Ian Mond reviews Sam Riviere’s Dead Souls – Locus Online

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dead Souls, Sam Rivière (Catapult 978-1-646-22028-1, $ 26.00, 320 pp, hc) May 2021.

You will be forgiven if you think Sam Riviere detests poetry. His shaggy dog ​​story from a second novel, dead Souls, is among other things an excavation of the poetry industrial complex: the poems, their authors and the publishers. Riviere is, of course, a well-known poet who runs an independent press (If a Leaf Falls Press) and has published numerous collections, including three by Faber & Faber. For all barbs and deep cuts, dead Souls is as bullshit on Riviere’s career (considered part of a “pack of brats” of aspiring British poets a decade ago) as well as a hilarious satire of the controversies that have surrounded the “sealing establishment” for the past few years. This includes the split between spoken word and page poetry and claims that social media has made the craft cheaper and created a cult of “personality poets”.

dead Souls takes place at a literary festival in London, more precisely in a Travelodge bar near Waterloo Bridge, where the conference participants have gathered to be royally plastered. There our nameless narrator, the editor of a medium-sized literary magazine, meets Solomon Wiese, a once celebrated poet who is now disdained by the London literary scene. Wiese is the victim of a publishing industry that is in a crisis of originality. As our narrator explains, “belief in the established standards and practices of the industry had rapidly deteriorated,” and literary agents and editors were no longer willing to “vouch for their own judgment.” This “column of doubt” leads to a series of terrible publishing decisions that culminate in two of the larger companies that publish books they claim are new but are, in fact, reprints. With the belief of the public “eroded to such a point … that” even poetry preferable to them ”, the publishers (especially their PR departments) are developing a program, the“ Quantitative Analysis and Comparison System ”or QACS, which“ makes previous plagiarism detection services child’s play ”. This leads us back to Wiese. With poetry now a viable and even popular literary genre, its work – which borrows heavily from other poets – is classified as “unacceptably derived” by QACS. As such, he is on the “gray list” of the literary community. But that is only the beginning of Wiese’s extraordinary story. All night and a good part of the following day, he meticulously told how he rebuilt his career as a spoken word poet and how it all collapsed again. It’s an incredibly strange story about data piracy, reading sickness, fake social media accounts and the cultural wasteland of the English countryside.

Recalls Thomas Bernhard and more recently the works of Lucy Ellman and Mike McCormack, dead Souls is shown as a single, uninterrupted paragraph. The long and tortuous, multi-sentence sentences that dominate the narrative add an air of autocracy to it that echoes the nameless narrator’s sardonic attitude towards the conference, attendees, and the industry they all represent, including the narrator. There’s this particularly biting section where he discusses the difference between altruism and performative activism when editors (like him) publish political poetry by marginalized and oppressed poets:

Everywhere you saw favored idiots with only the best of intentions, that is, them Appropriators of good causeswho, whatever their ambitions, always controlled the agenda in the most clueless way imaginable, dominated the discussion, and turned it into a dialogue only suitable for idiots and posers.

This biting view of the cultural elite – the presumptuousness, the hypocrisy, the narrow-mindedness – extends to Wiese’s eccentric story. When he settled in his hometown Diss, where the only sales point for the mob is to play in buggy races “which are remotely controlled by buggy drivers from pods installed in their homes”, he does so with the conviction to revive his career in order to “emphatically return ”he has to withdraw from the cultural influence of London. And meadow does Make that emphatic return, but only by playing social media and cynically exploiting the work of rural poets that the capital city ignores. This is symbolized by a very funny section that involves the old poet on his deathbed, who was weakened by the endless requests of the villagers for poems (“they had quickly robbed him of his strength”). However, it is humor that is heavily infused with bitter tragedy, as the same poet notes that his last poem was more than a decade ago as he lived in the “butt end of nowhere”.

Beyond Riviere’s biting satire of the cultural gatekeepers commodifying the correct forms of poetry and making strict rules (they appear in the novel almost like wizards from Harry Potter), dead Souls is ingeniously inventive. On the way we meet an eccentric group, including literary terrorists, an inventor of a device that can turn household waste into paper, and my personal favorite: the man with a “scab on his head”. Combined with Riviere’s criticism of the literary genre that he so clearly loves, we get a novel that can laugh out loud, funny, hard and wild, but also sobering and thoughtful.


Ian Mond loves to talk about books. For eight years he co-hosted a book podcast with Kirstyn McDermott, The Writer and the Critic. He recently revived his blog, The hysterical hamster, and again publishes mostly vulgar reviews on a diverse selection of literary and genre novels. You can also follow Ian on Twitter (@Mondyboy) or contact him at [email protected].

These and similar reviews in the May 2021 issue of place.

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