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Dead Souls
Dead Souls follows the course of a single big night - most of which is spent in the bar at the Travelodge just off Waterloo Bridge. There the unnamed narrator meets Solomon Wiese, a poet who has been ostracized by the community after failing to pass a technology-based authenticity test. Solomon Wiese's account of his rise and fall is a story that takes him the entire night and the remainder of the novel to tell. It is a story that touches on - amongst many other things - childhood encounters with 'nothingness', a retreat to the east of England, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, and Wiese's plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which the narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...
320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 18, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
May 18, 2021
“Dead Souls,” by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down.
But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: “Dead Souls” is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry. One of the book’s blurbs claims it’s “gut-wrenchingly funny,” which may be true for a certain subset of lute-playing spoken-word baristas in Brooklyn, but others should temper their expectations.
This is not a negative review.
Indeed, I think “Dead Souls” is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: “Dead Souls” is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry. One of the book’s blurbs claims it’s “gut-wrenchingly funny,” which may be true for a certain subset of lute-playing spoken-word baristas in Brooklyn, but others should temper their expectations.
This is not a negative review.
Indeed, I think “Dead Souls” is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
December 29, 2021
Dead Souls is the Gogolian title of the debut novel from Norfolk-born poet Sam Riviere.
It is hard not to comment, in common with a number of reviews (https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all...) that the novel is best described as a Roberto Bolano plot written in the style of Thomas Bernhard, Savage Detectives in the style of My Prizes. And yet as far as I can see Riviere himself has not made the comparison, indeed were it to prove that he hadn’t read either book, it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me.
And both things - the unoriginality of my observations, an impression formed from reviews and the blurb before I even opened the novel’s pages, and the potentially indirect, not necessarily acknowledged, influences on the novel itself - are both highly apposite for the book’s themes.
Riviere is an academic as well as a poet and now novelist and his research interests, in his own words “include contemporary poetry and ‘post-internet’ poetics, found text and appropriation, conceptual writing, small presses and innovative publishing, form and procedure in poetry and prose, imitation and plagiarism, autofiction and experimental fiction, book arts, and post-digital publishing and writing generally, especially the effects of technology on literary style, genre and form.”
In an interview around the launch of the book (https://www.anothermag.com/design-liv...) he commented:
And the books explores these themes, and more, via an alternative / near-future England where literature has claimed the cultural zeitgeist - tote bags from independent bookshops have superseded band t-shirts among the youth. But a crisis of confidence around originality in literature has both led to both the emergence of poetry as a more ‘authentic’ form, but also the desire, particularly via the big 4 publishers, to hunt out plagiarism and assess authenticity mechanically:
The team of engineers was nearing the completion of a program that they – the select panel – believed would have wonderful, recuperating effects on the devastated marketplace. Working from the latest developments in plagiarism detection services, the team of engineers had constructed a tool that made all previous plagiarismdetection services resemble child’s play sets – that was the claim. Not only would this program be able to recognise and match any extended sequence of words and phrases in the submitted document with those contained in an existing publication, but, using quantitative analysis and comparison of a sophistication hitherto not imagined, it would be possible to identify such features as the machinations of plot, the structural dynamics of narrative and perspective, the balancing of metaphor and the density of descriptive language, tactics of rhetoric such as repetition, assonance, anaphora and apostrophe, the intersecting arcs of major and minor characters and the patterns of their outcomes, the pacing and delivery of dialogue, the physical laws of fantastic worlds, chronological distortions, and even the biologies of imaginary creatures. They also had in their sights that most elusive quality, the style of the work, which would be objectively defined at last, locked down, taking into account the frequency and emphasis of specific words, the frequency and emphasis of specific sounds, and perhaps even – the engineers refused for now to be drawn on this point – the indivisible emotional components, below the surface, underpinning everything. So that what the program would arrive at, by logging all of these variables and myriad others, over a plethora of categories and sub-categories, was a complete taxonomy of every literary publication in the language, graphed every which way, testable through any metric, readable along any axis, displayed in colour-coded charts or sharp monotone grids, as the viewer preferred. A friendly dialogue between two sworn enemies. Business failure prompting a descent into criminality. Children who die in the first twenty pages. Descriptions of the light in western Scotland. Easter as the story’s climactic and final date. Friendships resulting from traffic accidents. Giant plants. Historical figures cross-dressing. Isolated pieces of luck. Junkyards as hideouts. The knocking out of the narrator by an unknown assailant. Lavish descriptions of feasts. Mythical creatures malevolent in appearance yet well intentioned. Northern European cities as honeymoon destinations. Open wounds infested with maggots. Purple garments. Questions directed to an artificial intelligence. Risky bridge captures. Sex in bathrooms. The betrayal of a king by his nephew. Uses of time travel to investigate ambiguous parentage. Visions of the Christ child. Worlds with three or more moons. Xenophobic shopkeepers. Yellow-haired villains. Zoo as principal setting. And so on. We are able to apprehend, the statement continued, for the first time, an absolutely individual fingerprint, the soul of the book, and with this wonderful tool we will strive to ensure that no work is brought before the paying public that runs the risk of being exposed as a sham, a copy, on any level a fraudulent document. This kind of deception is at an end, the originality of the author enshrined, placed once again at the centre of the enterprise which we each still live to serve. Signed, yours faithfully, etc.
That my opinion of this novel is, undoubtedly, influenced by the views of others is on point, as the narrator explains:
No sooner would I assert a particular perspective on a particular poet or poem, a dislike of poem x of poem y, or of poet x or poet y, than one of my three friends would express the contrary opinion, that is, they would immediately launch into a convincing case for poet x or poet y, as if they had foreseen my statement and prepared in advance a counter-statement, so before long I would find myself coming around to their point of view, to the extent that I would actually take on their point of view, as if it were my own point of view, in some sense actually believing it was my own point of view, that my affection for said poem or said poet preceded my hearing their opinion, when this was precisely not the case I had simply subsumed their position into my own, or more accurately I had simply replaced my point of view with their point of view..
The plot of the novel has our narrator, once a poet but now primarily a small press editor, attending a festival of literature on the South Bank. The buzz at the festival is all about Solomon Wiese, the first poet ‘exposed’ by the new software. Later that evening, the narrator meets Wiese himself at a bar and hears more about his story.
The whole is told in one intense, unbroken monologue by the narrator, albeit one infused with much indirect reported speech, often more than one layer (a Bernhard trademark of course).
And the novel touches on not just plagiarism and originality, but the big press vs small press scene, publishing in a social media age, the cultural dominance of the capital, the role of privilege (particularly among those claiming not to be privileged), mansplaining and mansplaining of mansplaining, English civilisation (and the appropriateness of the word ‘veneer’) and much more besides.
And the whole is infused with much humour. I read the book on a retreat from the capital, where I live, to rural Norfolk. And part of the book is set in and around Diss, where Wiese visits a retired poet, driven to his ruin by the villagers:
There are still simple village people in this part of the world, and their obsession with commemoration became linked immediately and indissolubly with the knowledge that I was their village poet, the old poet said and so naturally they demanded that I commemorate anything that happened in the village that seemed to anyone worth commemorating. A fever of commemoration activity ensued. I was expected to commemorate with poetry not only weddings and funerals, but the size of a particularly impressive cauliflower or cabbage, or the fact that the farmer's favourite cow had won a medal at the country fair, or the arrival of the Easter holidays, or the village shop coming under new management.
Wonderful. 4.5 stars. If not 5, in line with many of the rave reviews, perhaps only because the subject matter, of literature, is of rather more interest in my experience to critics and other authors than it is to general readers. But then that very cultural insularity is another of the novel’s themes. And it is of course unsurprising when rereading reviews, to find another reviewer (Ron Charles in the Washington Post) had made the exact same point.
It is hard not to comment, in common with a number of reviews (https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all...) that the novel is best described as a Roberto Bolano plot written in the style of Thomas Bernhard, Savage Detectives in the style of My Prizes. And yet as far as I can see Riviere himself has not made the comparison, indeed were it to prove that he hadn’t read either book, it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me.
And both things - the unoriginality of my observations, an impression formed from reviews and the blurb before I even opened the novel’s pages, and the potentially indirect, not necessarily acknowledged, influences on the novel itself - are both highly apposite for the book’s themes.
Riviere is an academic as well as a poet and now novelist and his research interests, in his own words “include contemporary poetry and ‘post-internet’ poetics, found text and appropriation, conceptual writing, small presses and innovative publishing, form and procedure in poetry and prose, imitation and plagiarism, autofiction and experimental fiction, book arts, and post-digital publishing and writing generally, especially the effects of technology on literary style, genre and form.”
In an interview around the launch of the book (https://www.anothermag.com/design-liv...) he commented:
In poetry, particularly, there’s a sense that when you write a poem you’re supposed to be expressing your true self. I never really understood that. I don‘t really understand when people say art is self-expression, because what is the self? Is it the sum of your experiences, or your particular angle on the world? I don’t know. Your inner self seems to be precisely what you can’t communicate to someone. And I think, because the premiums are so high on the “authentic experience” in poetry, it puzzles me. We all learn the same words, and we all learn language. So why is taking someone else’s language so bad? It’s connected to early capitalism, really; this idea that content belongs to people. But we claim language all the time, that’s mainly what we do when we speak; we cobble together various things we’ve already heard and said before. This idea of authenticity and originality in writing is this ghostly thing that doesn’t really exist. Writing is just reorganising materials and shining a new light on something.
And the books explores these themes, and more, via an alternative / near-future England where literature has claimed the cultural zeitgeist - tote bags from independent bookshops have superseded band t-shirts among the youth. But a crisis of confidence around originality in literature has both led to both the emergence of poetry as a more ‘authentic’ form, but also the desire, particularly via the big 4 publishers, to hunt out plagiarism and assess authenticity mechanically:
The team of engineers was nearing the completion of a program that they – the select panel – believed would have wonderful, recuperating effects on the devastated marketplace. Working from the latest developments in plagiarism detection services, the team of engineers had constructed a tool that made all previous plagiarismdetection services resemble child’s play sets – that was the claim. Not only would this program be able to recognise and match any extended sequence of words and phrases in the submitted document with those contained in an existing publication, but, using quantitative analysis and comparison of a sophistication hitherto not imagined, it would be possible to identify such features as the machinations of plot, the structural dynamics of narrative and perspective, the balancing of metaphor and the density of descriptive language, tactics of rhetoric such as repetition, assonance, anaphora and apostrophe, the intersecting arcs of major and minor characters and the patterns of their outcomes, the pacing and delivery of dialogue, the physical laws of fantastic worlds, chronological distortions, and even the biologies of imaginary creatures. They also had in their sights that most elusive quality, the style of the work, which would be objectively defined at last, locked down, taking into account the frequency and emphasis of specific words, the frequency and emphasis of specific sounds, and perhaps even – the engineers refused for now to be drawn on this point – the indivisible emotional components, below the surface, underpinning everything. So that what the program would arrive at, by logging all of these variables and myriad others, over a plethora of categories and sub-categories, was a complete taxonomy of every literary publication in the language, graphed every which way, testable through any metric, readable along any axis, displayed in colour-coded charts or sharp monotone grids, as the viewer preferred. A friendly dialogue between two sworn enemies. Business failure prompting a descent into criminality. Children who die in the first twenty pages. Descriptions of the light in western Scotland. Easter as the story’s climactic and final date. Friendships resulting from traffic accidents. Giant plants. Historical figures cross-dressing. Isolated pieces of luck. Junkyards as hideouts. The knocking out of the narrator by an unknown assailant. Lavish descriptions of feasts. Mythical creatures malevolent in appearance yet well intentioned. Northern European cities as honeymoon destinations. Open wounds infested with maggots. Purple garments. Questions directed to an artificial intelligence. Risky bridge captures. Sex in bathrooms. The betrayal of a king by his nephew. Uses of time travel to investigate ambiguous parentage. Visions of the Christ child. Worlds with three or more moons. Xenophobic shopkeepers. Yellow-haired villains. Zoo as principal setting. And so on. We are able to apprehend, the statement continued, for the first time, an absolutely individual fingerprint, the soul of the book, and with this wonderful tool we will strive to ensure that no work is brought before the paying public that runs the risk of being exposed as a sham, a copy, on any level a fraudulent document. This kind of deception is at an end, the originality of the author enshrined, placed once again at the centre of the enterprise which we each still live to serve. Signed, yours faithfully, etc.
That my opinion of this novel is, undoubtedly, influenced by the views of others is on point, as the narrator explains:
No sooner would I assert a particular perspective on a particular poet or poem, a dislike of poem x of poem y, or of poet x or poet y, than one of my three friends would express the contrary opinion, that is, they would immediately launch into a convincing case for poet x or poet y, as if they had foreseen my statement and prepared in advance a counter-statement, so before long I would find myself coming around to their point of view, to the extent that I would actually take on their point of view, as if it were my own point of view, in some sense actually believing it was my own point of view, that my affection for said poem or said poet preceded my hearing their opinion, when this was precisely not the case I had simply subsumed their position into my own, or more accurately I had simply replaced my point of view with their point of view..
The plot of the novel has our narrator, once a poet but now primarily a small press editor, attending a festival of literature on the South Bank. The buzz at the festival is all about Solomon Wiese, the first poet ‘exposed’ by the new software. Later that evening, the narrator meets Wiese himself at a bar and hears more about his story.
The whole is told in one intense, unbroken monologue by the narrator, albeit one infused with much indirect reported speech, often more than one layer (a Bernhard trademark of course).
And the novel touches on not just plagiarism and originality, but the big press vs small press scene, publishing in a social media age, the cultural dominance of the capital, the role of privilege (particularly among those claiming not to be privileged), mansplaining and mansplaining of mansplaining, English civilisation (and the appropriateness of the word ‘veneer’) and much more besides.
And the whole is infused with much humour. I read the book on a retreat from the capital, where I live, to rural Norfolk. And part of the book is set in and around Diss, where Wiese visits a retired poet, driven to his ruin by the villagers:
There are still simple village people in this part of the world, and their obsession with commemoration became linked immediately and indissolubly with the knowledge that I was their village poet, the old poet said and so naturally they demanded that I commemorate anything that happened in the village that seemed to anyone worth commemorating. A fever of commemoration activity ensued. I was expected to commemorate with poetry not only weddings and funerals, but the size of a particularly impressive cauliflower or cabbage, or the fact that the farmer's favourite cow had won a medal at the country fair, or the arrival of the Easter holidays, or the village shop coming under new management.
Wonderful. 4.5 stars. If not 5, in line with many of the rave reviews, perhaps only because the subject matter, of literature, is of rather more interest in my experience to critics and other authors than it is to general readers. But then that very cultural insularity is another of the novel’s themes. And it is of course unsurprising when rereading reviews, to find another reviewer (Ron Charles in the Washington Post) had made the exact same point.
June 2, 2021
I’m the first person properly reviewing this book and I wish there were some positive things to say about it, but really nothing comes to mind. Though I am positive that there is a chance my review might help someone save time and possibly money by avoiding this book.
Metaphysical mystery sounded intriguing. That’s what did it. In retrospect, further research should have occurred, but even knowing that the author specializes in poetry and experimental fiction wouldn’t have prepared me for the steaking pile of doodoo this was. No, wait…this is poetic, so let’s go with the flaming aggregation of excrement. In the end, it’s all the same thing, though, mainly…unreadable.
Continuing with his experimental fiction trend, the author produced a paragraph free dialogue free obscenely dense forest of a narrative wherein a semblance of a paper thin plot is thoroughly obscured by linguistic and stylistic indulgences. The plot has something to do with poets (of course) and plagiarism and contemplation of art and love and that’s about as much as I can tell you about it, because it was not easily discernible during reading and immediately forgotten upon finishing. And the only reason I even finished this book is because I’m an obsessive completist by nature. There wasn’t a single thing about this book that merited interest otherwise. The worst thing is that it isn’t like the author has no talent, it seems as though he does, at least for sentence crafting and phrase turning, but that alone is nowhere near enough to become a book. And no souls shall be livened by this endeavor.
Overwritten, overwrought, overdone, underplotted, underbaked and underwhelming. If this is metafiction, I’m not a fan. It went by quickly enough, but what a complete waste of perfectly good 240 minutes or so. This one required reading of several good books immediately afterwards just to get that taste out of my mind. Stay away. Far away. Thanks Netgalley.
Metaphysical mystery sounded intriguing. That’s what did it. In retrospect, further research should have occurred, but even knowing that the author specializes in poetry and experimental fiction wouldn’t have prepared me for the steaking pile of doodoo this was. No, wait…this is poetic, so let’s go with the flaming aggregation of excrement. In the end, it’s all the same thing, though, mainly…unreadable.
Continuing with his experimental fiction trend, the author produced a paragraph free dialogue free obscenely dense forest of a narrative wherein a semblance of a paper thin plot is thoroughly obscured by linguistic and stylistic indulgences. The plot has something to do with poets (of course) and plagiarism and contemplation of art and love and that’s about as much as I can tell you about it, because it was not easily discernible during reading and immediately forgotten upon finishing. And the only reason I even finished this book is because I’m an obsessive completist by nature. There wasn’t a single thing about this book that merited interest otherwise. The worst thing is that it isn’t like the author has no talent, it seems as though he does, at least for sentence crafting and phrase turning, but that alone is nowhere near enough to become a book. And no souls shall be livened by this endeavor.
Overwritten, overwrought, overdone, underplotted, underbaked and underwhelming. If this is metafiction, I’m not a fan. It went by quickly enough, but what a complete waste of perfectly good 240 minutes or so. This one required reading of several good books immediately afterwards just to get that taste out of my mind. Stay away. Far away. Thanks Netgalley.
dnfed
July 8, 2024DNF at 60%.
The cover and title were so cool but even when I tried to speed read it to get it over with I couldn't do it. There were interesting ideas but it often felt like they should have been their own little short stories rather than part of a larger "story" I say "story" because for the life of me I couldn't get a grasp on where any of it was going and quite frankly after ± 25% I didn't really care to try.
No rating.
The cover and title were so cool but even when I tried to speed read it to get it over with I couldn't do it. There were interesting ideas but it often felt like they should have been their own little short stories rather than part of a larger "story" I say "story" because for the life of me I couldn't get a grasp on where any of it was going and quite frankly after ± 25% I didn't really care to try.
No rating.
June 11, 2021
Dead Souls is the very definition of a literary read if you take literary within the popular literary v genre fiction argument- this novel has no stopping points, no chapters and sometimes endless seeming sentences. It stands out because of these things even though it is not unique and in the end, once I grasped the concept, I understood that to get anything from it I would need to read it in one sitting.
So that's what I did. My lower rating may imply that I don't give this novel much credit- yet it is a fair one for me because whilst I adored the writing, loved how the author used language and levelled description, in the end it just didnt have enough story for my tastes.
Yet it did have a certain sense to it that deserves praise. The central theme, the burning question if you like, of whether all writing is now plagiarism to a higher or lesser degree, whether there is anything new to be found within any reading material you may pick up as a reader, was conceptually excellent and leaves you with a sense of melancholy and a tendency to observe your recent reading through new eyes. It is an intelligent meta concept executed in a way that does what I assume the author wants it to do, yet I was left feeling that it just took too long to bring the point home.
If you love literary mind tricks and are a patient reader you may find a lot to love here. Me, I loved some of it and was exasperated by some of it in pretty equal parts.
So that's what I did. My lower rating may imply that I don't give this novel much credit- yet it is a fair one for me because whilst I adored the writing, loved how the author used language and levelled description, in the end it just didnt have enough story for my tastes.
Yet it did have a certain sense to it that deserves praise. The central theme, the burning question if you like, of whether all writing is now plagiarism to a higher or lesser degree, whether there is anything new to be found within any reading material you may pick up as a reader, was conceptually excellent and leaves you with a sense of melancholy and a tendency to observe your recent reading through new eyes. It is an intelligent meta concept executed in a way that does what I assume the author wants it to do, yet I was left feeling that it just took too long to bring the point home.
If you love literary mind tricks and are a patient reader you may find a lot to love here. Me, I loved some of it and was exasperated by some of it in pretty equal parts.
November 11, 2023
Once I got into it I really enjoyed this satire on the arts establishment positing an alternative London where poets rule the (arts) roost. Riviere has a good old dig at the mainstream government funded arts organisations (I'm guessing organisations such as the Arts Council, Barbican and South Bank Centre).
May 2, 2021
DEAD SOULS by Sam Riviere is an interesting and intricate novel. It’s about a poet who is disgraced when it’s found out his work has been plagiarized. This book is described as a metaphysical mystery whatever that is. I didn’t find there to be much mystery. I can appreciate the writing but I struggled with it. There are no chapters and the sentences are extremely long. There were some witty parts and I found the premise intriguing but couldn’t connect to any of the characters or the meandering storyline.
.
Thank you to Catapult via NetGalley for my advance review copy!
.
Thank you to Catapult via NetGalley for my advance review copy!
February 9, 2021
What a strange reading experience this was, not unlike the first time I read Camus' The Fall. In fact, that's the book I most readily want to associate with this one, although the blurbs relating it to Gogol and Bernhard and Bolaño are not wrong either. This novel has a dream-like quality to it, helped by the hypnotic prose (a poet, our Mr. Riviere is when he's not writing this novel) and the stream-of-consciousness style -- a bit like watching the third season of TWIN PEAKS, particularly in the early going where our narrator is attending a festival at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. Then, when he strikes up a conversation at the bar after the event, the conversation takes us deeper and deeper into something... something quite strange, quite unsettling, but also (and maybe this is because I finished it right before bed), something that you can't quite put your finger on when you wake in the morning.
Truly one for the weird ones, but I loved this and devoured it.
Truly one for the weird ones, but I loved this and devoured it.
July 4, 2021
It's interesting how the structural conventions of a book can have dramatic impact when stripped away. 'Dead Souls' is one sustained paragraph with no chapter breaks. This created a reading experience where I felt I had to keep churning through pages at the manic pace in which I imagined the book being written. Then, about 20 pages in, my semi-dormant higher brain functions gave me an existential pinch that told me to, Slow The Fuck Down! I'm glad I listened. This novel is full of wit and insight, not just about writing, but also about the nature of success and failure. And how neither seems to ever be fully attainable. I also vow to someday go to a secondhand bookstore and buy a poetry anthology. And when I do, I expect to be hailed as a hero by the owner.
February 18, 2022
I listened to this book in audio and wished it had never found its way to my audio shelf. It was a waste of my time. Others, whose reviews I often agree with, liked it quite a lot. I did not. I'm going to classify it as extreme satire about the publishing industry and about the multitude of people influenced by others and social media to agree to something they don't either know anything about or that they think will make them more popular with those they seek to impress or have like them. The book is basically Solomon Wiese, a wannabe poet, going on and on about things I had no interest in. A major theme was plagiarism in writing and some automated system designed to detect plagiarism. I'm not sure why the GR blurb calls this a mystery.
May 23, 2021
DNF. Honestly, life is too short to slog through this, sorry.
June 13, 2021
if you can't handle the experimental nature of 'dead souls's' format, just listen to the audiobook; there, problem with most the negative reviews solved. this book is a bit of a love letter to the publishing industry, or at least those who can't stand it, but know the importance of partaking in its minutiae, from writer, to editor, to agent. at times it felt dfw-ish, along with the cynicism and wit of moshfegh, and a comfortable nod to joyce. the advancement of technology to render editors' jobs useless was clever, scary, and funny. those three words are consistent descriptors for this book. when reading a character's critique of what "real" poetry is and isn't, along with who gets famous, who doesn't, and guesses to the reasons why, a poet or writer you think the same about will instantly pop up in your head, without riviere even having to mention anyone in particular irl by name. self-awareness, sleazy business, appropriation, plagiarism, it's all in 'dead souls.' i can see this book being divisive, but that's probably part of the intention, anyway. i guess it matters if you're in on the joke, or the one being joked on, and if you like stream of consciousness writing.
March 24, 2023
Did I finish this book or did it finish me.
June 8, 2022
I ordered this book by mistake but started to read it anyway—another mistake. Seems to be a satire of the pretensions of the literary world. Not worth it, in my opinion.
Interesting review from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997601...
Interesting review from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997601...
March 27, 2025
2.5 stars. This book was a fucking slog. One continuous stream of consciousness written in obnoxiously overcomplicated language that seems to be that way purely to show off the intellect of the author and unknown narrator. Not to mention the entire story was a deeply cynical and depressing take on poetry and how the literary world functions. While I will admit that Sam Riviere has his small moments of clever truth within the novel, you have to trudge through so much pointless and frustrating text to get to any kind of useful idea that it barely feels worth it. The story was also extremely hard to follow and often seemed to go on a tangent for 20 or so pages that barely had any bearing on the story whatsoever. The one thing I appreciated in this book was an extremely brief tangent about a side characters brother in which the narrator describes how we understand our lives only in terms of other people's lives and the chains of exploitation that connect us. Other than that though, I just can't really say I gained very much from this book other than a few hours of slight frustration as I tried to get through it.
June 12, 2021
I knw the Travelodge near Waterloo, and the South Bank. Having read this though, I don't think it matters. A single shaggy dog of a paragraph, dense yet strangely hypnotic, on poets, and poetry, and the value (or lack of it) of modern culture. There were some funny moments and interesting ideas, but they are buried in a sea of words which begin to blur after a while. A little disappointing overall.
tasted
October 13, 2022This novel has some elements that I usually enjoy, such as a flat, rational narrative voice (first person), repetition, and long paragraphs (one, to be exact, it appears), but instead of the usual thrust this form has, it is staccato and moves very slowly. And the repetition added no depth to the images or words. Just not for me.
did-not-finish
June 8, 2022I can't read this. I want to, but I can't. It got tiring with the long sentences that I had to reread to get. No paragraphs, no dialogues..just an endless text. For the first time in my 10+ years of reading in English, I felt difficulty catching up. Or maybe I'm just tired?
I'll give it another chance if there's another edited version or an audiobook.
I'll give it another chance if there's another edited version or an audiobook.
July 15, 2021
Absolutely hilarious!! Mr. Rivière is quite brilliant to keep it all straight and write in the stream of conscious style, all the while using satire. Very very clever.
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November 19, 2024A smart, fun, and richly written literary romp. It's set in an alternate (very alternate) reality in which poetry has such high stakes that publishers have devised a highly technical plagiarism detection program to make sure readers won't be bored by the same stuff repeated (if only!). The law of the program comes down hard, and thus creates outlaws. We follow the protagonist's search for one of these outlaws, Solomon Wiese, in a London cultural festival. I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that the search doesn't last very long. The protagonist finds Wiese in an all-night Travelodge bar, drinking with other poets. From that point onward, the present action of the story takes place entirely within that bar. We get stories from Wiese and others about other poets--outlaws and not--in their little world. Riviere does a great job of capturing the dynamics of a small but sort-of-high stakes cultural community. There are thoughtful observations about literature, culture, social politics, originality, and a lot else along the way. The cast of characters we hear about is almost entirely male, though that overwhelming male-ness comes to a point near the end. Still, I would've loved to read more about wacky women/other people in this literary circle too. It's remarkable that the story takes place over such few days in such a tight setting--just the cultural festival and then the bar afterparty--but I found the latter ~third rather tedious as we were both narratively and physically stuck in the bar. Nonetheless, it's a great torchbearer for the Bolaño/Bernhard/Pynchon tradition (a tradition I love).
June 26, 2021
Ok let me start off by saying I was super interested in what the story was about. The whole premise was so intriguing and I thought it was something that would capture my entire attention. That unfortunately is not how it played out although i'm very surprised at how fast I was able to fly through it.
Alot of it felt very pointless. Like 60% of the book was random chatter and if this was a concersation that i'd been sucked into i'd have fallen asleep all the way at the beginning. If this book was made to sound the way a conversation goes then he did an amazing job. He captured the random bits of information a person will give you when they're telling something and all the weird tangents they go off on. It was perfect in that sense. But the book made me feel tired of it as soon as I started reading it whenever I came back to it. I think part of it was the lack of chapters which is a silly reason really but you just need chapters man. It becomes way too intense when you feel like you're just constantly reading and never getting to the end of anything. When I had to put the book down for the night or it was the end of my lunch I didn't quite know where to leave it...I just had to stop reading.
Alot of it felt very pointless. Like 60% of the book was random chatter and if this was a concersation that i'd been sucked into i'd have fallen asleep all the way at the beginning. If this book was made to sound the way a conversation goes then he did an amazing job. He captured the random bits of information a person will give you when they're telling something and all the weird tangents they go off on. It was perfect in that sense. But the book made me feel tired of it as soon as I started reading it whenever I came back to it. I think part of it was the lack of chapters which is a silly reason really but you just need chapters man. It becomes way too intense when you feel like you're just constantly reading and never getting to the end of anything. When I had to put the book down for the night or it was the end of my lunch I didn't quite know where to leave it...I just had to stop reading.
March 12, 2022
I don't read a lot of fiction and really do not know much about the world of poetry, so take my review with a grain of salt. Mr. Riviere has written a novel in first person that is more self-absorbed and annoying than anything I have read in a long while. First, there are no chapter headings and no paragraph demarcations, so the book reads as one long stream-of-conscious rant. I suppose Mr. Riviere thinks he is clever, but ancient Jewish literature was written the same way, but also without punctuation or vowels. Chapter and verse headings in the bible are a modern invention. I felt Mr. Riviere was trying to scream a point, but I could not really tell what he was screaming. The whole book read as disgruntled has-beens trying to explain their professional failures as some grand philosophical criticism of society - pathetic, tedious and annoying.
October 5, 2021
Got through about 30%. Found it increasingly tiresome. No paragraphs; no chapters (though the contents list suggests there are). Stream of consciousness stuff: a writer writing for writers ... Give me a break.
October 2, 2023
SO MANY NOVELS of late have no table of contents. This bothers me. The new Zadie Smith novel, for instance (which I am enjoying very much so far), has chapters that are both numbered and titled and moreover divided into eight "volumes" (not literally--it's all one book). all these carefully designated parts, but no table of contents. Frustrating.
Poet Sam Riviere's first novel has a table of contents, I am pleased to report, one I found myself consulting frequently, and moreover has one in spite of the fact that it has no chapters, not even divisions indicated by blank pages or extra spacing. In fact, his novel is all one paragraph from beginning to end. By having recourse to the table of contents, however, a reader can quickly locate the pages on which one or another character had been mentioned earlier--an indispensable aid, given the monolithic presentation of the text.
Riviere thus had me as an ally before his novel even commenced, and everything after that confirmed me a stalwart in his camp. For one thing, the novel is very reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard. This could have gone very wrong, of course, but here it is skillfully sustained.
For another, the writing is consistently surprising, keen-eyed, and even graceful (even when it goes in for some of the intentionally graceless Bernhardian effects, á la Correction).
Best of all, the novel, even given its swirly four-in-the-morning surrealist streaks, persuasively presents the world of contemporary poetry. The (unnamed) narrator is a poet, or former poet, who edits a literary quarterly and whose duties have taken him to the Literature Zone of the Festival of Culture taking place at the Royal Festival Hall. All of which suggests that poetry is a matter of crucial, even central cultural significance and is lavishly supported...which it is, in a way. At the Festival, everyone is gossiping about the disgrace of poet Solomon Wiese, who has been caught plagiarizing and has also been bad boyfriend. All of which suggests that poetry is just a tiny, spiteful coterie of people relentlessly undermining each other while pursuing an activity no one else in the world cares about...which is also true, in a way. Riviere convincingly portrays poetry's' paradoxical situation of somehow being quite important and not at all important at the very same time.
Soon the narrator finds Solomon Wiese himself, and we get his story--as well as some stories within his story, and stories within those stories, in a delightfully Bernhardian matryoshka doll of a novel.If I were a graduate student still, I would diagram them all out for you...but I'm not, so I won't.
Dead Souls reminded me of Douglas Kearney's Optic Subwoof, very different book though that is (not a novel, for one thing), in that it gives a sense of the contemporary Anglophone poetry world that is wickedly funny and irreverent while also being lucid and earnest.
Poet Sam Riviere's first novel has a table of contents, I am pleased to report, one I found myself consulting frequently, and moreover has one in spite of the fact that it has no chapters, not even divisions indicated by blank pages or extra spacing. In fact, his novel is all one paragraph from beginning to end. By having recourse to the table of contents, however, a reader can quickly locate the pages on which one or another character had been mentioned earlier--an indispensable aid, given the monolithic presentation of the text.
Riviere thus had me as an ally before his novel even commenced, and everything after that confirmed me a stalwart in his camp. For one thing, the novel is very reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard. This could have gone very wrong, of course, but here it is skillfully sustained.
For another, the writing is consistently surprising, keen-eyed, and even graceful (even when it goes in for some of the intentionally graceless Bernhardian effects, á la Correction).
Best of all, the novel, even given its swirly four-in-the-morning surrealist streaks, persuasively presents the world of contemporary poetry. The (unnamed) narrator is a poet, or former poet, who edits a literary quarterly and whose duties have taken him to the Literature Zone of the Festival of Culture taking place at the Royal Festival Hall. All of which suggests that poetry is a matter of crucial, even central cultural significance and is lavishly supported...which it is, in a way. At the Festival, everyone is gossiping about the disgrace of poet Solomon Wiese, who has been caught plagiarizing and has also been bad boyfriend. All of which suggests that poetry is just a tiny, spiteful coterie of people relentlessly undermining each other while pursuing an activity no one else in the world cares about...which is also true, in a way. Riviere convincingly portrays poetry's' paradoxical situation of somehow being quite important and not at all important at the very same time.
Soon the narrator finds Solomon Wiese himself, and we get his story--as well as some stories within his story, and stories within those stories, in a delightfully Bernhardian matryoshka doll of a novel.If I were a graduate student still, I would diagram them all out for you...but I'm not, so I won't.
Dead Souls reminded me of Douglas Kearney's Optic Subwoof, very different book though that is (not a novel, for one thing), in that it gives a sense of the contemporary Anglophone poetry world that is wickedly funny and irreverent while also being lucid and earnest.
August 6, 2021
Dead Souls is a remarkable book. Consisting of a single solid paragraph mercilessly devoid of dialogues or any other breaks, full of long and often repetitive sentences, and with a multilayered plot that revolves around the world of poetry and literary publishing, it should be completely unreadable. Astonishingly, for me it was a page turner and I breezed through it in less than two weeks. The breathless pacing is probably one of the reasons, but to be fair the main one is that Sam Riviere is a very skilled writer.
This is, however, a very frustrating book. Even as I was devouring it I could feel that it was leaving no mark in me whatsoever. Riviere does something clever and, as I said, it layers stories on top of each other, and often what we are reading is the narrator telling in his own words a story that the protagonist, Solomon Wiese, is telling him in his own words which he heard from someone else. There are also all sorts of detours about random topics, mostly observations about the life of poets, writers, and in general the literary world. Of course stories within stories is a very common literary device which has been used in novels for centuries, but the problem is that in this book these stories and digressions are continuously being abandoned without any conclusion or closure so they end up being a string of unsatisfying non sequiturs. It is a pity because some of these stories did pique my interest before they were tossed away.
Another problem I had with the book is its hopeless tone. The novel is a satire, of course, but it is too nihilistic for my taste. It also gets too hyper-self-aware. It is one of these novels where dialogues (always in reported speech, of course, remember it's a single paragraph) are punctuated with insightful real time commentary on the minutiae of the social dynamics involved in the conversation. No need to say that these observations almost inevitably paint a depressing picture of human relationships.
In summary, it was an entertaining read but ultimately rather shallow. I enjoyed Riviere's mastery of long sentence syntax and found his insider critique of the literary establishment interesting, but apart from this, it left me rather cold.
This is, however, a very frustrating book. Even as I was devouring it I could feel that it was leaving no mark in me whatsoever. Riviere does something clever and, as I said, it layers stories on top of each other, and often what we are reading is the narrator telling in his own words a story that the protagonist, Solomon Wiese, is telling him in his own words which he heard from someone else. There are also all sorts of detours about random topics, mostly observations about the life of poets, writers, and in general the literary world. Of course stories within stories is a very common literary device which has been used in novels for centuries, but the problem is that in this book these stories and digressions are continuously being abandoned without any conclusion or closure so they end up being a string of unsatisfying non sequiturs. It is a pity because some of these stories did pique my interest before they were tossed away.
Another problem I had with the book is its hopeless tone. The novel is a satire, of course, but it is too nihilistic for my taste. It also gets too hyper-self-aware. It is one of these novels where dialogues (always in reported speech, of course, remember it's a single paragraph) are punctuated with insightful real time commentary on the minutiae of the social dynamics involved in the conversation. No need to say that these observations almost inevitably paint a depressing picture of human relationships.
In summary, it was an entertaining read but ultimately rather shallow. I enjoyed Riviere's mastery of long sentence syntax and found his insider critique of the literary establishment interesting, but apart from this, it left me rather cold.
July 17, 2021
(copy received through goodreads giveaway)
This is a deceptively challenging book to read, as it is a 289-page, single paragraph. That structural choice, of a single stream of unbroken narrative, not so much as a direct quote, but instead the internal monologue of our narrator as he filters memories and how they fit into the stories he is being told, is incredibly well-executed, but very difficult. As a reader and as a human I struggle with focus; if I was a person who could sit down and read a book in one sitting of a few hours, this book would be a fantastic choice. But I don't think this book is as rewarding for those of us who simply cannot stay plugged in for that length of time.
That said, the author does a tremendous job with the language and flow; this book reads beautifully, and the fluid repetition of names and relationships is worded in such an affectation as to be perfectly believable as a train of thought (our narrator is, for the most part, either telling or trying to follow a meandering saga, just as the reader is) and the restating of people and their relationships to the present tense serves as a welcome anchor, a stylistic save point in following the story. This novel reminds me a lot of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, except this novel I could actually follow throughout, even if I wasn't quite sure what the point was. Like Calvino's novel, though, I finished this novel, and wasn't sure what happened. Or why. I mean, the action, present tense, is that our narrator delivers a poetry reading, then goes to a bar, meets a disgraced poet, and stays up all night listening to this poet tell of his weird experiences, and tell stories he has heard from people he has met of their weird experiences. Then it's morning, and our narrator leaves, and there's the sense that something about this all-night vigil has fundamentally changed them for the worse, but for the life of me I'm not really sure what. It has gorgeously flowing language and evocative concepts, but the ending never really touches back down to earth.
This is a deceptively challenging book to read, as it is a 289-page, single paragraph. That structural choice, of a single stream of unbroken narrative, not so much as a direct quote, but instead the internal monologue of our narrator as he filters memories and how they fit into the stories he is being told, is incredibly well-executed, but very difficult. As a reader and as a human I struggle with focus; if I was a person who could sit down and read a book in one sitting of a few hours, this book would be a fantastic choice. But I don't think this book is as rewarding for those of us who simply cannot stay plugged in for that length of time.
That said, the author does a tremendous job with the language and flow; this book reads beautifully, and the fluid repetition of names and relationships is worded in such an affectation as to be perfectly believable as a train of thought (our narrator is, for the most part, either telling or trying to follow a meandering saga, just as the reader is) and the restating of people and their relationships to the present tense serves as a welcome anchor, a stylistic save point in following the story. This novel reminds me a lot of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, except this novel I could actually follow throughout, even if I wasn't quite sure what the point was. Like Calvino's novel, though, I finished this novel, and wasn't sure what happened. Or why. I mean, the action, present tense, is that our narrator delivers a poetry reading, then goes to a bar, meets a disgraced poet, and stays up all night listening to this poet tell of his weird experiences, and tell stories he has heard from people he has met of their weird experiences. Then it's morning, and our narrator leaves, and there's the sense that something about this all-night vigil has fundamentally changed them for the worse, but for the life of me I'm not really sure what. It has gorgeously flowing language and evocative concepts, but the ending never really touches back down to earth.
July 10, 2025
This is interesting, and while it starts strong it falters in a hard way fairly quickly. It seems this is the poet's first attempt at a novel and so novelistic elements, such as time and pacing, what or who to emphasize with extra ink. Well, this is what first novels are often struggling with.
Let's be clear: Cortazar did this much better by which I mean the stream of consciousness and the repetition, especially in his middle stories. So it appears that Riviere wants to try to do a Cortazarian number here that comes off as the lesser homage. The sharpness and imagination of Cortazar here is lacking and I found myself asking (since Riviere is mainly a poet) where here is the careful, elliptical, evocative language that poetry often demands?
The book is exquisitely, broadly hyped, as Brits do for their own, but the book itself and the writing doesn't hold up to they hyperbolic praise.
And, it is an obvious fact to state the "critical acclaim" is often done by critics who have not read enough to know when a work is actually derivative so they can't call it out, or if they are from the country of the author they dare not.
Should you read this? It's interesting in a way but be prepared for two major rambles by Solomon Weise (who is like a mysterious main character) that will possibly bore you for pages on end. Basically a good chunk of the book is our narrator getting his ear chewed off by Weise over the course of a night in a bar. It's the weaker part of the novel. During this extended rant there are 30 or so pages in which Weise rambles about two subjects, to the point of disinterest on my part. Also be prepared for "insights" about the publishing and visual arts world that are very 1990's. Like me you may find we've over analyzed such ideas and moved on and so they are no longer very insightful but hackneyed. My recommendation is pick up that great book of Cortazar short stories, Bestiary, and enjoy.
Let's be clear: Cortazar did this much better by which I mean the stream of consciousness and the repetition, especially in his middle stories. So it appears that Riviere wants to try to do a Cortazarian number here that comes off as the lesser homage. The sharpness and imagination of Cortazar here is lacking and I found myself asking (since Riviere is mainly a poet) where here is the careful, elliptical, evocative language that poetry often demands?
The book is exquisitely, broadly hyped, as Brits do for their own, but the book itself and the writing doesn't hold up to they hyperbolic praise.
And, it is an obvious fact to state the "critical acclaim" is often done by critics who have not read enough to know when a work is actually derivative so they can't call it out, or if they are from the country of the author they dare not.
Should you read this? It's interesting in a way but be prepared for two major rambles by Solomon Weise (who is like a mysterious main character) that will possibly bore you for pages on end. Basically a good chunk of the book is our narrator getting his ear chewed off by Weise over the course of a night in a bar. It's the weaker part of the novel. During this extended rant there are 30 or so pages in which Weise rambles about two subjects, to the point of disinterest on my part. Also be prepared for "insights" about the publishing and visual arts world that are very 1990's. Like me you may find we've over analyzed such ideas and moved on and so they are no longer very insightful but hackneyed. My recommendation is pick up that great book of Cortazar short stories, Bestiary, and enjoy.
June 3, 2023
2.6/5
i've never felt so much despair from reading a book. not because of its content but because the lack of chapters, paragraphs, and quotes threw me for a never-ending loop. 300 pages and i still couldn't get use to it.
as for the book itself, i can't even lie- didn't understand most of it. i can acknowledge it as a critique on literature itself but perhaps a too ambitious one in my opinion. the book essentially exists inside the head of the narrator and it was just so difficult to grasp onto ideas with such a monotonous point of view. ideas were introduced successively (and granted really smoothly) and it felt like too much to digest at- what felt like, once. the intro (before the entrance of solomon wiese) was so painful to read because there is virtually no painting of the narrator. it starts inside their head and remains connected to just that (every sentence is just a thought, like there's no feeling). it starts to pick up after it takes on the perspective of providing a description for what someone else is drawing from their mind (the narrator reiterating solomon wiese's words, which came from his thoughts). i really like the ending where it kind of broke the fourth wall by debating the roles of a confessor and a listener, during a confession (wall being broke when considering the formatting/structure of the book).
overall, content was pretty dense and philosophical and i felt like a lot could be taken from that. going to reread it sometimes in the future and see where everything lands then.
i've never felt so much despair from reading a book. not because of its content but because the lack of chapters, paragraphs, and quotes threw me for a never-ending loop. 300 pages and i still couldn't get use to it.
as for the book itself, i can't even lie- didn't understand most of it. i can acknowledge it as a critique on literature itself but perhaps a too ambitious one in my opinion. the book essentially exists inside the head of the narrator and it was just so difficult to grasp onto ideas with such a monotonous point of view. ideas were introduced successively (and granted really smoothly) and it felt like too much to digest at- what felt like, once. the intro (before the entrance of solomon wiese) was so painful to read because there is virtually no painting of the narrator. it starts inside their head and remains connected to just that (every sentence is just a thought, like there's no feeling). it starts to pick up after it takes on the perspective of providing a description for what someone else is drawing from their mind (the narrator reiterating solomon wiese's words, which came from his thoughts). i really like the ending where it kind of broke the fourth wall by debating the roles of a confessor and a listener, during a confession (wall being broke when considering the formatting/structure of the book).
overall, content was pretty dense and philosophical and i felt like a lot could be taken from that. going to reread it sometimes in the future and see where everything lands then.
March 3, 2025
This book is INFURIATING in the best way. The sentences are crafted so precisely that they feel like a performance in themselves. At times, I loved it. Other times, I wanted to throw the book across the room. It teases meaning, offers glimpses of clarity, then buries them under more layers of detours and footnotes. It’s exhausting. It’s brilliant. It’s exactly what it intends to be. To be clear, it is written as one long, uninterrupted block of text. There are no chapters, no clear pauses, and no paragraph breaks. This means the story keeps flowing without giving you a chance to stop and take a breath. It creates a kind of relentless, almost hypnotic effect, where the narrative feels like one continuous train of thought. It’s a deliberate choice that mirrors the obsessive, meandering nature of the book. The lack of breaks forces you to stay in the narrator’s mind, making the reading experience more intense and immersive. It can feel overwhelming at times, but that’s part of what makes the book so unique. If you like books that demand patience, that make you work for every ounce of meaning, that leave you feeling slightly unmoored, then read it NOW. But if you need clarity, structure, or even the satisfaction of a clear resolution, this one might drive you up the wall. Either way, it lingers.
December 27, 2021
I'm not going to lie, I wasn't thrilled when this book lapsed completely into retelling- but after some reflection, I realized that this was due partly because it precluded any aesthetic / ethical "assessment" of the main character- these questions of: are they basically a good person? do i like them?, which provide so much cheap satisfaction to the contemporary reader, myself included - to the point where this sideshow almost upstages the story itself.
This narrative fake out both pre-empts the modern reader's impulse to calculate character righteousness, with a secondhand version of the trendy formula:
"I'm only thinking, never doing, so I'm not doing anything wrong," and answers the question posed at the start by the narrator: which is the 'truth' - the poet's work (their sincerity + brand (broke, diaspora, etc)), or their knowing, ironic distance from it?
The poet's "truth" here is neither, it's in the exit song, when nothing is at stake so there's no reason to withhold any info. not just "old souls," in thrall to the past and nostalgia-pilled, but dead souls, defined only by their debt to the past. in this way i do think this is a book that couldn't have been written at any point but now, so ,,, 4 stars.
This narrative fake out both pre-empts the modern reader's impulse to calculate character righteousness, with a secondhand version of the trendy formula:
"I'm only thinking, never doing, so I'm not doing anything wrong," and answers the question posed at the start by the narrator: which is the 'truth' - the poet's work (their sincerity + brand (broke, diaspora, etc)), or their knowing, ironic distance from it?
The poet's "truth" here is neither, it's in the exit song, when nothing is at stake so there's no reason to withhold any info. not just "old souls," in thrall to the past and nostalgia-pilled, but dead souls, defined only by their debt to the past. in this way i do think this is a book that couldn't have been written at any point but now, so ,,, 4 stars.
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