Inglorious

"'You're depressed,' a doctor tells Rosa, the thirty-five-year-old heroine of this debut novel. It is one of many simplistic diagnoses offered by Rosa’s acquaintances, who are shocked when, months after her mother’s death, she quits her job as a newspaper writer, is dumped by her boyfriend, and rapidly sinks into debt. To Rosa, her condition feels like anything but depression; she has a sense of excitement, of the tumult of her thoughts, of being 'driven towards an end that I do not know.'  Kavenna pursues the causes and trajectory of a nervous breakdown with a relentlessness that comes close to overwhelming the minimal plot; still, her understanding of the complexity of depression and her evocation of her heroine’s bewilderment are precise, and Rosa, for all her misery, has an appealing and often funny voice."—The New Yorker

"In exchanging the usual niceties of story and character development for [a] barrage of language, full of obscure allusions and quotations, Kavenna faces the charge of pomposity—worse, she risks alienating her readers with a display of linguistic dexterity that dazzles rather than engages. That she succeeds instead in captivating is testament to her sly, self-deprecating wit."—Olivia Laing, The Guardian (UK)

"The downward spiral of a breakdown begins ever so slowly. You turn, you slip, and you turn again, and then you start hurtling from basement to sub-basement to lower levels three and four. Inglorious is . . . arresting, and barefisted—for the blows come hard. But it is also a work of art: tart, wise, human, funny, and best of all, without the least trace of sentiment. Kavenna finds humor in the abyss . . . and ultimately exhilaration at the end of the tunnel."—André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name

"Joanna Kavenna’s writing is full of wit and wisdom in glorious proportion."—Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man

“Kavenna is incisive and funny enough to make Rosa convincingly crazy.”—Publishers Weekly

 

“Depressed Rosa, homeless, jobless and at the mercy of her friends, muses on the meaning of life in a darkly comic fiction debut. Kavenna sets her heroine on a slippery path. Rosa's mother's death has triggered some kind of breakdown and she has begun to withdraw from the kind of life everyone else is busy leading, focused on mortgages, children and possessions. She has walked away from a good job as a journalist and abandoned the flat she was sharing with her boyfriend, to move in with a series of friends until they ask her to leave. Sinking into debt, she knows she should find work but doesn't seem able to take the applications seriously, distracted as she is by her detached, mortality-clouded perspective. While the street life of London streams around her, she focuses on minutiae like sounds, the weather and why the word TEMP keeps appearing as graffiti. She composes crazed letters and makes nonsensical lists: 'Vacuum the living room'; 'Read widely in world religions'; 'Stop writing these lists that waste your time.' Inside her head, a sane-seeming and erudite monologue considers philosophical questions, but her actions and emotions when visiting friends in the Lake District or going for an interview betray her fragility. Kavenna's wit and quirky insights turn what might seem dreary and repetitive material into an oddly compelling and subversive disquisition on modern assumptions. Perhaps we are all only 'drifting in darkness, fumbling around,' or so begins to suspect Rosa, newly aware that TEMP (for temperate) might be the future, as she fades from view on a train to Paris. A horribly funny, surprisingly jaunty visit to the edge of the abyss.”—Kirkus Reviews