- Hardcover: 446 pages
- Publisher: Random House; First US Edition edition (1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679420622
- ISBN-13: 978-0679420620
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.8 x 4.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 816 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Details |
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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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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