This Is Memorial Device (eBook)

David Keenan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-33084-3 (ISBN)

Infos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017 ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTH LRB BOOK OF THE WEEK CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH SHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

David Keenan is the author of England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underworld and a senior critic on The Wire.

Rezensionen

Compelling, funny, furiously particular and often profound, This Is Memorial Device is a mysterious micro-curation of a novel; a psycho-geography, a mythical ecosystem, pulsing on its on terms, no doubt, much like Airdrie itself - and thus like every place.

Brilliant stuff. It captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fans youth in an utterly definitive way.

A fantastical meander in intense, magical-realist prose [...] In these creatively risk-averse times, it's heroically bizarre.

I wanted to live in this book.

Music writer Keenan makes a rewarding switch to fiction, telling the story of a post-punk band in the small Scottish town of Airdrie. Narrated by different people connected with Memorial Device, it is a powerful "hallucinated oral history" of provincial 1980s counter-culture.

I've never read a book quite like this. It hits all the reflex points one after another in quick succession ... David's book is such a rich, fun, honest, tender and rare gift, everyone should read it.

Mesmerising ... This debut novel often feels like a piece of free-form jazz: dense, experimental and entirely exhilarating, constantly threatening to spin free of its axis and yet always hauled back by its author's command of his tune.

Dream-shaped, intoxicating and brilliant. A hymn to small town energy and intelligence. An anthem for 'shroomed youth'.

Beautifully believable and appallingly sad ... One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years ... A hallucinatory and haunting vision.

I couldn't really like anybody who doesn't love this book. It's the sound of young Scotland distilled forever.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.1.2017
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: david keenan • goldsmith's prize • Misfits • Post Punk • Punk Rock • small town fiction • this is memorial device
• ISBN-10: 0-571-33084-3 / 0571330843
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-33084-3 / 9780571330843