Description - Quicksand by Steve Toltz
A daring, brilliant work by one of our most original and fearless novelists 'Why should I let you write about me?' 'Because you'll inspire people. To count their blessings.' Aldo Benjamin, relentlessly unlucky in every aspect of life, has always faced the future with despair and optimism in equal measure. His latest misfortune, though, may finally have brought him undone. There's still hope, but not for Aldo. His mate Liam hasn't been doing much better - a failed writer with a rocky marriage and a dangerous job he never wanted - until he finds inspiration in Aldo's exponential disaster. What begins as an attempt to document these improbable but inevitable experiences becomes a profound exploration of fate, fear and friendship. Wildly entertaining and acutely insightful, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of 21st-century existence in all its hypocrisy and absurdity, an exquisite interpretation of suffering and resilience, and a compelling story about the taking of risks and the making of art. 'The energy, the hairpin turns, the narrative crashes, the stomach churning ascents and trashed taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent.'
Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of Amnesia 'The funniest novel of the past year ...Genuinely moving.' The Saturday Times (UK) 'Quicksand proves to be the cherry on the cake - a beguiling novel that confounds and astonishes in equal measure, often on the same page ...Part Chuck Palahniuk, part David Foster Wallace ...Quicksand has a thousand dazzling throwaway moments of brilliance ...A tour de force.' Australian Book Review 'It is very rare for me to laugh on almost every page of a book; it is even rarer for that to be accompanied by exquisite melancholy. Toltz is writing like very few other authors; he seems like an Antipodean Thomas Bernhard in his unsparing, agonizing comedies. I hope it is not seven years before his next novel.' Scotland on Sunday (UK) 'Brilliantly dark ...It's counterintuitive to find Beckett in an Australian maximalist, but Toltz's black humour, keen eye for the absurdity of existence and intimate exploration of physical suffering can't help but bring him to mind ...The entire novel is buzzing with the power of human connection - the jokes, accommodations and shared mythologies of love and friendship.'
The Guardian 'A narrative so brilliant, so fizzing with lucidity and comedy and horror and hard-nosed empathy ...In these pages the old shopfront of Australian masculinity is white-anted with honesty and self-lacerating glee, while the deadpan nihilism of our national humour is elevated to cosmic schtick ...Aldo Benjamin is one of those rare characters who will live on in our collective literary imagination.' The Saturday Paper 'Steve Toltz is incapable of turning out an uninteresting sentence. There is a comic force to his writing, a relentless accumulation of detail, absurdity and ruthless observation, that is unlike almost anything I have seen in contemporary Australian literature, with the possible exception of Peter Carey.' Sydney Review of Books 'Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest.'
Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names 'There are more lines of genius on one page of Quicksand
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