Monday 14 February 2011

A novel, ‘if that’s quite the word for it’


David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel was talked about on this morning’s Start the Week by David Shields and Andrew Motion, the latter calling it ‘a tremendous palate cleanser’. A friend phoned to say she’s been waiting for two weeks for Daunts in Marylebone High St to get hold of the book; you’d get it quicker from the CBe website – but click the button now rather than later, because later this month I’m going out to lunch and won’t be back for a month (more on this later).

Lots of review coverage for Andrew Barrow’s Animal Magic (Jonathan Cape) – ‘this strange and unnerving book’: Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times; ‘a book unlike anything I have ever read’: Elizabeth Day, Observer; also in the Independent on Sunday, Spectator, Telegraph. Given that Andrew Barrow quotes extensively in Animal Magic from Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue, the reviews function as previews for that: ‘darkly comic, treading a thin line between brilliance and total barminess’ (Observer); ‘a wild picaresque fantasy, erotically polymorphous’ (IoS). The Queue will be available from CBe in April/May.

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