Vu
Book Title: Vu
Author: Kenneth Sinclair
Publication Date: 19/12/2024
The Story
Vu is an experimental fiction, a novel from a writer who previously wrote plays and was looking for a way to gather together the riches of a lifetime of reading.
His narrator, Gabriel, must entertain the legendary Scheherazade. Inverting the classic tales of The Arabian Nights, it is she who commands a storyteller to beguile “those interminable nights.” She tells him to start with the Greeks, whose “long oars drip diamond drops.” From there, with frequent interpolations from Scheherazade, Gabriel advances across the globe from the Han Ku Pass to the Amazon rainforest, and down the years to the eve of the twenty-first century, offering a collage of scintillating and lyrically-penned images.
A princess reclines on her juniper couch. A captive storyteller muses in his cell, recalling scenes from Hampstead and Wiltshire, and waiting to be conducted to his captor’s apartment by a torch-bearing guide. From time to time he meets the old storyteller, seated beneath a palm tree, fingering prayer beads. They exchange words about freedom and captivity, a theme that is threaded through the narrative.
Clarion Foreword review
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. Each referenced moment is given space to breathe before Gabriel moves on to the next.
Brendan McKelvy
Historical Novel Society review
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.
For more about Vu, see the Bryn Glas Blog post, What Kind of Experimental Fiction is Vu
Vu can be ordered from bookshops, or purchased direct from Books on Line, Wales at Gwales.com.
A Pantolwen Press publication.
Reader Reviews
Author Bio
Kenneth Sinclair was born in Scotland and has lived in London and Wiltshire.
In the 1960s and 70s he wrote stage plays.
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 appeared in the Express and News (forerunner of the Ham and High). Lewin 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.”
However, foiled in fully-realising realising his intention, Sinclair turned away from theatre and started working on Vu. First conceived during the prolonged post office strike of 1988, it underwent many revisions before Gillian Paschkes-Bell began to work with Sinclair, as his editor. Vu emerges from years of extensive reading and Sinclair’s deep interest in the arts and popular culture. It 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, but is no longer in print