Crudo means raw or uncooked in Italian and this novel is certainly raw. The dust jacket features an award winning photograph of a dissected crustacean – complete with bluebottle! The author is a journalist and critic so the subject is autofiction – part memoir, part fiction – and switches between herself and her heroine; the late punk poet Kathy Ackers. In the summer of 2017 Olivia Laing got married and holidayed in Italy. The novel opens with the anticipation of this event but regards it from the reimagined perspective of Kathy. Kathy died from cancer in 1997 but always denied that she was dying. So the narrative here changes the facts to suit the story. This is a parody of fake news of course - something the real Kathy was fond of in her poetry. The author, writing as Kathy, does get married, in spite of her doubts, so the reader races to see whether there is life or death as a result. Compelling reading. Mike
Description
"The status beach read of the summer" Sunday Times StyleKathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it's not only Kathy who's changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all.Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker . . .SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2018PRAISE FOR CRUDO "Beautifully written" Independent"Exhilarating" Irish Examiner"Laing's prose shimmers...this is a hot, hot book. The fuse is lit" Suzanne Moore, Observer"Laing writes with a reckless swagger...a book of really funny lines" Evening Standard
