Vertigo, the best website about photo-embedded literature, has published a long and generous appreciation of my new novel Mural.
First and foremost, it explains in considerable detail — several hundred words — what the book is about. The narrator’s thesis is that the ‘difference between someone with a benign passion and someone with a violent obsession is razor thin’, Vertigo’s author Terry Pitts writes. Spot on, I’d say.
Of Mural’s many reviews, Pitts’s explains my book in the greatest detail. He talks about the narrator D and his attempt to excuse his crimes on a laptop provided by his psychiatrist. He talks about the stories D tells in an attempt to say why he committed his violent and heinous offences.
‘The moral of Mural, so to speak, is that it helps to feel fully human, to feel loved, in order not to become a murderer or a psychopath’, writes Pitts, whose blog focuses on literature influenced by the prose fictions of W. G. Sebald. And while that might sound a less than inspiring recommendation for a book, Mural’s author has collected, writes Pitts, a ‘half-dozen or so really intriguing and well-written stories [some] true some not’. The ‘mini-stories’, as Pitts calls them, are what made ‘Mural a rewarding book for me’.
Mural’s images — photographs, drawings, landscapes, pages from other books — have been chosen with discernment in this ‘very entertaining book’.