Toby Lichtig
Incisions
‘What is heartbreak?’ asks the poet Craig Raine in his first foray into novel form. ‘You can’t break a heart.’ For Raine, the notion is ‘hyberbolic’, an ‘exaggerated claim to an impossible condition’. These pedantries aside, Heartbreak is a tender, ludic and intelligent meditation on this only-too-possible (if figurative) human state. In a series of loosely related short stories, vignettes, fictional biographies and philosophical meditations (the term ‘novel’ is a broad one), Raine imagines heartbreak as nourishing and empty; parental and erotic; mutating and fateful; tragic and banal – and, above all, as life itself.
As one would expect from a poet, Raine’s prose is thick with simile, whether he is contemplating ‘the stridulation of insects like an automatic sprinkler system’ or the voice of a throat cancer patient which ‘crackled and buzzed like a walkie-talkie’. His lyricism is turned on by erotica.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete