Crudo

by Olivia Laing

Overview

A New York Times Notable, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, and Bustle Best Book of 2018

A brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City.

"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue."

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652727
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk, UK.

Editorial Reviews

Written with bristling intelligence, Crudo…begins as a piece of conceptual swagger, only to morph into something far more intimate and in some ways more exceptional…At its heart, Crudo is aspirational in the best and most moving sense of the word. It's a novel about middle age, about that moment when we start to recognize the boundaries and limitations of the people we have become. It's about the longing to escape our ossified selves—to become, if only for a moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own.

The New York Times Book Review - Katie Kitamura

07/16/2018
“Avant-garde, middle-class-in-flight” is the way Kathy, modeled on experimental novelist Kathy Acker and the heroine of this penetrating debut novel from biographer and memoirist Laing, thinks of herself. Unlike Acker, who died at age 50 in 1997, this Kathy is age 40 in 2017 and is getting ready to marry her boyfriend. As the tale toggles back and forth between Rome and Manhattan, present and past, Laing (The Lonely City)—who laces her narrative with phrases subtly quoted from Acker’s texts—fantasizes about how the author might have reacted to the age of Twitter (“her scrying glass”), Facebook, Instagram, and information overload. Kathy’s thoughts—which are the novel’s sum and substance—are like those of an Acker character: moments of self-consciousness and anxiety aswirl with gloomy reflections on recent historical events including the Trump presidency; Brexit; nuclear proliferation in North Korea; the Grenfell Tower fire in London; the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va.; and so on. The world that Kathy moves in is, like that in Joyce’s Ulysses, full of touchstones for intimate memories and reveries. Laing’s novel can be read as an account of one individual’s personal odyssey through a turbulent era defined by “fire and fascism,” searching for peace. As in her nonfiction, Laing trenchantly depicts the life of the creative mind. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Laing...dunks you into the narrative and its fast-moving waters. It's only once you get to the end that you realize you've been holding your breath."

Vanity Fair

"Laing's experiment, and it's a good one, is to describe the world—her world, between May 17 and September 23, 2017—as precisely as she can... [Crudo is] a short, entirely readable, and lovably eccentric book."

The Believer - Nick Hornby

"Like the foodstuff for which it is named, Olivia Laing's Crudo is weird, intense, served in a small portion, and totally delicious... Beautifully written and artfully focused."

"More Books We Loved in 2018" - The New Yorker - Rebecca Mead

"[Crudo] manages to capture the delirium and anxiety of carrying on through [this] turbulent period with searing clarity."

Time

"[A] pretzel twist of form and meaning... Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel."

New York Times - Dwight Garner

"Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt... Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is."

The New Yorker - Alexandra Schwartz

"Crudo seduces from the very first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device—it is literary detonation... Crudo is a hot, hot book."

Guardian

"[Crudo] manages to capture the delirium and anxiety of carrying on through [this] turbulent period with searing clarity."

Time

"Written with bristling intelligence... [Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves—to become, if only for  moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own."

New York Times Book Review

"Breathless and gripping... [Crudo] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber."

NPR

04/01/2018
Laing's To the River was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize; The Trip to Echo Spring, for the Costa Book Award; and The Lonely City, for the National Book Critics Circle Award. So her debut novel should be a winner. In summer 2017, commitment-averse Kathy wrestles with her decision to marry even as right-wing populism, climate-changed waters, and tempers over Trump and Brexit are rising.

Library Journal

2018-06-18
The political and personal chaos of the summer of 2017 as it tumbles through the consciousness of a writer named Kathy.With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing (The Lonely City, 2016, etc.) has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction. The narrative begins with Kathy's arrival in England on a plane from New York. She is met by her fiance, who we will eventually learn is also a writer, 29 years older than she. At this early point in the story, there is also another man in her life, but this turns out to be no big deal—that kind of plot is not the focus here, though Kathy will at some point get married and, at some time after that, will actually fall in love. A focus at least as prominent as this "love story" is creating a record of the ongoing avalanche of terrible news that characterizes this time in the age of Trump and Brexit, the threat of war with North Korea, various terrorist incidents, murders of innocents, Steve Bannon's resignation, etc. Another major concern is the overlap of the narrator with the character of the late transgressive feminist writer Kathy Acker. Since the real Kathy Acker died in 1997, this Kathy can't be that Kathy, but on the first page of the book, she is credited with writing Acker's books, and lines from Acker's work are woven through the text and footnoted at the end. This Kathy is close to that Kathy in body and spirit. "The best thing about breast cancer was the double mastectomy, lop them both off she said, I'd always hated them. Hair cropped, skinny, flat-chested, she was a lovely dickless boy, a wrinkling Dorian Gray, finding her jewels....She was indeterminate and oversexed, a hot chrysalis, and if she'd had a dick you better believe it would be perfect, at least as good as David Bowie's." To enjoy this book, you have to stop trying to understand it. If you can, you may well experience a warm sense of recognition at the absurdity and impossibility of trying to carry on a life in these times.Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool.

Kirkus Reviews

"I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Crudo. I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel."

Guardian - Sally Rooney

"Written with bristling intelligence, this debut novel… pays homage to the iconoclastic author Kathy Acker, creating a pastiche of voices and identities."

New York Times - Notable Book of 2018

"Laing’s experiment, and it’s a good one, is to describe the world—her world, between May 17 and September 23, 2017—as precisely as she can.… [Crudo is] a short, entirely readable, and lovably eccentric book."

Nick Hornby - The Believer

"A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches."

Wall Street Journal - Deborah Levy

"A single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing."

Paris Review Daily