"Freud would have had a lot to say about a novel in which the central premise is writers being murdered. A manifestation of a repressed desire to eliminate rival literary talent? A clear case of the death drive? Either way, there's some twisted business going on in Andrew Gallix's chronically funny debut novel, Loren Ipsum. The morbid if intriguing premise quickly becomes secondary to an insouciant satire on the vanity fair of present-day literary culture."
"Loren Ipsum somehow manages to be both the book's moral centre and a shapeshifting cipher for everything that's wrong with contemporary literary life. With a heart of frosted glass, she is all blurred features and radio static. Her own first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, was published by Galley Beggar in 2019. Her favourite bookshop is Shakespeare and Company (she had all their totes), and her best party frock is part Mondrian, part Battenberg."
A chronically funny story frames serial murders of writers as a device to lampoon the vanity fair of contemporary literary culture. A Paris-based journalist named Loren Ipsum researches a reclusive English literary figure while serving as both moral centre and shapeshifting cipher for literary excess. Loren combines blurred features, a heart of frosted glass, and a catalogue of bougie affectations that embody peak London literary fashion. As Parisian scribes are killed, an obscure terrorist group claims responsibility and the action relocates to Antibes, where carnivalesque episodes escalate, including a yacht party nodding to Fellini's 8 and a later cameo by Marcello Mastroianni.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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