James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
Crudo
An experimental novel that captures the political turbulence of the summer of 2017 and the private anxiety of marriage with diary-like immediacy. Through a narrator who evokes Kathy Acker, love, news, the body, and apocalyptic dread collide at high speed.
Work Information
A brief novel that asks what it means to love and to write during a summer when the world feels close to collapse.
Crudo is a short novel that moves through the summer of 2017 almost in real time. In the mind of Kathy, a writer on the verge of marriage, the Trump administration, Brexit, climate anxiety, wealthy holidays, and fear of love rush together. Its fragmentary voice, shaped in dialogue with Kathy Acker, captures the feeling of an era in which private life and global crisis can no longer be separated.
Review Summaries
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The novel drew attention for the speed with which it turns current events into fiction and for the boldness of moving into fiction while retaining a critical intelligence. Its fragmented, heated style strongly reflects the anxieties of its moment.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Picador
- Published
- 2018-06-28
- Pages
- 176 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.7 x 2.5 x 20.4 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781509892839
- ISBN-10
- 9781509892839
- Price
- 1169 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Biographical
'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when it could all end at any moment? From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. '[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather . Their first novel, Crudo , was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
Reviews
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It’s early but I’m calling it: Olivia Laing’s ‘Crudo’ is the most important and extraordinary novel you’ll read this year (and you WILL read it). What a moving, thoughtful, thought-provoking meditation on the beautiful horrible modern world we live in. This is a novel about dissociation: from nation, from others, from ourselves - and from subjects, the novel beginning with an insistent and repeated “Kathy, by which I mean I”, a first-person declaration that comes to nothing, subsumed by Kathy in the third person, this impossible to follow, immune-to-contentment third person, about whom Laing later writes “Writing she can be anyone. On the page the I dissolves, becomes amorphous, proliferates wildly.” This pseudo-memoir-novel’s pseudo-Kathy Acker is the most fitting nexus for creative turmoil and urgency, but it is ultimately her distressed relationship with the world around her that grabs the reader most violently. Kathy resists contentment even as she seizes it, is pre-disposed to self-sabotage, questions her own reality, and above all rages at the world around her, at Trump and Kim, at the too-hot-and-getting-hotter-still world, at Twitter, at terrorism and Brexit and apathy and apocalypse. The most relatable sentence I’ve ever read was “Kathy never stopped agitating towards the future”, the perfect summary. And yet, in all the carnage and the sweat and the fear and the rot, Kathy and Olivia both find something enduring and worthwhile, a redemptive capacity in the world for love and beauty that could save us all, even if just for the duration of this novel, from the rot.
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Really.
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Quality of paper of the copy is poor.
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Self-indulgent, boring and ultimately unreadable; the sign that autofiction has reached a tipping point
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This is definitely a fake. It says that it is a Picador publication but this is a pirated book. Very obviously photocopied cover and inside pages.