Delphi: A Novel

by Clare Pollard Narrated by Emma Lowndes

Overview

A Guardian Best Book of 2022 * “Clever and surprising.” -BuzzFeed * “Brilliantly funny.” -San Francisco Chronicle * “Ingenious.”-The Millions * “Powerful.” -Harper's Bazaar

A captivating debut novel about a classics professor immersed in research for a new book on a prophecy in the ancient world who confronts chilling questions about her own life just as the pandemic descends-for readers of Jenny Offill, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Sally Rooney.

Covid-19 has arrived in London, and the entire world quickly succumbs to the surreal, chaotic mundanity of screens, isolation, and the disasters big and small that have plagued recent history. As our unnamed narrator-a classics professor immersed in her studies of ancient prophecies-navigates the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a ten-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes obsessed with predicting the future. Shifting her focus from chiromancy (prophecy by palm reading) to zoomancy (prophecy by animal behavior) to oenomancy (prophecy by wine), she fails to notice the future creeping into the heart of her very own home, and when she finally does, the threat has already breached the gates.

Brainy and ominous, imaginative and funny, Delphi is a snapshot and a time capsule-it vividly captures our current moment and places our reality in the context of myth. Clare Pollard has delivered one of our first great pandemic novels, a mesmerizing and richly layered story about how we keep on living in a world that is ever-more uncertain and absurd.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Pollard’s debut novel is set in contemporary London during the Covid pandemic. Emma Lowndes brings the unnamed narrator, a classics scholar, to life as she tries to balance the needs of her husband and 10-year-old son with her own needs. She is studying ancient prophecies and attempting to predict the future. In a detached academic voice, Lowndes defines 65 ancient methods of prophecy while interweaving Greek mythology, the surreal aspects of isolation during lockdown, and the impact of other global events. Listeners hear the scholar’s resentment and her husband’s defensiveness as he shirks parenting responsibilities. Rae, the tarot reader, sounds young as she pronounces her vague observations with an inflection that turns them into questions. Many listeners will identify with the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness reflections on our lives during Covid. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/15/2022

Poet Pollard (The Heavy-Petting Zoo) follows an unnamed professor and mother’s adjustment to the Covid-19 lockdown in her richly layered debut novel. The narrator’s interior monologue alternates between racing panic and numbed tedium as she juggles a classics course, a translation project, and research on divination methods for her next book. As her 10-year-old son, Xander, deals with depression, and the two become increasingly isolated, she calls upon German words to define her state of mind. The novel is separated into short chapters, each named after a form of prophecy she’s been researching, which she connects to her attempts to cope with the new normal (in “Tarotmancy: Prophecy by Tarot,” she counts Xander among her mixed blessings while drawing a tarot card from a deck). In some chapters, the narrator meditates monotonously for several pages on what happens during a single hour; in others, she rushes through a matter of months in a few paragraphs. The uneven pacing creates discomfort, which seems to be the point; though Pollard’s fractured narrative is difficult to get through at times, it effectively conveys the first year of the pandemic. It’s low-key compared to other recent pandemic fiction, but the main character’s frustration and fear is sure to strike a chord. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Finally, a brilliantly funny and sad look into the heart of the pandemic lockdown... [that] manages to avoid cliches and tired complaints while being reassuringly familiar at the same time... Characters, settings and even whole scenes are drawn in quick, exquisite precision full of wit and pathos. Its intimacy reminded me of Sally Rooney and its subtle, sly humor of Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows... a reassuring reflection in the darkness.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Pollard is the author of six poetry collections, and her talents are on display as information and anecdotes unfurl with pleasing syntactic turns... Delphi distills something elusive and upsetting about all the things we can’t quite see or understand about the present moment, even as all we ever do is look. This feels impressive, part of what good fiction is meant to do.”—Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review

"Anyone who feels tapped out on pandemic fiction, I urge you to give Claire Pollard’s debut novel, Delphi a try. It tackles COVID-19 in a darkly funny way that avoids the dreary dystopian fatalism that afflicts much of mainstream fiction these days... This book does a superb job of providing perspective by connecting our present moment to ancient history in a way that’s clever and surprising. For Fans of Jenny Offill, Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney, here’s another hot sad girl book to add to your list." —BuzzFeed

"For anyone looking for ways of thinking creatively and with love about art in an emergency and what just happened to us all... I would recommend [Delphi], because despite the bleakness – you can’t have realism without bleakness now – this is clever, warm and funny writing." —The Guardian

"A deeply intimate story, told in the language of maternal love, of fear, and, especially, of prophecy... From a politics gone topsy-turvy to disrupted domestic routines and interrupted life cycles, the novel vividly portrays what happens when everything stops working all at once, including the authorities we look to for succor and the stories we tell ourselves to cope.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“This isn’t the first — and most certainly won’t be the last — pandemic novel, but it might be the most brilliant... Pollard’s novel is consistently inspired, and will keep you gripped all the way through to the heart-stopping finale.” —Daily Mail

"Ingenious." —The Millions

"A powerful fable about life in an ever-more unpredicatable world." —Harper's Bazaar

“[A] richly layered debut novel... effectively conveys the first year of the pandemic...the main character’s frustration and fear is sure to strike a chord.” —Publisher's Weekly

“Inviting, stylish and candid... So many of Pollard’s sentences ring with delicious wryness... It is the freshness of this narrator’s perspective and the openness with which this perspective is shared that suggests that Pollard’s future, as a novelist, is very bright indeed." —i

"[An] exquisitively painful debut... Pollard’s deft inclusion of all the pandemic’s practical and political challenges—masks, vaccines, social distancing, the strain on shared home WiFi networks, long separations from aging parents, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and January 6—is wrapped in the inventive framework of prophecies. Irresistible and also oddly reassuring for all who have come through (so far) to the other side of COVID’s miseries." —Library Journal

“We need the ancients to explain today to us, and we need Clare Pollard. In brief, brilliant passages, Pollard confronts the shadow-play of our screen-entranced lives, and offers this simultaneous comfort and curse: we are not the first to live these griefs and these bewilderments. Delphi is the strangest, best thing I’ve read in ages.” —Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink

“Clare Pollard’s Delphi delivers an urgency unlike any I’ve experienced. I loved this book so much; the language, the humor, the style, which reminded me of both Patricia Lockwood and Sheila Heti. A brilliant novel born of searing eloquence and sinister wit.” —Jackie Polzin, author of Brood

“A compact miracle of a book.” —Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing

“Vivid as fireworks, the brief chapters of Delphi explode with the ambivalence, rage and dread of middle years lived within a world of pandemic and climate collapse. Both terrifying and exhilarating.” —Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

Library Journal

07/01/2022

DEBUT Written at a feverish pace once her own children returned to school, London poet/playwright Pollard's exquisitely painful debut recaps the hellish first year of the COVID pandemic. COVID hits England just as the unnamed 45-year-old narrator, a British academic and translator, begins a novel about prophecies and Greek myths. As the lockdown drags on, she, her husband, and their 10-year-old son grow short-tempered and emotionally distant from one another. The narrator recounts the details of their yearlong suffering in short journal entries labeled with specific prophecies: Ovomancy covers the dilemma of safe travel (the family scraps their plan to go to Delphi for Easter), while in Cybermancy she's aghast at the fallout for students learning online. With the help of online psychics, Tarot apps, and the I Ching, she desperately searches for signs pointing to the end of the COVID nightmare, blinding her to a looming family disaster playing out before her. VERDICT Pollard's deft inclusion of all the pandemic's practical and political challenges--masks, vaccines, social distancing, the strain on shared home WiFi networks, long separations from aging parents, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and January 6--is wrapped in the inventive framework of prophecies. Irresistible and also oddly reassuring for all who have come through (so far) to the other side of COVID's miseries.—Beth E. Andersen

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Pollard’s debut novel is set in contemporary London during the Covid pandemic. Emma Lowndes brings the unnamed narrator, a classics scholar, to life as she tries to balance the needs of her husband and 10-year-old son with her own needs. She is studying ancient prophecies and attempting to predict the future. In a detached academic voice, Lowndes defines 65 ancient methods of prophecy while interweaving Greek mythology, the surreal aspects of isolation during lockdown, and the impact of other global events. Listeners hear the scholar’s resentment and her husband’s defensiveness as he shirks parenting responsibilities. Rae, the tarot reader, sounds young as she pronounces her vague observations with an inflection that turns them into questions. Many listeners will identify with the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness reflections on our lives during Covid. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-05-11
A British classics professor intersperses her lockdown diary with a taxonomy of ancient systems of prophecy.

The unnamed narrator of Pollard’s debut novel titles each of her short chapters with a method of foretelling the future, starting with “Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events” and ending with “Dactylomancy: Prophecy by Means of Finger Movements.” Upon a random check, even the kookier-sounding ones—“Urticariaomancy: Prophecy by Itches,” “Ololygmancy: Prophecy by the Howling of Dogs”—are authentic. The entries narrate experiences and emotions familiar from our recent collective experiment in uncertainty, from home schooling to craft cocktails to Zoom exhaustion and news addiction. In fact, except for some slight variations since the book is set in the U.K., it all feels so familiar and real that it has the feeling of a time capsule that’s been opened many years too soon—though Pollard, the author of six books of poetry, is at pains to bookend her narrative with assurances that it is fictional. The narrator teaches a screenful of students with their cameras off, deals with her 10-year-old son's increasing dependence on screens even as she follows on her own screen the unfolding nightmares of Sarah Everard (a young woman who was murdered in London) and Donald Trump. She tries an I Ching app, visits an online psychic, does tarot readings. She keeps getting the family happiness card even as her husband steps up his drinking and the marriage frays. Finally she decides to jump the fence and go for a walk only to run into an acquaintance who complains about her au pair, leading her to rush home in horror. “I haven’t missed small talk” is one of many wry, relatable moments—but these might be funnier later on. Here and there, big plot elements drop in like stones, with little buildup or aftermath, including a last-minute bit of terrifying melodrama with mythic overtones.

Re-creates the particular frustration, tedium, and fear of 2020 and 2021 with depressing verisimilitude.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178721285
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/02/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1. Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events
I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don’t want anything to do with it; don’t want it near me.

No one used to have to deal with this much future. I mean, the future, so far as they could imagine, would have been fairly like the past: harvest, solstice, snow, trees coming into bud. They would get older and die, but the cycle would begin again. We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we’re in the future, already—that dystopian future of surveillance, video calls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalization, and the 24-hour news saying AI extinction event gene-modification the collapse of civilization.

So it is that, somehow, one winter night, I find myself standing in my kitchen, hissing shrilly at my husband: I don’t know if my son will even live to middle age.

Something can be melodramatic and true at the same time.

In Delphi, gods spoke through oracles. Delphi is in Greece, on multiple plateaux along the slope of Mount Parnassus. The myth says that Zeus wanted to find the centre of Gaia—the Greek personification of the Earth, our primordial mother—so sent two eagles soaring from the east and west. The spot where their flight paths crossed over Delphi was declared the navel of Gaia, sometimes also known as the Omphalos.

Delphi belonged to Gaia, then, but Apollo slayed the dragon who guarded it, the Python (from the verb pytho, “to rot”), and stole the land from her. To legitimize his theft, a sanctuary was built for him above the deep, zigzagged chasm into which he had pushed the Python’s dying body. There they later installed the Pythia, a priestess named after that rotting-dragon smell. The famous oracle of Delphi. By custom, she was an older woman—what we might call middle-aged—and often poor. Someone who had led an ordinary life but who was willing to sever ties with her husband or children completely and erase herself. To become a blank; become instrument.

Before the oracle could begin there was a ritual: priests sprinkled a goat with cool water. If it didn’t shiver there would be another month’s wait; if it shivered, they could proceed, sacrificing it and burning the flesh. Rising smoke signalled the oracle was open.

Next, the Pythia was purified by fasting and bathing in a spring. They seem to have burned laurel leaves to cleanse her, or else she chewed them. Purple veiled, she was taken down into a dark, enclosed inner sanctum and placed on a gilded tripod that teetered over the fissure. I wonder if her heart was panting? I wonder if she was afraid? The room was low and dim; she trembled as fumes rose from the decomposing dragon, sly, sweet, lifting vapours that lurched her into a blood-thumping blur or violent trance, her limbs loosened from her own control.

She jangled above the pit, enlarging. Apollo moved the bones of her jaw, her clump of tongue, to speak through her mouth—a male voice issuing furious barks, a roar.

The historian and essayist Plutarch, who worked as a priest at Delphi, attributed her ecstasies to the pneuma: the breath of the fault in the rock. He wrote rather memorably that she looked like a windswept ship.

It was probably anaesthetic, the rock’s breath—sugared ethylene or ethane, a heavy, crawling asphyxiant. The sanctuary lacked oxygen. And therefore, lo: the future spilt from her mouth—

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