MixedThe Guardian (UK)Ranging from an unvarnished journal entry to an intergalactic Twilight Zone episode, they come across as an endearingly ragtag bunch of tryouts. For the Cohen obsessive, there are fascinating glimpses into his self-fashioning. On almost every page, you can find an image that later blossomed in one of his songs ... Twisty but deeply affecting ... At its worst, A Ballet of Lepers is bitter and portentous ... n a Cohen song, we would tolerate and perhaps even enjoy this, because there would be a killer tune, and the voice delivering the beating would sound like that of a world expert on compassion. Stripped of the troubadour’s glamour, it appears – as Cohen clearly intended – far more ugly than the hapless Cagely. But it’s the taint of bitterness that is most offputting.
Sam Riviere
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Dead Souls is Sam Riviere’s Thomas Bernhard phase. It is a single-paragraph novel, written in raging, recursive prose, about the small world of English poetry ... Within a couple of pages this subject matter became clear and I thought, \'Oh God, why bother?\' But a hundred pages later, I was thinking, \'Why bother with anything else? Why bother with lunch?\' This is a brilliant and brilliantly entertaining novel. The writing is merciless; the rage is genuine. I’d say it was satire, and it is that, but it’s also a meticulous analysis coming from a place of despairing intimacy ... The cumulative effect is exhilarating: Riviere has turned paranoid pub talk and midnight doubts into a prose poem of laceration. But the novel goes deeper than flesh wounds. Time after time, the reader is brought to a point of soul horror – the horror of doubleness, nothingness, meaninglessness ... By the novel’s end, Riviere has extended his satiric range far beyond the monstrous poetry scene. It’s become a guilt verdict on his countryfolk worthy of Thomas Bernhard. Not just a phase.
Joe Dunthorne
PositiveThe GuardianThere’s a terrifyingly knowing eloquence to the voice of Ray Morris, the narrator of Joe Dunthorne’s third novel ... The Adulterants, from its punning title onwards, is brilliantly knowing about its knowingness. It knows the only way we’ll tolerate a narrator as annoying as Ray is to punish him for the very virtues that make him a good narrator – nosiness and eloquence. Ray shares these virtues with the main character in Tobias Wolff’s now classic short story \'Bullet in the Brain\', in which a know-it-all literary critic caught up in a bank robbery gets shot in the head for taking the piss out of the cliched way in which the bank robbers speak. In Wolff’s story, the punishment for knowingness is death; Dunthorne is more forgiving, but offers a more indirect route to redemption.
