Crudo

by Olivia Laing

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, Esquire, and Bustle

"Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is." —The New Yorker

It’s the summer of 2017 and Kathy is getting married. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever closer to nuclear war. 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 in sight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652734
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. She is 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 Black Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Suffolk, England.

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

"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

"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

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

Time

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

Wall Street Journal - Deborah Levy

"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

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

NPR

"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

"[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

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

Paris Review Daily

"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

"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

"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

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

Time

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