"I met John Tottenham in LA because we have the same publisher, Semiotext(e). I was intrigued to read his first novel, Service, because I'm interested in first novels written by middle-aged people. In sport, it's good to be young, but not always in literature. You have to go through some kind of trouble before you can write a book. Service is about a character called Sean - a double of Tottenham - who is in his late forties"
"It's a great book about literature and what it is to be a writer. Being a writer is an impossible quest - it's not easy and it's certainly not fun. It's a quest for something vague but absolutely meaningful. And this thing for him, and for many of us, is writing. Tottenham describes how difficult being a writer is. I feel the same anxiety, pain, loneliness and madness in this life we have chosen."
John Tottenham's novel Service follows Sean, a late-forties bookseller in Los Angeles who struggles to compose a book while working in a bookstore. The novel frames the novelist's vocation as an impossible but essential quest marked by anxiety, loneliness, faith, and moments of madness. Tottenham situates that struggle within a literary lineage from Kafka to Proust to show shared existential hardship. Constance Debré underwent a radical reinvention in her early forties, leaving marriage, a legal career, and bourgeois Parisian life for an ascetic routine of reading, swimming, sleeping, smoking, and same-sex relationships. That transformation fuels a propulsive autofictional trilogy.
Read at AnOther
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]