ELLE A VERSE NOVEL Reviewed

I’m pleased to announce that Billy Mills has reviewed my latest book, Elle – a verse novel on his impressive blog.

The review may be read here: Two Broken Sleeps – Elliptical Movements.

 

I thought his description of the main ‘character’ spot on: ‘And then there’s the titular Elle, or “She”, Belle without the B, who is both a character and not one, and who merges at times with Christine, the woman murdered in the Brighton story.’ The text is based on Belle de Jour and 'the Brighton story' is of a terrible murder. I particularly hope other readers will concur with Billy’s reflection: ‘What the book achieves, in the end, is to replace the double victimhood of Christine, once at the hand of her husband and again at the hands of his judge and jury, with a sense of her power, of her being, in spite of everything, in control of her choices.’ 

I describe the process of writing the ‘novel’ here, with some account of the backstory that is described in more detail in the book’s ‘Afterword’: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition. I also described the book again, on its publication, here: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.  

‘It’s a tour-de-force of a book,’ Billy concludes, ‘in which Sheppard makes the verse novel his own.’

Elle may be bought here: Robert Sheppard - Elle, a Verse Novel | Broken Sleep Books.

 

My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books

My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is now published by Broken Sleep Books

 

Details for ORDER: Robert Sheppard - Elle, a Verse Novel | Broken Sleep Books

 

Elle: A Verse Novel by Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template. Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium. The book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a hauntological lyric, a summoning that won’t let the archive lie still.

 Thanks to Aaron Kent and Broken Sleep for publishing this 'wild card' contribution. 

 

I write about the project here in some detail, including a video of my initial process: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition

And there is an extract here: Elle: a verse novel - শুদ্ধস্বর

David Spittle writes: ‘Collapsing collage into writerly montage, Robert Sheppard’s utterly unique creation inhales its smudged histories of Brighton newspaper ink until the seedy banality of crime and commerce – laced with counter-cultural artists and surrealist drama – becomes a visionary disorientation of troubling desire. 

Fitfully lighting a fuse for pulp alchemy, the dislocations of Sheppard’s experimental verse-novel reimagines a scandalous chapter of sex and violence as a redemptive book for, and of, linguistic transformation. Writing through Joseph Kessel’s novel, Belle de Jour (1928), Sheppard’s mulched and dexterous composition invokes a host of guardian influences: Tom Phillips’ miraculous collage-project Humument, the melting plastic frenzies of Jeff Keen’s stop motion films, and the busy scrutiny of Iain Sinclair’s occultations of time and place…all jostle in the shadowy streets and anachronistic absurdities of Brighton’s strange vortex. However, regardless of such coordinates, it belongs only to that rare and wonderful vein of books that have no obvious antecedent; a beguiling milestone for the orphaned anti-traditions of all that wander through that curious designation: sui generis. 

A cheap paperback and the incriminating link of a Pontiac, a misremembered poet and washing-machine tycoon, l’amour fou and The Blue Gardenia Club…all are framed and re-framed as talismanic clues towards a mystery that’s only ever resolved in the present of its reading. Unlike anything else, this is poetry as séance, trance, farce, and delirious hearsay; it is the intoxicated remembrance of a lost film that changes with each retelling and yet, beneath or beyond that telling, the propulsive dream of its significance remains - a fixed magnetism around which the patterned filings circle. Lose yourself in it and retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence.’

 As I write in the Introduction: The turn to the ‘verse-novel’, however ironical, reflects yet another, late, act of transformation, the translation to ‘verse’, a term I seldom use. These procedures and processes are well described by Derek Attridge in his The Work of Literature (2015) when he tells us: ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art is … both an act and an event: it’s something the artist does … and something that happens to the artist.’ This work has been hard labour but it has manifested itself before and within me, almost without me.

 

Here's a hint about how the rough drafts were constructed, for later workings-on.