Through repetition, these initially innocuous descriptions become more and more slyly pointed as distinctions of status, just one aspect of the novel’s merciless satire of the arts ‘food chain’. As the novel opens, we meet our narrator, ‘an editor of mid-circulation literary magazine’ in conversation with ‘the head of a small publishing company’ at a Festival of Culture. In keeping with Bernhard’s style, the novel is structured entirely without paragraphs, with a looping, recursive narrative. The book itself steals or borrows a title (from Gogol) and a style (from Thomas Bernhard), so, if originality is the ultimately fetishized good, then Riviere is enacting his own disavowal of such value. Riviere is keenly interested in cultural capital, and one senses that, for him, plagiarism has come to seem symbolic of the way in which cultural value functions more generally.
.jpg "dead souls sam riviere")
Set in a slightly warped world where poetry has become immensely lucrative, the novel explores the case of a plagiarising poet, Solomon Wiese, publicly shamed for presenting the work of obscure poets as his own. A satire on the cultural sector, which uses humour to play with ideas about literary convention and value, Dead Souls is also a series of philosophical enquiries, with plagiarism the preeminent theme.
0 kommentar(er)
