Loren Ipsum
Andrew Gallix
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From the publisher
VIVE LA RÉSISTANCE!
Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure.
Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists’ slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their éminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island?
Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. A famous author is expropriated from her beautiful garden, which is turned into a commune. The severed head of a British novelist residing in Paris is discovered in a box. A Scandinavian playwright’s ponytail is cut off on the streets of the Left Bank. A mermaid blows up a yacht where a sparkling literary party is in full swing…
PRAISE
‘If Petronius had taken ketamine with Guy Debord… Loren Ipsum is like a chemical (or celestial, or necro-feline) phenomenon the very observation of which causes it to radically mutate under your gaze. As you turn the pages, biting satire morphs into tender autobiography, literary theory into crime, and farce into a complex reflection of culture and its place in history”
– Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and The Making of Incarnation
‘In Loren Ipsum language itself is up in arms, subverting syntax and blasting holes in meaning left, right, and centre. Gallix’s gleeful opus of literary insurrection is a rogue assemblage of styles and strategies that bristles with cunning stunts, skilful swordplay, and meta-tricksy in-your-endos, with a JPM — jokes per minute — count that’s right off the page’
– Rob Doyle, author of Threshold and Cameo
‘Loren Ipsum is a roman à clef which gleefully scrapes its keys over the surface of the realist novel, turning it inside out and revelling in the carnage it creates. It forms an anti-biography which spills the tea on several lives, teases truth like a saucy flash of knickers, artfully nicks from several sources and spins puns to make sense unspun. Dazzlingly comic and profoundly serious, this novel — like all great writing — is utterly futile and absolutely essential, both confounding and illuminating. Loren Ipsum writes, rewrites and unwrites the great Anglo-French novel, destroying then re-creating the world with each chapter”
– C.D. Rose, author of We Live Here Now
‘Brilliant, tricksy and wild.’
– Heidi James, author of The Sound Mirror
‘I haven’t felt so embroiled in my own medium since absorbing the works of Gilbert Adair. Gallix’s sleuth Loren Ipsum is a cutting-edge successor to Adair’s Evadne Mount, and with Loren Ipsum, Gallix proves that word domination can be accomplished from his own Paris garrotte’
– Sophie Lewis, literary editor and translator
‘Strange and playful, this debut novel is full of surprises and charm’
– Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily