- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Penguin UK; New edition edition (May 31 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0141014857
- ISBN-13: 978-0141014852
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.6 x 3.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 381 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #654,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
In his U.S. debut Sinclair, a British poet, filmmaker, rare book dealer and jack-of-all-trades, puts his varied background to work in a dextrous, multifaceted novel of the London docklands. The narrator, among other sordid locals, has been hired by a movie production company to ferret out the "real" old-time docklands. Told as 12 stories set in the near future but riddled with spectres of the past, this novel attempts to do for this down-and-out area what Joyce did for Dublin: eulogize it with language so abstract and imagery so densely allusive as to simulate the layering of historical detail upon a specific locale. The result is nearly incomprehensible, but that's part of the fun; and Sinclair goes out of his way to entertain. His separate narratives introduce a bizarre assortment of sexual encounters and violent deaths, each as vivid and incoherent as any nightmare. Filled with the ghosts and wrecks of London history, inhabited by grubby barflies and Cockney wharf-rats, this teeming novel seems as rich, fecund and ultimately mesmerizing as the muddy Thames. Downriver won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel; Sinclair's first book, White Chapel , Scarlet Tracings , has not as yet been published here.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Sinclair won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel for this mixture of fiction, history, travel memoir, and autobiography. It is ostensibly the story of a crew of writers and filmmakers who try to document the passing of a way of life in the gentrified Thames basin, the history they uncover, their attempts to develop a way to record it, and the problems Sinclair (who is both author and character) encounters in writing the script and the novel itself. Denizens of the basin, including a prostitute and a scavenger, appear throughout, and dogs and Masonry play important roles. The style is rich but often difficult, especially for a non-British reader (e.g., "The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro"), though Sinclair includes more accessible wit ("They were encrusted with enough badges to subdue a college of semiologists"). Recommended for literary collections.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
'And what,' Sabella insisted, 'is the opposite of a dog?' Her husband, Henry Milditch, continued to ignore her. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
'And what,' Sabella insisted, 'is the opposite of a dog?' Her husband, Henry Milditch, continued to ignore her. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
All Over the Map,
By
This review is from: Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath) a Narrative in Twelve Tales (Paperback)
I picked up this book for a number of reasons: primarily, I was intrigued by the concept of a novel comprised of twelve stories which would reveal a gritty, dark side of London's docklands. (I'm not a Londoner, nor have I spent a great deal of time there, but I am drawn to fiction about it for some reason.) I have to admit I was also impressed with the plethora of effusive praise from the British press on the jacket. Having read the first three stories, I have now set it aside, unlikely to return to it. Why? Well, it all starts and ends with Sinclair's style. Had I known beforehand that he is a poet, I probably would have avoided the book. My experience with poets is that their prose style tends to be overly ornate. Some find this wholly delightful, but it generally leaves me deeply unmoved. I liked the notion of what Sinclair was trying to do in tying the Thames to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and mixing it all up with a critique of Thatcherite policies and the the capitalist assault on the underclass. He's clearly a writer with a political viewpoint who absorbs his cultural surroundings and infuse them back into his writing. Unfortunately, the connections aren't always visible, and worse, the stories aren't particularly interesting. There are flashes here and there of something, and clearly Sinclair has masses of knowledge and skill, but it's hard to find any cohesion to it all. The reviewer at The New York Times put it rather well in saying, "The book is a tremendous pillar of words, not all of them making direct sense and not trying to." It's writing one can appreciate, but not really enjoy, and since I have stacks of other unread books waiting for me, I'll put this one aside-perhaps forever.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.1 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews) 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mind-blowingly original novel from a master,
By Brian A. Oard - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath) a Narrative in Twelve Tales (Paperback)
Iain Sinclair is one of the masters of modern English prose, and he deserves to be much better known outside of Britain. If a writer's visibility were proportional to his sheer talent, Sinclair would have a profile as high as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, two other British writers with whom his talent is--at least--on a par."Downriver" takes us to Sinclair's familiar turf, the East End of London and eventully transports us all the way downriver to the mouth of the Thames, but the real geography mapped here is the one inside Iain Sinclair's head. This man's imagination is incredibly fertile, and it rarely flags. I would compare him to Pynchon, Grass, Kafka, even Garcia-Marquez. But I must also go further afield and compare him to Blake and Coleridge. One of his blurb writers calls Sinclair "a demented magus of the sentence." Now that I've read "Downriver," I understand exactly what that means. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genius...I think.,
By PuroShaggy - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Downriver (Paperback)
I'm not even going to pretend that I really know what this book was about, all I do know is that months after reading it, I cannot get the book out of my head.Here is what I do know: the book is about London, a seedy side of London, a side of London that Dickens wrote about, only Sinclair is writing about the 20th century version of that London. The language is updated and exponentitally more graphic, the characters participate in activities that Dickens characters could not conceive of, and the plot is more convoluted, if there actually is a plot, that is. The book is divided up into 12 sections, and at first I thought the sections were connected, then I realized they weren't, then I thought they were, and then I still thought they were, but only in ways I did not understand. I was confused, enthralled, intrigued, frustrated, and fascinated, and only when exhausted did I put the book down, turning each page in the hopes that the next page woud contain the answers to the multitude of questions every preceding page produced. One thing is not up for debate, though, and that is Sinclair's ability to write. Like Joyce, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, the highly underrated William Gaddis, Sinclair does what he wants with the English language and seems to do it with ease. At times dense, other times frivolous (not many, these other times), profane in a way that hints at sacredness, Sinclair challenges your every notion about what makes a good story, what makes a good book, what makes an interesting read. I do not read books twice- there are way too many out there to waste my time on the same one twice- but this one will be the exception to the rule. Challenging- without a doubt. Worth it- most definitely. 8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A humorously deconstructionist "novel" set at Thames river,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Downriver, (or the Vessels of wrath), a Narrative in Twelve Tales (Hardcover)
For those of you who have often wondered how a deconstructionism would be expressed in a literary production, this book really does the job. It's unlike anything that I've read, and yet it seems to have triggered a resonating series of semi-familiar philosophical points from my past readings. Sinclair writes really well and seems to enjoy creating and using the literary vehicle of Derrida/Heidegger's "disappearance of a presense". Instead of reading those stodgy philosophers, take a break and read this book. You'll enjoy how the London real estate and its artistic allies can remake the unmarketable Thames river area. It figures...
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