The absurd idea around which Riviere constructs his pitiless, often hilarious satire is the invention of the “quantitative analysis and comparison system ( QACS),” a cutting-edge antiplagiarism software for literary publishers that not only picks up borrowings of extended sequences of words but also, “using quantitative analysis and comparison of a sophistication hitherto not imagined,” makes it
To make it clear that the strategy is unashamed and deliberate, Riviere offers an epigraph from Bernhard: “It is the absurd ideas that are the clearest ideas, and the most absurd ideas are the most important.” So the English author Sam Riviere’s first novel, Dead Souls (after Gogol), unfolds in a single three-hundred-page, one-paragraph monologue, deploying with an infallible ear all the obsessive rhythms, italicized repetitions, and general spirit of scandalized denunciation and acute insecurity that we immediately associate with Thomas Bernhard. If you are writing a comedy about imitation, plagiarism, or simply the monotonous sameness of so much contemporary literature, so much contemporary discourse, it makes sense perhaps to borrow the title of your work from one of the most celebrated novels of all time and to write it in one of the most radical and recognizable of modern prose styles.
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