"As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity."
"As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work. A Waiting for Godot transported to the housing estates and grotty sublets of Clerkenwell, London, the book opens with a gnomic Vladimir/Estragon-type exchange between two startlingly similar strangers in a flat. They are both in their late 40s, very tall, dark-haired, a mirror image of each other my unremarkable eyes, they were looking back at me, Aubrey Lewis, who is subletting the flat, notices with some alarm."
An earlier novel features a working-class writer who wins a literary prize that manifests as an elusive UFO, leaving the outsider unable to claim or confirm the award. The ephemeral nature of success and unfamiliar social power contexts underline the surreal, destabilizing experience of recognition. As If uses the acting profession and themes of performance and doubleness to probe precarity at work. The narrative opens with two uncanny, mirror-image strangers in a Clerkenwell flat, invoking Waiting for Godot energy through gnomic exchanges and Pinteresque domestic gestures. The characters share overlapping pasts: a former actor mourning a curator wife and an intruder assuming new guises.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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