'The Inevitable Gift Shop' by Will Eaves

The Absent Therapist, which saw Will Eaves short-listed for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, is one of the most enjoyable books I have read in the past couple of years, and is a consummate piece of kaleidoscopic ventriloquism (read my review here). The Inevitable Gift Shop is not so much kaleidoscopic as autokleptomanic, not so much ventriloquistic as autoarchivistic. This book is an assemblage of prose fragments, poems, anecdotes, and observations on works of literature. It is unsuccessful as ‘a work’, but as a ‘non-work’ it is intimate and personable and frequently insightful, funny, or both; it is as if we are permitted to read Eaves’ journal, or to be with him as he has his thoughts. He makes some perceptive comments on the act and place of writing: “The work is an act of self-conscious creation that has the effect of cancelling self-consciousness”, and of the relation between our inner and outer lives: “The self-portrait is even more surprising than the objective portrait because, it turns out, we are not as we see ourselves, either”. And his humour is never far below the surface: “I eat fish with a clear conscience because they neglect their young”.

March 2016