Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday 18 December 2019

"Petit Mal" by DBC Pierre (Faber and faber, 2013)

A square format. No contents page. Most stories have an illustration or two - photos and paintings in plush colour. A few stories are cartoon strips. Most of the pieces are short, "Cox" being a 15-page exception. After reading the first few of them, the signs weren't good. "News" (the first story with that title) had good bits. Several others had phrases that would have been good workshop prompts but are wasted here. I liked "Lie", and "Angels" has promise. I liked the cartoon on p.45.

The styles vary from anecdote and SF to satire, essay and CNF. "Key" has perhaps the most serious parts - "Fiction works because we practise it every day. We write our lives while accidents write us ... does society expect our fiction to support its fiction? Does it need it to?".

Other reviews

  • Sam Leith (There are portentous pieces ... There's also some material that could have been journalism. ... That imprecision goes through the whole book. If your stylistic tug, as here, is towards aphorism, that's fatal ... When not aphoristic, he's just vague. Similes misfire – a man in lust wants "to live like a worm in her nectar" – and grandiose statements collapse to mush. ... In offering this for sale his publishers put two fingers up to his public and, I think, two fingers up to poor old Pierre's reputation, too.)

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