Book of the year so far, by a novelist I had never heard of, although apparently quite prolific (wrote ‘The Boy in striped Pyjamas’ which I think we have seen the film of).
This is a book about ownership/theft of literary texts, by the anti hero Maurice Swift. All the narrative, apart from the final chapter, is voiced by his victims – firstly Erich Ackerman, a gay German novelist and academic whose story Swift seduces out of his and publishes as his own, leading to Ackerman’s disgrace and death. Next his wife, who he murders and steals, publishing as if his own, her novel. There is an interlude involving Gore Vidal, who sees through him fairly quickly.
In the final section he is hoist quite rightly on his own petard by a distant relative of Ackerman, his first victim.
Brilliant, and coincidentally on the radio last week after I had read it!
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