Vu

Book Title: Vu

Author: Kenneth Sinclair

Publication Date: 19/12/2024

The Story

A legendary princess reclines on her juniper couch. A stranded storyteller muses in his cell, recalling scenes from Hampstead and Wiltshire, and waiting to be conducted to the princess’s apartment by a torch-bearing guide. From time to time, exercising in a courtyard, the storyteller encounters his predecessor, seated beneath a palm tree, fingering prayer beads. They exchange words about freedom and captivity, a theme threaded through the narrative, in which the ambivalence of the human condition is poignantly expressed.

All this is the frame for a book which offers not one story, or even a few, but literally hundreds of stories, culled from the riches of world culture and all seen in the mind’s eye of the narrator, Gabriel. “I am a very visual writer,” says Sinclair. “That is why I called my book Vu, the French for seen.” He, too, slips into the narrative from time to time – blue pen hovering above the page, his dog waiting for his walk – before slipping again silently behind the scenes.

For more about Vu, see BrynGlasBooks Blog post, What Kind of Book is Vu

Reader Reviews

I’ve never seen a book like this. The words are so beautiful, so image-rich, that they are almost poetry, gorgeous metaphor-filled erudite references to literary and artistic wonders. Every paragraph is a jewel, an ‘iridescent text that causes others… to quiver a little’. They flit like butterflies, never quite anchored, like Japanese tanka court poetry, little bubbles linked not so much by narrative but by theme or emotive effect. A cornucopia for the senses. Susie Helme, Historical Novel Society

Epic in scope, the literary novel, Vu, is made up of woven-together historical tales used to deliver a thorough picture of the past. Using the framework of Arabian Nights, Kenneth Sinclairʼs novel is a history of the world told in a dreamy stream of elegant prose. Brendan McKelvy, Foreword Review

Author Bio

Kenneth Sinclair was born in Scotland and has lived in London and Wiltshire.
His early writing, in the 1960s and 70s, comprised a number of stage plays, three of which were performed publicly. These are,
The Private Secretary (BBC Radio 4);
Blue Skies (Pentameters, Hampstead);
Candles in the Night (ADC Theatre, Cambridge).

A 1974 review of Blue Skies by Matthew Lewin in the Express and News – forerunner of the Ham and High – described the drama as, “a penetrating and amusing play about the hopes, dreams and suddenly-changing fortunes of new and established staff of a large company… The play very effectively lashes out at the petty rules and pompous regulations which large companies tend to generate within themselves. People find security in obeying policies and rules which they have themselves created – and it only takes a few minor upsets to knock the whole delicately balanced mechanism out of alignment.”

The ADC Theatre programme describes the Candles in the Night production as, “a move towards a more fluid, emblematic presentation, free from the inhibitions and limitations of naturalistic stage technique.”

Sinclair pushed his dramatic endeavours to the limit with an ambitious piece that includes, first, a meeting between the fictional Baron de Charlus and Leopold Bloom, followed by that of their authors, Proust and Joyce. In a personal letter, Harold Pinter wrote to him in 1980, “The play is clearly a highly ambitious piece of work. I think it is in the main part beautifully written, with elegance and wit and, as you suspected, I was intrigued by what you were setting out to do. I donʼt think it entirely succeeds and it is difficult to put oneʼs finger on the reason…”

After that, Sinclair turned his attention away from theatre, but retained a desire to break the boundaries in a new form of writing. He started working on Vu during the prolonged post office strike of 1988. It underwent many revisions before Gillian Paschkes-Bell began to work on it with him as his editor. Although he describes Vu as a novel, it retains only the barest development of character and plot. Rather, it emerges from his years of extensive reading and his interest in the arts, including popular culture. Vu is a collections of images in words that drift, as one reader put it, like clouds across the imagination.

Kenneth Sinclairʼs life is revealed through his poetry collection, A Breath Taken, which was published by Wordcatcher in 2022, shortly before the company ceased trading.