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Erith
Unifying the influences of English supernatural tale and the micro-observations of the Japanese I-novel, and combining them with a trainspotterish psychogeography, Quentin S. Crisp brings you a monochrome novella that is either a paean to or a polemic against the drabness of quotidian Britain – his dreariest yet.
It’s 2013. Pop culture is dead. With human activity increasingly ‘updated’ to digital conformity, community is on the verge of extinction, and a weary, soulless, 21st century Britain is about to endure a phase of austerity imposed from above. As gentrification continues in London, a pitifully obscure writer is squeezed to the very outskirts of the city. At an ebb, he applies for housing benefit, stunned by depression and lost in the shuffling labyrinth of his internal monologue, tripping over the untied shoelaces of his mind.
It’s 2013. Pop culture is dead. With human activity increasingly ‘updated’ to digital conformity, community is on the verge of extinction, and a weary, soulless, 21st century Britain is about to endure a phase of austerity imposed from above. As gentrification continues in London, a pitifully obscure writer is squeezed to the very outskirts of the city. At an ebb, he applies for housing benefit, stunned by depression and lost in the shuffling labyrinth of his internal monologue, tripping over the untied shoelaces of his mind.
- GenresFiction
Tankobon Hardcover
First published November 1, 2015
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45 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 23, 2021
Here is the inherent danger one finds as a reader of Quentin S. Crisp: the overall style and pace Crisp sets is relaxed, intelligent, possibly super intelligent, funny, observant and serious. This allows Crisp to write about anything without losing the attention or interest of the reader. No plot required! The simple act of reading him is itself a pleasure.
Gert Jonke and Robert Walser buzzed in my head as I read Crisp for the first time. The wandering thread of the prose, and the descriptions of the city surrounding them gave me a minor connection to hold fast to. I will read more Crisp (probably tonight) as i'm still unsure how to encourage others, without mindless superlatives stacking, to read this fine author as soon as possible.
Gert Jonke and Robert Walser buzzed in my head as I read Crisp for the first time. The wandering thread of the prose, and the descriptions of the city surrounding them gave me a minor connection to hold fast to. I will read more Crisp (probably tonight) as i'm still unsure how to encourage others, without mindless superlatives stacking, to read this fine author as soon as possible.
December 28, 2016
I follow my track of Quentin S. Crisp's road with this strange book about how subjectivity can be defeated by itself. The self, this obstacle, dissolves into a myriad of perceptual details in this plot about urban disintegration. A liberating book in more ways than one.
January 22, 2021
The narrator is looking for the Town Hall to claim Housing Benefit, and I can empathise with the mazy wordy clause structures of heuristic Hesitancy and its maze of subways where it is easy to get lost, with strange mentionable areas cut off by such subways. I’ve been there, done it, got the Tea Shirt. Except not in Erith. Yet.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
October 28, 2025
In Erith a poverty stricken writer makes a series of trips to a provincial town in “the obscurest outskirts of southeast London” to fill in a housing benefit claim. He is affected by the weird and uncanny atmospheres this town emanates, which lead to a series of quasi-mystical episodes and philosophical ruminations on reality and the role of the imagination.
Subtitled an ‘I-Novel’, Erith utilises the Japanese tradition of autobiographical fiction, subtly different to the western tradition of ‘life writing’ of which DH Lawrence, Henry Miller and the more recent Karl Ove Knausgård and Rachel Cusk are exemplars. To the I-novel, plot and character are secondary to the ‘mental attitude’ of the author, where the exploration of personal reflections and attitudes towards everyday experiences are key. Here, the everyday experiences of Erith are transformed through Crisp’s poetic sensibilities, he notes “the seeds of Erith’s enigma may have been buried in the soil of my mind, germinating somewhere”. The dull quotidian of life: the electronic bureaucracy of benefit claim departments manned by spry youngsters, bus rides through drab southeast London streets on rainy days, grim supermarkets, his damp and dreary flat which gives him a rash, are traced with a dour Larkin-esque melancholy. Crisp has a poet’s sensitivity to the subtleties of ambiance and twists these perceptions of the quotidian into the eery and the supernatural.
Erith, the provincial “half-town”, is not easy to get to, and Crisp is at the mercy of a faltering public transport system. The buses have their own inscrutable system known only to locals, and if the trains are running at all, they are likely to stall. There’s a sense of a quest in getting to and from the town, as if it is a place out of space and time. Even the unusual pronunciation of the name of the town, Ear-ith, signals it as “otherworldly”, “as if it had encroached on this reality from elsewhere.”
Set in a grey autumn in austerity-hit Britain, in “the senility of capitalism”, Erith’s inner weather is unremitting melancholic, where “lights mourned their way across the skies of night and day.” It is this dour reality in which the writer’s imagination is in revolt. He’s self aware, knowingly quick to flights of fantasy, but belligerent in the defence of that trait;
Indeed it is the crux of Erith, it lives or dies on the success of its paean to the imaginative faculty, or at the very least, on its consolation against reality and its grim “itch of despair.”
Looking out from the train when he notices gentle rain spotting against the window, inspires this;
(Hilariously bathetic, his polemic is immediately undercut with the next line: “The train terminated at Barnehurst.” Indeed there is a self-depreciating humour running throughout Erith. Later on he is nearly blinded in the Catford branch of Tesco, and ends the episode “telling myself never, never to look into the heart of a check out barcode scanner again.”)
It is that “kernel” of reality that Crisp is attuned to, coming up against it in various locales in Erith. It is finding quasi-mystical visions in amongst the detritus of the quotidian, the struggle to keep true to his artistic vision despite his impoverishment and the unrelenting dourness of reality. When rooting around behind a neglected church off Erith high street, the smell of soil suddenly fills him
It is as though Crisp has transformed Erith itself into a kind of symbol or objective correlative for the writer’s imagination, that source of creative vision in defiance of grim, dour reality. Erith is one of the great Crisp novellas, for me up there with Hamster Dam. It contains everything that makes him such a unique writer, and as such serves as a good introduction to his late work, where his life, the zeitgeist and his fiction are so compellingly interlinked.
More Quentin S. Crisp reviews at kulchurkat.uk
Subtitled an ‘I-Novel’, Erith utilises the Japanese tradition of autobiographical fiction, subtly different to the western tradition of ‘life writing’ of which DH Lawrence, Henry Miller and the more recent Karl Ove Knausgård and Rachel Cusk are exemplars. To the I-novel, plot and character are secondary to the ‘mental attitude’ of the author, where the exploration of personal reflections and attitudes towards everyday experiences are key. Here, the everyday experiences of Erith are transformed through Crisp’s poetic sensibilities, he notes “the seeds of Erith’s enigma may have been buried in the soil of my mind, germinating somewhere”. The dull quotidian of life: the electronic bureaucracy of benefit claim departments manned by spry youngsters, bus rides through drab southeast London streets on rainy days, grim supermarkets, his damp and dreary flat which gives him a rash, are traced with a dour Larkin-esque melancholy. Crisp has a poet’s sensitivity to the subtleties of ambiance and twists these perceptions of the quotidian into the eery and the supernatural.
Erith, the provincial “half-town”, is not easy to get to, and Crisp is at the mercy of a faltering public transport system. The buses have their own inscrutable system known only to locals, and if the trains are running at all, they are likely to stall. There’s a sense of a quest in getting to and from the town, as if it is a place out of space and time. Even the unusual pronunciation of the name of the town, Ear-ith, signals it as “otherworldly”, “as if it had encroached on this reality from elsewhere.”
Set in a grey autumn in austerity-hit Britain, in “the senility of capitalism”, Erith’s inner weather is unremitting melancholic, where “lights mourned their way across the skies of night and day.” It is this dour reality in which the writer’s imagination is in revolt. He’s self aware, knowingly quick to flights of fantasy, but belligerent in the defence of that trait;
“I would surrender to make-believe without shame, and not punish myself for my own defeat in doing so, that would allow the total surrender to be a total victory in defiance of all reality.”
Indeed it is the crux of Erith, it lives or dies on the success of its paean to the imaginative faculty, or at the very least, on its consolation against reality and its grim “itch of despair.”
Looking out from the train when he notices gentle rain spotting against the window, inspires this;
“the moments of such sweetness are as insubstantial as the wing that gives the lacewing its name. Yet when they come, the stagnant inferno of the universe's end may be viewed placidly as the chaff of reality, and not its kernel.”
(Hilariously bathetic, his polemic is immediately undercut with the next line: “The train terminated at Barnehurst.” Indeed there is a self-depreciating humour running throughout Erith. Later on he is nearly blinded in the Catford branch of Tesco, and ends the episode “telling myself never, never to look into the heart of a check out barcode scanner again.”)
It is that “kernel” of reality that Crisp is attuned to, coming up against it in various locales in Erith. It is finding quasi-mystical visions in amongst the detritus of the quotidian, the struggle to keep true to his artistic vision despite his impoverishment and the unrelenting dourness of reality. When rooting around behind a neglected church off Erith high street, the smell of soil suddenly fills him
“with a glow of warmth and comfort, and of some other unnameable thing beyond warmth and comfort that has been a silvered refrain will-o-the-wisping me on through the inexplicable disappointment of human existence.”
It is as though Crisp has transformed Erith itself into a kind of symbol or objective correlative for the writer’s imagination, that source of creative vision in defiance of grim, dour reality. Erith is one of the great Crisp novellas, for me up there with Hamster Dam. It contains everything that makes him such a unique writer, and as such serves as a good introduction to his late work, where his life, the zeitgeist and his fiction are so compellingly interlinked.
More Quentin S. Crisp reviews at kulchurkat.uk
June 10, 2023
Crisp, Quentin S. - Erith
He needs to go to the Erith office in order to sort his housing allowance.
The train may well stop there, maybe the bus. Neither schedule lists Erith.
Oh, yes, he does ask. Answers are vague.
Why can’t he simply visit his own council branch? Procedure. One follows procedure. Period.
A flow of journeys, along with varying perceptions of the route. The narrator’s view, filtering his own anxieties with the theatrical dress he overlays on Erith itself.
For me, Mr. Crisp can be daunting, and my method has always been to simply read. Read, keep turning pages until I match step with his rhythm.
Now and then you may feel you are in Aickman territory. You are not. Crisp’s voice is distinctive.
Erith shifts from anxious, to comical, to suppressed frustration with each page.
He needs to go to the Erith office in order to sort his housing allowance.
The train may well stop there, maybe the bus. Neither schedule lists Erith.
Oh, yes, he does ask. Answers are vague.
Why can’t he simply visit his own council branch? Procedure. One follows procedure. Period.
A flow of journeys, along with varying perceptions of the route. The narrator’s view, filtering his own anxieties with the theatrical dress he overlays on Erith itself.
For me, Mr. Crisp can be daunting, and my method has always been to simply read. Read, keep turning pages until I match step with his rhythm.
Now and then you may feel you are in Aickman territory. You are not. Crisp’s voice is distinctive.
Erith shifts from anxious, to comical, to suppressed frustration with each page.
December 5, 2023
Book #23/90
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews