Souvenir

Name: Souvenir
Brand: Hachette UK
Availability: InStock
Author: Michael Bracewell
ISBN: 9781474622325

Author: Michael Bracewell

Narrator: Tom Lawrence

Unabridged: 2 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: White Rabbit

Published: 09/02/2021

Categories: Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Memoirs, Literary Collections, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant

'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside

'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare

'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe

A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

About Michael Bracewell

Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and two works of non-fiction including SAINT RACHEL, PERFECT TENSE, REMAKE/REMODEL and ENGLAND IS MINE.His writing has been published in THE FABER BOOK OF POP and a selection of his writings on art and culture, THE SPACE BETWEEN was published in 2012.He has written widely on modern and contemporary art, most notably about the work of Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton on the occasion of recent exhibitions of their work at The National Gallery, London. Also on the art of Damien Hirst and Gilbert & George for the Tate Gallery, London.His most recent publications include the Introduction to a new edition of Oscar Wilde's classic essay, 'The Critic As Artist'.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nigeyb on February 05, 2022

I am squarely in the target market for Michael Bracewell's Souvenir: an extended essay (aka a very short book) which recalls and ruminates upon the pre-digital London of the 1970s and 1980s. I was a young person living, working and socialising in that very London, and retain vivid memories of the er......more

Goodreads review by Laura on October 20, 2021

Zinc-coloured skies, the air smelling of vinegar and lost illusions, a dead gull, the sense that always, somewhere, is elsewhere, somewhere beyond the wires, perhaps, where a retrograde alterity sulks behind a burger bar and there's a sense of transmission and hopeless longing. There's a lot of page......more

Goodreads review by Stagger on November 24, 2021

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling. Paul Morley doing Iain Sinclair, long lists of signifiers and present tense descriptions, like flicking through Polaroids. Some of the references were so precise I trusted the ones I didn't get but like The Waste Land (which crops up a lot), you'd surely only......more

Goodreads review by Scott on January 18, 2023

It's at time wondrous and at others near impenetrable. It is a one of a kind kaleidoscopic work riffing on the late 70s and early 80s London where the Pop Age is running out of steam and thrusting forward interesting new concepts based on the intellectualism of the past and transgressing the pop of......more

Goodreads review by Owen on July 24, 2023

By far the best thing I've read of MB's: a series of extremely condensed, glinting, elliptical portraits of post-punk London, surely the book he's spent his life running up to. Also, so short you can read the whole thing in one bath.......more

Quotes

The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s

I loved Souvenir, not just because it is a great book, but also because it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years. If it were not so corny, I would say that the book gave me new hope - and of course, there is more to it than that, though hope was certainly a part of that first reading. I know there will be many more to come

Michael Bracewell's exquisitely written book is a suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had. Told in shards of images, in postcards from the streets, clubs, clothes and chords, SOUVENIR reclaims the capital city. It is the story of a London told in a demi-decade,1975-1908 - one which formed the modern world. After SOUVENIR, that time and place will be forever remembered, in Bracewell's elegant prose

A tone poem of clean reflection and hallucinatory detail

Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism

Nimble and impressionistic, Souvenir ... creeps up on you, at once intimate and remote, austere and yet beguiling. Souvenir is a one-off FINANCIAL TIMES

Rich, evocative... Part eulogy, part elegy, Bracewell's blurred hallucinatory memoir seems to have no grand purpose other than to transport and the reader has no option but to give in to its powerful, hypnotic prose and imagine themselves as a time traveller or ghost, adrift in a vanished London poised somewhere between post-war despondency and futuristic optimism MOJO

These atmospheric recollections of the capital of the 1970s and 80s, and the artists it inspired, conjures a city - and a culture - in a less rapacious age ... Neither a memoir nor a work of psychogeography, Michael Bracewell's Souvenir has elements of both, its shifting, impressionist narrative made up of recalled moments, places and encounters THE OBSERVER

Evoking the London of four decades ago in impressionistic and allusive prose that intentionally reads at times like poetry, or an experimental novella: history recalled in non-fiction that mimics fiction. This is a lost world as seen through the eyes of Blitz club regulars, ICA bookshop frequenters, readers of the Face and I.D. magazine - young people drawing inspiration from the likes of William Burroughs and Guy Debord, the residual energy of punk and glam rock, Weimar Berlin, or the newer electronic sounds of Soft Cell and Throbbing Gristle...Throughout, the imagery is precise and carefully judged...Bracewell's book is fittingly named. It is a souvenir of the spirit of a particular London...it succeeds very well THE SPECTATOR

Michael Bracewell's latest book is an elating elegy, a portrait of the years 1979-86 in the form of glimpses, or near-vignettes, half-remembered, half-imagined, and heaving with imagery and semi-colons. There are 26 in all, starting with the emergence of colour and fantasy in the "pop-style zeitgeist" and ending with Richard Rogers's audacious Lloyd's of London building NEW STATESMAN