Souvenir

Reviews

The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s 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 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 A tone poem of clean reflection and hallucinatory detail Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism Nimble and impressionistic, Souvenir ... creeps up on you, at once intimate and remote, austere and yet beguiling. Souvenir is a one-off 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 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 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 Michael Bracewell's latest book is an elating elegy, a portrait of the years 1979-86 in the form of glimpses, or near-vignettes, half-remembered, half-imagined, and heaving with imagery and semi-colons. There are 26 in all, starting with the emergence of colour and fantasy in the "pop-style zeitgeist" and ending with Richard Rogers's audacious Lloyd's of London building Proustian ... Bracewell - a novelist and cultural commentator whose topics have ranged from Roxy Music and Bridget Riley to Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George - summons-up images from the past, but their potency gives them an eerie clarity as if they are being experienced now ... In today's (un)social media-polarised society it provides, possibly, the most important reminder of what has been lost (temporarily, one hopes) in much of present-day society - the capability to engage in independent thought - and which it needs to recover if both social stasis and pointless conflict are to be avoided. For this Bracewell deserves our thanks, not only for what he resurrects from the past, but also for reminding us of what we need now and for the future. Complex, rich and near-perfect in its management of its peculiar tone, it's one of the most remarkable works on pop history in recent memory Souvenir is alive to the senses and seasons dressing London . . . Bracewell has a poet's gift for locating essence in detail . . . Souvenir reaches back across decades of exsanguinating Conservatism, New Labour, austerity and gentrification to find intimations of today's malaise Expand reviews