“Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005”

I wouldn’t give him any prize for this depressing book. It was certainly skillful, and the language impressive. Good vocabulary exercise, for example…

• leporine
• proscenium
• declivities of my shoulders
• concave integument below his breast-bone
• an interior succubus
• a clear ichor glinted
• pharaonic nostrils [I can guess this one]

• mephitic whiff of gas
• of that faltering anabasis I recall
• in another prelapsarian life

One sentence I did like – “If there is a long version of shrift then that is what I am in need of.”

The book has been described as Beckettian, which is fair warning. Toward the end, I was reading very fast just to get through it and didn’t savour it at all. Feel free to read another review or two to get a more positive opinion of the book.

It gave me an excuse to take this photo of my thumb.