Description
Book SynopsisA rediscovered literary classic, The Bloater is a rollicking hothouse novel where love and repulsion are two paths to the same abyssTrade Review"Uncommonly good." -- The Guardian
"Writing like this?—?a bit of Rhys, a bit of Knut Hamsun, a bit of Wyndham Lewis, a bit of Muriel Spark, overlaying the everlasting Shakespeare/Austen/?Brontë/George Eliot marriage drama?—?is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London, between Hangover Square and Carnaby Street." -- Michael Hofmann - Poetry
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The Bloater delights us by its wit, relish, and new-minted metaphors." -- Daily Telegraph
"Redolent of Swinging-Sixties London, Tonks’s brilliant sex comedy reveals sobering depths beneath its flashing surface... the revival of this beguiling 1967 novel restores a truly original voice to the shelves; a must." -- David Wright - Library Journal
"Passion and revulsion, tenderness and cruelty, worldly sophistication and schoolgirl naiveté—outside of the classic will-they-won’t-they set-up of an unlikely romantic pairing, it’s Tonks’s embrace of oppositional forces that provides the source of the novel’s tension, as well as its levity…The joy of reading
The Bloater is in the vitality of Tonks’s sentences, which are teeming with sensory particulars and surprising, delightful connections…its republication seems a small miracle." -- Madelaine Lucas - Astra Magazine
"It is about flirtation as a method of self-organization, and a crush as a method of self-torture. All of
The Bloater, however—every single sentence—is funny." -- Audrey Wollen - The New Yorker
