identifying the individual lines. The reader has to guess and speculate, and that eventually became tiresome. It also missed a great opportunity for enjoyment, since comparing a line's original use with its repurposed use was the best part of the book's fun. For example, seeing the reuse of Joseph Mitchell's lines about Joe Gould was amusing, (and added some new interest and luster to the original lines), especially in the context of exactly this sort of book.
So, this struck me as fair as a normal novel, good fun as a postmodern lark, but somewhat disappointing as a veiled treasure hunt.
(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
April 16, 2020
I was between 2 and 3 stars for this book.
It may have just been my terrible attention span, but it was only towards the last half of the book that it really began to make sense to me what was going on.
But, generally, for the concept of the book and how it turned out - I am very happy and impressed. Do I think it could have been done better by another storyline? Perhaps, but I don't think it's necessarily needed.
Despite my initial confusion, this novel does have a strange poetic vibe in the way it is written, and I did enjoy the last half, which is why I decided to pick 3 stars. Again, the concept was very impressive and considering everything it was done rather well. I'm glad I read this book but I don't think its one for everyone.
It may have just been my terrible attention span, but it was only towards the last half of the book that it really began to make sense to me what was going on.
But, generally, for the concept of the book and how it turned out - I am very happy and impressed. Do I think it could have been done better by another storyline? Perhaps, but I don't think it's necessarily needed.
Despite my initial confusion, this novel does have a strange poetic vibe in the way it is written, and I did enjoy the last half, which is why I decided to pick 3 stars. Again, the concept was very impressive and considering everything it was done rather well. I'm glad I read this book but I don't think its one for everyone.
October 31, 2017
This book is really odd, but I liked it. It's very short, with each sentence in its own paragraph, reads more like a poem than a novel. With its sentences taken from 100 different works, by a range of authors, it is, of course, a bit disjointed, and yet does tell a comprehensive story. What was it about? I'm not really sure- a writer leaves his job working in a prison in order to try and find out how a young former prisoner died. He encounters a range of different people who knew the lad, and retraces his steps. This book is more about the language and the rhythm of its words that the plot or the characters - I daresay a lot of it went over my head, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
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August 31, 2025dnf on page 44
i just can’t stand this… i was really interested to see how the format & collection of lines would weave together, but that’s the thing, for me, they don’t. it’s otherworldly on the scale measuring choppiness & i couldn’t stand the way it just from first to third POV
i just can’t stand this… i was really interested to see how the format & collection of lines would weave together, but that’s the thing, for me, they don’t. it’s otherworldly on the scale measuring choppiness & i couldn’t stand the way it just from first to third POV
August 27, 2020
Genius/Brilliant/Arresting work.
March 1, 2021
an interesting piece of contemporary fiction, very quick and poetic read but there was a lack of connection with the characters and plot which was to be expected with the medium. still enjoyable.
December 31, 2024
Less than the sum of its parts.
March 7, 2025
2.5... This was kind of all over the place. I definitely liked the second half better than the first half. But then the end fell flat. Meh.
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