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Dead Souls by Sam Riviere    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Poets are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of writers, and writers are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of people, the old poet said,” writes poet Sam Riviere in Dead Souls, a novel that is a satire, that is not the word, an evisceration of the poetry scene, so to call it, under late capitalism. The creative industries, as they have the misfortune too often to be called, in our time as in the very-near-to-our-time world of the novel, are, of course, focussed on industrial production, their cultural products, so to call them, quantified and qualified, if that is the right way to put it, on scales of popularity and originality, vacuous measures, the whole writing enterprise is futile, really, other than as a means of pointing out how futile it is, which Riviere does, incidentally, rather well. Dead Souls is narrated by the editor of a poetry journal or some such but, after the first pages, the book is entirely given over to the narrator’s verbatim reporting of the seven-hour monologue of renegade poet Solomon Wiese, delivered to the narrator in the poet-infested Travelodge Bar over one night during London’s so-called Festival of Culture. Riviere not only emulates Thomas Bernhard in nesting the narrative, so to call it, in often several layers of reported speech, keeping his protagonist, so to call him, at a filtered remove from the reader, but also in the employment of long, looping, comma-rich sentences that take any thought to the point at which that thought, not to mention frequently sanity itself, is entirely exhausted. Riviere has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a keen sense of how closely the ridiculous lies to the ordinary, a keen sense that in fact the ridiculous is only the ordinary logically extended, as you will affirm from your own experience. Having fallen foul of the algorithm QACS that measures a poem’s originality and therefore what we could call its market value, Wiese, branded a plagiarist (is it possible to be anything else?), withdraws to a provincial town, the population of which seems interested only in virtual buggy-racing, and amasses the output of several overlooked provincial poets, whose work he spontaneously regurgitates on his wildly popular return to the London scene (so to call it). For Wiese, it seems, poetic production is the releasing of unoriginal and mediocre material back into the nothingness where it belongs, the opposite or complement of inspiration, not that there is such a thing as inspiration, really, a relinquishment of thought. “It was this nothingness that had attracted him to poetry … the literal nothingness on the page, invading from the right margin, threatening to wipe out meaning entirely. Rather than making something, Solomon Wiese said, the writing of poetry was far more like deleting something, it was like pointing at something to make it disappear. … Poetry was the gradual replacement of things in the world with their absence.” Ultimately, Wiese falls again into disgrace, notwithstanding the ‘dead souls’ he has bought in the form of fake follower accounts on the poetry social media platform Locket—in much the same way that Chichikov purchases for his intended advancement the identities of serfs who have died since the last census in Gogol’s novel of the same name (does this make Gogol an anticipatory plagiarist of Riviere?). Riviere’s book is full of bitter invention, of devastating humour, of the skewering of anything and anyone skewerable, of exquisite panic. It will amuse you to the point of despair. Although, of course, everything that is wrong with the poetry world, so to call it, is wrong also with the wider world of other concerns, Riviere does have a special affinity for the poetic calling: “Detach yourself from this terrible pastime that will lead only to ruin. It will never please you or anyone you care about, it will never make you happy, it will simply become the basis and means of recording your own unhappiness, the old poet said.”