IAIN SINCLAIR, ENGLISH NOVELIST AND POET

[Zlatko Waterman]

Aficionado of the Beats, maker of a famous film on Allen Ginsberg, poet, novelist, screenwriter, book dealer and film director, Iain Sinclair is one of the most remarkable writers in English alive today.

Born in Wales in 1943, he now lives and writes in London, living in a house he bought for 2000 pounds in the East End in 1969.

Here's a note I made in my notebook while I was reading "DownRiver", a truly extraordinary feat of word-conjuring and serio-comic narrative ( of over 400 pages) which chronicles the collapse of what Sinclair calls "the river life" ( on the Thames) during the Thatcherite period:

(I wrote)

Iain Sinclair, "Downriver"

A strange dryadic twilight gathers around much that he writes, along with a rollicking, Fellini-like irreverence for the slightest word or gesture. A torrent of language simultaneously roars around our ears like city traffic. seemingly inexhaustible streams of it. His diction is a bottomless reservoir and his rhythms range from military tambourines to Coltrane-like riffs to the round, fruitlike notes of a Renaissance lute. Not since Joyce or Celine has anyone I've read "leaned-into" the bank of language with such force and yanked fists of turf from it. Each sentence seems almost astonished at itself, but having danced down the page, is ready to partner with another skein of words slashing our expectations even deeper, and doing so often with a rough, stinking bravado.
Bloody marvelous, I would cry out if I were a Brit. Being a transplanted Californian, I can only smirk and chuckle to myself at this carnival of possibilites.

(end notebook)

And Sinclair is far better than my notebook scribblings might lead you to believe.

I recommend "Downriver" strongly. I have sampled some of his other books: "Radon Daughters" and "Landor's Tower" ( his latest) seem particularly promising.


Here's a link to some reviews of Sinclair's work, and other links to his books:

http://www.complete-review.com/authors/sinclairi.htm



Zlatko