“There is no story, she writes, I’m going crazy. It’s a cry.”
This booklet has barely 120 pages, but that was quite enough for me. I soon wondered where this was going: those short flip-flopping sentences, the accumulation of very gloomy thoughts about the (bad) state of the world, the growing chaos in the life of storyteller Kathy and beyond. The current events of the summer of 2017 are constantly returning, and Trump and Brexit in particular cast their shadow over the story. Well, story…, it's barely there: the most important thing we learn is that after a rough life, at the age of 40 Kathy is going to marry a much older poet. But apparently that event does not radiate much enthusiasm. Constant emphasis is placed on the disruption, on the emptiness and loneliness of existence: "She was at the middle of her life, going south, going nowhere, stuck between stations like a broken-down engine." That doesn't prevent Kathy from living a true luxury life: she accumulates vacation after vacation, makes impulse purchases of exquisite merchandise, and moves out as soon as she's tired of a home. All the time complaining about the misery in the world.

I learn from reviews that Olivia Laing was inspired by the life of punk artist Kathy Acker (1947-1997), but how that can be reconciled with the luxury life of our narrator is a mystery to me. I am certainly not the first to point this out, but the references to current affairs involuntarily exudes the atmosphere of Ali Smith's Autumn without approaching the magic of that work. And while we are comparing, perhaps this is a writing experiment along the lines of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. But then just the other way around: with Cusk the narrator was defined by the stories that others told her, here our narrator just throws everything out herself, unfiltered (indeed 'crudo'). Unfortunately, for me this didn’t work out well. ( )