Take Harold Pinter: dismissed at the outset for having written an impenetrable play, but who nearly 50 years on ends up being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I ask you, who’d be a critic? I mention this by way of an apology should, in 50 years’ time, Simon Liberati pick up a gong of similar importance. Because right now, his debut makes little sense.
It’s very French, in a surreal, self-absorbed type way. At its core lies an exposé of a debauched layer of society, comprising a flaky group of world-weary, heroin-addicted teenage prostitutes and equally louche adults. The novel’s semi-hero is Claude, a man of ‘Luciferian beauty’ who in his forties is haunted by the memories (or apparitions) of girls he has slept with and pimped for. These include his sexually precocious sister Marina, who was seduced by her psychiatrist when 12, and who has been missing since June 1986.
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