The Past

by Hugh Fleetwood

Simon Powell, seventeen, struggles to escape from the perverse, nightmarish world of his parents.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Hugh Fleetwood was born in England in 1944. At the age of 18 he went to live in France; at 21, he moved to Italy, where he remained for the next fourteen years. He had his first exhibition in 1970 at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto; in 1971 he published his first novel, A Painter of Flowers, for which he also designed the jacket, as he did for his second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. His fifth novel, The Order of Death, was made into a film starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon (Johnny Rotten). His most recent one-man show, at the Calvert Gallery in London, coincided with the reissue of six of his books by Faber & Faber’s Finds series. In 2012, he was cited in David Malcolm’s The British and Irish Short Story Handbook as a key figure in the development of the English short story; his most recent publication, “How the Story Ends”, will appear in the anthology Speak My Language in November 2015. Hugh Fleetwood currently lives in London.

-Valancourt Books

Reviews

[M.D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots to say about this one, so I'll probably update this with a proper review at some point, but if you happen to be reading this...

"The Past" is a slept-on transgressive masterpiece, both decadent and depraved.

I'm actually surprised that the novel's (one and only) printing comes with no warning from its publisher (Hamish Hamilton) about what's in store for the reader... I wonder what an unsuspecting patron would make of it in a random, off-the-shelf purchase, circa 1987?

Or 'now', for that matter...

> If your summer reading consists of Schnitzler and Bataille... Have at it.