Quilt
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Review
'I read Quilt with admiration - it's a work of remarkable imaginative energy.' --FRANK KERMODE
'A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.' --HELENE CIXOUS
An intense study of grief and mental disintegration, a lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum... Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively. --Guardian
Royle's baroque, athletic prose... confers a strong sense of the "strangeness" of English, "which, after all, belongs to no one" and should be continually reinvented. Royle is adept at doing just this... His meandering prose - which seems at once anarchic and meticulously arranged - is appropriate to the subject matter: the disarray and isolation a man experiences when his father dies. There are moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism. --Observer
Nicholas Royle's first novel is a story of loss and love. He captures the absolute dislocating strangeness of bereavement. While the novel is bursting with inventive wordplay, Royle's use of language is most agile and beautiful in his descriptions of rays. In terms of narrative, the shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away. --New Statesman
An experimental and studied look at mourning, as a man struggles to come to terms with the death of his father - clearing out his house, embarking on a strange project to house stingrays and gradually losing his grip on reality. Playful, clever and perceptive. --The Big Issue
In the Afterword, Royle says he expects the novelist 'to aspire to a writing that figures and insists on strangeness'. He certainly achieves this with Quilt... It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life - the manhandling of an elderly parent; the solicitous, faintly patronizing conversations; the struggle with an overgrown garden and accumulated junk mail - moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest. --Times Literary Supplement
'A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.' --HELENE CIXOUS
An intense study of grief and mental disintegration, a lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum... Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively. --Guardian
Royle's baroque, athletic prose... confers a strong sense of the "strangeness" of English, "which, after all, belongs to no one" and should be continually reinvented. Royle is adept at doing just this... His meandering prose - which seems at once anarchic and meticulously arranged - is appropriate to the subject matter: the disarray and isolation a man experiences when his father dies. There are moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism. --Observer
Nicholas Royle's first novel is a story of loss and love. He captures the absolute dislocating strangeness of bereavement. While the novel is bursting with inventive wordplay, Royle's use of language is most agile and beautiful in his descriptions of rays. In terms of narrative, the shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away. --New Statesman
An experimental and studied look at mourning, as a man struggles to come to terms with the death of his father - clearing out his house, embarking on a strange project to house stingrays and gradually losing his grip on reality. Playful, clever and perceptive. --The Big Issue
In the Afterword, Royle says he expects the novelist 'to aspire to a writing that figures and insists on strangeness'. He certainly achieves this with Quilt... It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life - the manhandling of an elderly parent; the solicitous, faintly patronizing conversations; the struggle with an overgrown garden and accumulated junk mail - moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest. --Times Literary Supplement
Product Description
Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father's death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in.
He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his fathers life clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip.
Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief and embraces the endless possibilities of language.
He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his fathers life clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip.
Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief and embraces the endless possibilities of language.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found this book absolutely compelling - the way the story is told kept me feeling very close to what was happening, even when I was confronted with stuff that was completely, wildly unexpected. This is a thoughtful, intelligent, exploratory book but not a solemn one. There's powerful emotional warmth and engagement as well as an infectious delight in words and in comic or bizarre touches of experience. Quilt's subject-matter, the death of the narrator's father and what happens in the following weeks, is undeniably sad but the writing is so vivid, so attentive and lovingly human, that the effect on me was revitalising. I read it again.
The brief Afterword suggests some very interesting ways of thinking about fiction today, what it can do and what it might do. It also prompts a rethinking about Quilt itself.
Royle's critical work is justly famous and has always had a kind of inventiveness more usually associated with literary writing. In Quilt he takes this creative energy to the level,as Helene Cixous comments on the back cover, of mythmaking. It's an exciting development for English novel-readers.
The brief Afterword suggests some very interesting ways of thinking about fiction today, what it can do and what it might do. It also prompts a rethinking about Quilt itself.
Royle's critical work is justly famous and has always had a kind of inventiveness more usually associated with literary writing. In Quilt he takes this creative energy to the level,as Helene Cixous comments on the back cover, of mythmaking. It's an exciting development for English novel-readers.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Quilt is not at first an easy read, but worth persevering with through the linguistic and textural substrate for its brilliant portrayal of grief and obsession. The grieving of the son for his now dead father, his attempts to clear the parental home, arrange the funeral, meet his lover, who lives abroad, come to terms with his situation and past relationships with his parents, are all very tenderly and sometimes wittily done. The strength of the book lies in its central image: the son's obsession with stingrays. He builds first one, then an even bigger, aquarium in his father's home to house four rays. His identification with the rays in their substrate murk gradually takes over his life, culminating in a stunning final image. Stay with this book; read it slowly, twice. It will reward the attention.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
From the very beginning of this book the reader embarks on a fictional journey that feels distinctly different from any they may have had before. Language in all its strangeness and beauty comes to the fore, whilst at the same time the very human story is movingly conveyed. The tale is about the profound nature of the everyday, about emotional events that every reader will experience at some time in their lives. But it is also funny and intellectual. It engages the reader's thoughts, challenges them, calls for them to think about the very language they read and speak and inhabit. This is an inventive, risky piece of writing, which succeeds because of the way in which it combines flights of imagination with the sense of a powerful emotional reality.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
An interesting novel with an irritating afterword
The Nicholas Royle who wrote this is not to be confused with the Manchester Royle, although the two men are, I'm told, friends, and enjoy the confusion. Read more
Published 10 months ago by D Belbin
Quilt by Nicholas Royle
I am on my third reading of this amazingly poignant book. Dealing with the grief and
shock of his father's dying, the protagonist finds his own way to come -or not- to terms. Read more
shock of his father's dying, the protagonist finds his own way to come -or not- to terms. Read more
Published 20 months ago by LMF
a call to write
Quilt is an extremely moving and beautiful work.
Above all else, I was touched the way words are shown love. Read more
Above all else, I was touched the way words are shown love. Read more
Published 20 months ago by CB
A unique and complex representation of mourning.
Royle's debut is a profound and enthralling account of a man's mourning following the death of his father. Read more
Published 20 months ago by David Sones
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