Downriver (Paperback)

by Iain Sinclair (Author) "'And what,' Sabella insisted, 'is the opposite of a dog?'..." (more)
Key Phrases: jiffy bag, Jon Kay, Nicholas Moore, Edith Cadiz (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In his U.S. debut Sinclair, a British poet, filmmaker, rare book dealer and jack-of-all-trades, puts his varied background to work in a dextrous, multifaceted novel of the London docklands. The narrator, among other sordid locals, has been hired by a movie production company to ferret out the "real" old-time docklands. Told as 12 stories set in the near future but riddled with spectres of the past, this novel attempts to do for this down-and-out area what Joyce did for Dublin: eulogize it with language so abstract and imagery so densely allusive as to simulate the layering of historical detail upon a specific locale. The result is nearly incomprehensible, but that's part of the fun; and Sinclair goes out of his way to entertain. His separate narratives introduce a bizarre assortment of sexual encounters and violent deaths, each as vivid and incoherent as any nightmare. Filled with the ghosts and wrecks of London history, inhabited by grubby barflies and Cockney wharf-rats, this teeming novel seems as rich, fecund and ultimately mesmerizing as the muddy Thames. Downriver won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel; Sinclair's first book, White Chapel , Scarlet Tracings , has not as yet been published here.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Sinclair won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel for this mixture of fiction, history, travel memoir, and autobiography. It is ostensibly the story of a crew of writers and filmmakers who try to document the passing of a way of life in the gentrified Thames basin, the history they uncover, their attempts to develop a way to record it, and the problems Sinclair (who is both author and character) encounters in writing the script and the novel itself. Denizens of the basin, including a prostitute and a scavenger, appear throughout, and dogs and Masonry play important roles. The style is rich but often difficult, especially for a non-British reader (e.g., "The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro"), though Sinclair includes more accessible wit ("They were encrusted with enough badges to subdue a college of semiologists"). Recommended for literary collections.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 405 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862074895
• ISBN-13: 978-1862074897
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,550,887 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mind-blowingly original novel from a master, August 23, 2006

By	Brian A. Oard (Midwestern USA) - See all my reviews

Iain Sinclair is one of the masters of modern English prose, and he deserves to be much better known outside of Britain. If a writer's visibility were proportional to his sheer talent, Sinclair would have a profile as high as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, two other British writers with whom his talent is--at least--on a par.
"Downriver" takes us to Sinclair's familiar turf, the East End of London and eventully transports us all the way downriver to the mouth of the Thames, but the real geography mapped here is the one inside Iain Sinclair's head. This man's imagination is incredibly fertile, and it rarely flags. I would compare him to Pynchon, Grass, Kafka, even Garcia-Marquez. But I must also go further afield and compare him to Blake and Coleridge. One of his blurb writers calls Sinclair "a demented magus of the sentence." Now that I've read "Downriver," I understand exactly what that means.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A humorously deconstructionist "novel" set at Thames river, May 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Downriver (or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales (Or, the Vessels of Wrath : a Narrative in Twelve Tales) (Hardcover)

For those of you who have often wondered how a deconstructionism would be expressed in a literary production, this book really does the job. It's unlike anything that I've read, and yet it seems to have triggered a resonating series of semi-familiar philosophical points from my past readings. Sinclair writes really well and seems to enjoy creating and using the literary vehicle of Derrida/Heidegger's "disappearance of a presense". Instead of reading those stodgy philosophers, take a break and read this book. You'll enjoy how the London real estate and its artistic allies can remake the unmarketable Thames river area. It figures...

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ... without a paddle., April 6, 2008

By	Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Downriver (or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales (Or, the Vessels of Wrath : a Narrative in Twelve Tales) (Hardcover)

Sinclair's book is the only one I have ever read that makes Joyce seem only mildly difficult. I hope Sinclair had a good time writing this; perhaps he'd consider writing "Explaining Downriver".

So, why did I give it 2 stars? The first star is for his ability to write. The second is in case my lack of understanding is due to my being lame rather than this story.

If you are looking for a difficult read that at least makes some kind of sense, try David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.