I’ve been thoroughly enjoying SAJ3 contributor Stewart Home’s latest novel, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, a strangely delirious assault on the art world embedded with gleaming shards of cosmic philosophy, viral warfare, and pornospam cutups. The resulting XXX-rated slapstick datastorm has had me guffawing out loud on public transport, then checking that nobody’s reading this avant-garde filth over my shoulder!
Meanwhile I missed this Guardian piece on experimental fiction, which mentions Stewart and SAJ1 contributor Tom McCarthy.
The assumption that genuine experimentation is no longer possible is in many ways a parochial quirk of the anglophone world. Things are very different, for example, in Latin America, where anti-realist techniques have long been part of the mainstream, and where the recent success of writers such as Roberto Bolaño and César Aira (see right) shows that novelists can still be lauded for striking out in new ways. France may not be the hotbed of literary radicalism that it once was, but the avant-garde tradition represented by the likes of Georges Perec – famous, among much else, for writing a novel without the letter “e” – continues to be venerated.
