Sam Riviere’s debut novel, Dead Souls, depicts a fantastical, alternate-world version of London in which poetry has become the city’s major cultural product ... Like his protagonist, Riviere is not above a stylistic lift when the need arises. His long sentences, use of repetition and italicized emphases are swiped from the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard ... The reading is both manic and thrillingly musical ... Riviere, himself an accomplished poet, writes like one accustomed to the threat of obsolescence. Dead Souls buzzes with networks and media platforms that are as likely to manipulate as they are to empower. In this ambitious fantasy of marginalization, you either die unread or live long enough to see your work in someone else’s portfolio.
Dead Souls, by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down. But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel. There’s also the matter of its subject: Dead Souls is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry ... This is not a negative review. Indeed, I think Dead Souls is one of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. Riviere unleashes a flock of winged devils to tear apart the hermetically sealed world of privilege, praise and publication in which a few lucky writers dwell.
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.
Dead Souls belongs to a moment when art, money and technology now tangle ... Dead Souls – Its Gogol-ian title alone a hubristic act of theft, like calling your fiction debut Tristram Shandy or Moby-Dick – puts all these forces into play again. Then it cunningly aligns them into a remix of the dystopian literary satire that both reflects and distorts the way we live (and read) now ... Civilian readers might also wonder why they should care about an upscale coterie entertainment – especially one prompted by the rumoured narcissism and paranoia of this corner of the literary scene ... Once you catch the spuming surf of his prose – and, as with Bernhard or Marías, it does take a little time – you’ll want to ride the wave to the shore. He’s wickedly sharp about the pious deceits, and self-deceptions, that fuel the culture industry like oil. And he grasps that, in the era of endlessly networked art and emotion, all culture may come to resemble the poetry subculture: gossipy, parochial, panic-prone, intimate, addictive, yet somehow never really there.
... a hilarious satire on the controversies that have surrounded 'the poetry establishment' over recent years ... The long and winding, multi-clause sentences that dominate the narrative give it an air of self-importance, reflective of the unnamed narrator’s sardonic attitude ... Dead Souls is brilliantly inventive. Along the way, we meet an eccentric group of individuals, including literary terrorists, an inventor of a device that can make paper from household waste, and my personal favourite: the man with 'scabs on his head.' When blended with Riviere’s critique of the literary genre he so clearly loves, we get a novel that can be laugh out loud funny, harsh and savage, but also sobering and thoughtful.
... from its beginning, the novel’s pace is manic and relentless, evincing the unnamed narrator’s unreliable, overwrought state of mind. One long paragraph composed of one long, multi-clause sentence after another—all admittedly impeccably written—with no chapter breaks and therefore no orienting signposts creates a demanding reading experience that is not for the uncommitted. Style threatens at times to subsume substance in this novel, but beyond the spectacle of literary and linguistic acrobatics there may be a clever tale to unravel ... Riviere savagely takes aim at academic elitism in poetry, the manufactured divide between urban and rural poets, the role of privilege and family fortune in a poet’s success, and even the tedium of poetry anthologies ... Billed as a metaphysical mystery, Dead Souls may be a masterful ruse.
While the writing in Dead Souls contains playful puns and allusions, it is also loaded with vapid business jargon and pages of inconsequential 'microanalysis.' The standout stylistic signature is the lack of paragraph breaks. Typically, this is a technique used to convey a stream of consciousness, but in this case we are not getting the narrator’s wandering thoughts but rather his summary of Wiese’s confession. Delivering it with no breaks or pauses makes him seem like a sociopath, or some kind of post-human android. His soul is the deadest of all ... Mr. Riviere’s clever but enervating novel, then, is an instance of the imitative fallacy writ large, a book that embodies the aspects of culture it deplores (Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is another recent example in the trend). Poetry itself, Wiese admits, 'remains a continual possibility,' a space of potential regeneration. Obviously, no poetry appears in the book.
In the sycophantic poetry community, Wiese declares, praise springs from 'monstrous insincerity,' and is, therefore, deadly. As a critic who strives to be completely honest, I can't help but take this proclamation as a bit of an insult — what am I, chopped liver? — but still, I know it holds truth. In general, I feel similarly toward Dead Souls. Riviere is sharp and funny, and he fills his novel with insights that are both rude and correct. It is undeniably a smart book, and, in certain ways, a good one. That said, it is unreadable ... Dead Souls plainly takes inspiration from two writers: Thomas Bernhard, king of the single-paragraph novel, and Roberto Bolaño ... It is my personal, unshakable belief that writing without paragraphs is a middle finger to the reader, which suits Bernhard; his books are rageful howls. Dead Souls is a gripe. Gripes, by me, should have breaks in them ... Riviere's is fundamentally dried out. It is a collection of ideas with no emotion. Why turn to fiction for that?
The book’s single paragraph, which calls to mind Thomas Bernhard not only for its form but its rhythm and cadence, becomes increasingly demanding on the reader, but it gains traction with criticisms of a calcified literary canon. This esoteric crisis-of-craft story will appeal to fans of Kate Zambreno’s Drifts.
