Dead Souls

By: Sam Riviere

Narrated by: Thomas Judd

For listeners of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, this “sublime” and “delightfully unhinged” metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet’s spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums).

A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese’s rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night—and the remainder of the novel—to tell.

Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with “nothingness,” a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts—plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated.

Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?

dreams

i found myself driving around long winding roads for a few more glimpses of prose

An absolute work of genius

An honest representation of the world by someone who notices everything and can describe it all like a poet. (He is a poet.)

The narrator is perfect for this work.

finger...

I am the finger
The finger on the rim
The finger on the rim of the crystal wine glass
Ringing ringing ringing.

For a tedious look at a jaded narrator, look no further.
For a long-winded and repetitive exercise in trying to figure out what the heck the book is trying to say about poetry and writing in general, just participate in it rather than read this book... it may actually bother you less.