Souvenir
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Souvenir
Narrated by:
Tom Lawrence
Buy Now for ₹497.01
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Narrated by:
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Tom Lawrence
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Written by:
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Michael Bracewell
'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside
'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare
'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe
A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...
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Critic Reviews
The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s (Neil Tennant)
I loved Souvenir, not just because it is a great book, but also because it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years. If it were not so corny, I would say that the book gave me new hope - and of course, there is more to it than that, though hope was certainly a part of that first reading. I know there will be many more to come (John Burnside)
Michael Bracewell's exquisitely written book is a suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had. Told in shards of images, in postcards from the streets, clubs, clothes and chords, SOUVENIR reclaims the capital city. It is the story of a London told in a demi-decade,1975-1908 - one which formed the modern world. After SOUVENIR, that time and place will be forever remembered, in Bracewell's elegant prose (Philip Hoare)
A tone poem of clean reflection and hallucinatory detail (Jon Savage)
Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism (Jonathan Coe)
Nimble and impressionistic, Souvenir ... creeps up on you, at once intimate and remote, austere and yet beguiling. Souvenir is a one-off (Anthony Quinn)
Rich, evocative... Part eulogy, part elegy, Bracewell's blurred hallucinatory memoir seems to have no grand purpose other than to transport and the reader has no option but to give in to its powerful, hypnotic prose and imagine themselves as a time traveller or ghost, adrift in a vanished London poised somewhere between post-war despondency and futuristic optimism (Andrew Male)
These atmospheric recollections of the capital of the 1970s and 80s, and the artists it inspired, conjures a city - and a culture - in a less rapacious age ... Neither a memoir nor a work of psychogeography, Michael Bracewell's Souvenir has elements of both, its shifting, impressionist narrative made up of recalled moments, places and encounters (Sean O'Hagan)
Evoking the London of four decades ago in impressionistic and allusive prose that intentionally reads at times like poetry, or an experimental novella: history recalled in non-fiction that mimics fiction. This is a lost world as seen through the eyes of Blitz club regulars, ICA bookshop frequenters, readers of the Face and I.D. magazine - young people drawing inspiration from the likes of William Burroughs and Guy Debord, the residual energy of punk and glam rock, Weimar Berlin, or the newer electronic sounds of Soft Cell and Throbbing Gristle...Throughout, the imagery is precise and carefully judged...Bracewell's book is fittingly named. It is a souvenir of the spirit of a particular London...it succeeds very well (Max Décharné)
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