Sam Thompson (1) (1978–)

This is such a weird retrograde novel about a turn-of-the-century eccentric modernist writer, that feels completely out of place and tune with 2018. Thomson's connection with Beckett is interesting, but I'm not sure if it warranted this novel or if it added anything to a literary space that has already been explored to death. We get a dull protagonist who really loves wallowing in self-pity and a thread of feminism through his wife, none of which are explored and the novel just sort of ends without ever building up to anything.… (more)

This is such a weird retrograde novel about a turn-of-the-century eccentric modernist writer, that feels completely out of place and tune with 2018. Thomson's connection with Beckett is interesting, but I'm not sure if it warranted this novel or if it added anything to a literary space that has already been explored to death. We get a dull protagonist who really loves wallowing in self-pity and a thread of feminism through his wife, none of which are explored and the novel just sort of ends without ever building up to anything.… (more)

Brilliantly rendered prose. This is a rich complex network of stories which are supposedly subtly linked, but for the most part I couldn't see those relationships. The stories require vigilance and concentration. Reading the stories of Communion Town was to constantly be reminded that the reader is only a visitor there, and will never really understand that odd and vaguely menacing place.
This is Sam Thompson's first novel but his writing is remarkably assured and confident. He has an amazing facility for writing in different voices, most notably in 'Gallathea', a dynamic and muscular hardboiled-crime style story, replete with a gumshoe detective that calls women "dames". In 'The Significant City of Lazarus Glass', the story is told in the style of a Sherlock Holmes caper, and even ends with satisfyingly, albeit bizarrely twisted, inevitable logic. "City Room" is told from a child's knee-high view and is tinged with inarticulate fears of things that can't be understood.
At the edges of the stories are shadows of creatures and of the Flaneur, ill-defined, barely mentioned, and swiftly abandoned when they feel the reader's gaze.… (more)

This exceeded my expectations, that's for sure. Ten stories, vaguely linked, set in a city (and it was fun to pick up on parts that felt like real cities, I got a lot of London, New York, and Paris) with a bit of a magical realism thing going on, but not so much as to be annoying. Each story was relayed in a different genre style, and the author played this up pretty successfully -- I felt like the narrative voices were genuinely different while still making up a cohesive book. I saw a review that compared this to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities meets Gattaca, and that seems very reasonable to me.

There's no real overarching plot, it's definitely more of an atmosphere piece (at least in the sense that nothing comes to a big reveal, although the links between the stories do provide some added significance to the events described). Being mostly a lazy person, I think I need Cliff Notes to really make all the connections between the chapters.… (more)