Synopsis
A daring, brilliant work by one of our most original and fearless novelists. 'Why should I let you write about me?' 'Because you'll inspire people. To count their blessings.' Aldo Benjamin, relentlessly unlucky in every aspect of life, has always faced the future with despair and optimism in equal measure. His latest misfortune, however, may finally be his undoing. There's still hope, but not for Aldo. His mate Liam hasn't been faring much better - a failed writer with a rocky marriage and a dangerous job he never wanted - until he finds inspiration in Aldo's exponential disasters. What begins as an attempt to document these improbable but inevitable experiences spirals into a profound exploration of fate, fear and friendship. Anarchically funny and wildly entertaining, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of 21st-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity, an exquisite interpretation of suffering and resilience, and a powerful story about taking risks and finding inspiration.
Review
The energy, the hairpin turns, the narrative crashes, the stomach churning ascents and trashed taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent. (Peter Carey, twice Man Booker Prize-winner)
The funniest novel I've read in the last 12 months . . . Genuinely moving. (The Times)
Quicksand is, if anything, even more hysterically funny [than A Fraction of the Whole] and quite, quite horrific . . . Linguistically, Toltz manages to find the perfect if unlikely word or phrase faultlessly. It is very rare for me to laugh on almost every page of a book; it is even rarer for that to be accompanied by exquisite melancholy. Toltz is writing like very few other authors: he seems like an Antipodean Thomas Bernhard in his unsparing, agonising comedies. I hope it is not seven years until his next novel. (Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday)
Toltz is clearly talented, with a vivid satirical intelligence... tremendous. (The Sunday Times)
Leaves you almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest. (Dinaw Mengestu, winner of the Guardian First Book Award)
A book shot through with mordant humour and sizzling inventiveness.... In Aldo, Toltz has created a magnificent character. (Financial Times)
A relentlessly garrulous tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance that is both brilliant and exhausting... Even in a book overflowing with solipsists and monomaniacs, would-be artists and theories about art, it remains a creative force to be reckoned with. (Guardian)
Highly original, entertaining and almost impossible to summarize, this is a high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled, frenetic tour de force of sustained brilliance. There is with, laugh-out-loud humour and linguistic dexterity on almost every page. (Mail on Sunday)
Toltz is incapable of writing a dull sentence. (Daily Mail)
If anything can go wrong, it will - and it inevitably does so in the vicinity of Aldo Benjamin, Quicksand's luckless protagonist. Toltz's first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008; his funny, dark, formidable follow-up is a garrulous meditation on fate, religion and male misbehaviour. (Financial Times)
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