Crudo

A Novel

De: Olivia Laing

Narrado por: Olivia Laing

A brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City.

"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue."

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 Olivia Laing (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

rumbelino and glissando in one sandwich

first i say, because it's so unusual, that the reader allows her words to breathe as only an author can hear them breathe; this intuitive synergy of text and voice is a rare treat (second, for me, only to Hootkin's glorious reading of Moby Dick - and that only because Melville's work is of an entirely different order). Great timing, phrasing and inflection - and the author's rapid-fire sentence structure is perfect for her remorseless whimsy and the deliriously dark asides that mask a childlike longing for profundity. As the book progresses, she frequently allows the last syllable of each sentence to extend which can lend her staccato structure a rhythmic, almost incantatory, quality. This work is unlike anything else I have heard and for me, in this world, that is saying a lot.