There were rich poets.” In this surreal time, poetry has finally attained the central position that poets are always telling us it possesses. Show more Show more Comments are turned off. “Poets were making real money,” Riviere says. Sam Riviere joins us to present his new novel, Dead Souls, in conversation with Lucy Ives. Horrified by the deceptions perpetrated by novelists, dramatists, historians and biographers, the reading public turns in desperation to poets. Dead Souls opens in the aftermath of this cultural obsession with literary crime. Giant plants” – in short, all the various “crimes against originality” that authors are wont to commit.īut Riviere is just getting started with his deadpan satire. Friendships resulting from traffic accidents. Easter as the story’s climactic and final date. Descriptions of the light in western Scotland. It can detect the felonious reuse of “children who die in the first twenty pages. No infraction is too small to escape QACS’ notice. QACS analyses all aspects of a work of literature – “the machinations of plot, the structural dynamics of narrative and perspective, the balancing of metaphor and the density of descriptive language” – to identify elements of plagiarism. And so, the publishing industry, desperate to regain the public’s trust, devises a computer tool: the Quantitative Analysis and Comparison System. 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. One of the wittiest, sharpest, cruelest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read. As Facebook has taught us, every social and political ill can be cured with better algorithms. Dead Souls is an exceedingly cerebral comedy about the viability of contemporary poetry.
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