In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Denise Riley embarks on an exquisite, excoriating investigation of her own mourning in the wake of the sudden death of her son. The book was more or less self-published several years ago and passed around like samizdat from one small press aficionado to another. Now, though, it has been republished by Granta in a beautiful new hardback edition with an introduction by Max Porter, and I had the pleasure of reviewing it this week for Splice:
What is radicalism in literature, but a redrawing of the usual boundaries of the readable? Find the zone of moderation, which is to say convention, then strike off in one of two directions. Push the boundaries outwards, claim liberties beyond those taken by the average book, and churn out a thousand-page treatise on melancholy or a doorstopper that makes room for every known fact about cetaceans. Or make your space more cramped, more pinched, and draw the boundaries inward. Forgo certain allowances; let your possibilities atrophy. Write a book in chapters of exactly one hundred words each, or in sentences that all take the form of a question. Use only phrases culled from other books, or refuse to use words containing the letter e. And then, if you really want to indulge your radicalism, choose a subject whose emotional freight tilts it in one of these two directions — excessive or aloof — and force your style to take the alternative. Go maximalist, go gargantuan, with a story about office boredom. Or else go minimalist, be ascetic by an act of will, with a counter-intuitive approach to a harrowing situation like the one faced by the poet Denise Riley.
Infinite Patience 