The BURIED Book Club discussion

Influential modernist.

GR Bio:

John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.

Heppenstall's first novel The Blaze of Noon, was neglected at the time. Much later, in 1967, it received an Arts Council award. He was Francophile in literary terms, and his non-fiction writing reflects his tastes.

Critical attention has linked him to the French nouveau roman, in fact as an anticipator, or as a writer of the "anti-novel". Several critics (including, according to his diaries, Helene Cixous) have named Heppenstall in this connection. He is sometimes therefore grouped with Alain Robbe-Grillet, or associated with other British experimentalists: Anthony Burgess, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Alan Burns, Stefan Themerson and Eva Figes. The Connecting Door (1962) is singled out as influenced by the nouveau roman.

He was certainly influenced by Raymond Roussel, whose Impressions of Africa he translated. Later novels include The Shearers, Two Moons and The Pier. He also wrote a short study of the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy.

List of novels:

The Blaze of Noon (1939)
Saturnine (1943) novel, reissued as The Greater Infortune (1960)
The Lesser Infortune (1953)
The Woodshed (1962)
The Connecting Door (1962)
The Shearers (1969)
Two Moons (1977)
The Pier (1986)

What is your Spade program for him? up next? a sample?

No novels of his at local uni libbey, which is a bad sign of being extra-buried.

Updates:

Blaze of Noon reissued by Oneworld Classics.
The Pier available cheap used.

How does one add a book to GR to ensure it gets rated and reviewed? I've got a copy of The Woodshed (Jupiter Books, 1968, originally 1962) that I'm about to read, and can find no record of it on GR. I'm assuming some of the people in this group are GR librarians, which I am not, and can hopefully help out here.

Hey thanks! I totally unaware of that.

I'll add this book later when I'm around my computer again.

Here's a good article about Heppenstall that fleshes out his connections to Orwell and roman nouveau and BS Johnson and Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor and a lot more big names.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-co...

Review of The Woodshed will be up in a day or two - the quick of it is that it's a fast, good read that is elevated by a strong ending.

Here's my review of The Woodshed.

Dalkey also has a really good literary biography of Heppenstall on their site:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/rayner-h...

Reissue of two Hepp novels from VP:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Fantastic news! Look forward to reading them

Verbivoracious wrote: "Reissue of two Hepp novels from VP:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..."

Nicely done!

Verbivoracious wrote: "Reissue of two Hepp novels from VP:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..."

I'm assuming this got delayed? I've been plotting to read my copy of Saturnine, but would like to read it in conjunction with this; I don't see any ability to actually purchase it though.

^ Hi Ronald, the book is now available to order. It was delayed from September.

I read the VP reissue of The Greater Infortune and The Connecting Door. My review is here.