White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings - Softcover

Sinclair, Iain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141014849 ISBN 13: 9780141014845

Publisher: Penguin, 2004

Synopsis

A novel about London -- its past, its people, its underbelly and its madness.

"In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history" GUARDIAN

About this title

Review:

Sinclair's dark, psychogeographical exhumations of London scribe a semi-mythical underbelly of malcontents, manic bibliophiles and losers. Subterranean pubs and their snugs, hospitals and their labyrinths, all those who lose their way in a metropolis--Sinclair's subject is situated lives. How is a city separate from the people who make up its noise, its madness, its lies and its past? This is a harsh poetry. As a novelist Sinclair marks out a unique space. He understands place as a way time positions its memory of itself in the bricks and bridges of where we drink and fight. He shows how history's narrative saturates the present with awful resonances. London has a degraded beauty in each ancient street, each crime, each failure. Sinclair's impressionistic, dense wordcraft, often difficult, arcane, is lambent with regard to the spectral dusk of every city's shadows. White Chappell Scarlet Tracings is a paean to worlds we all do best skirting.-- Mark Thwaite

Review:

'A work of integrity because it constantly takes serious risks...I only wish there was more writing like this' Kathy Acker

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0141014849
• ISBN 13: 9780141014845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208