Patient X - by David Peace (Paperback)

About the Book

Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer Ryåunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), whose short story "In the Grove" served as an inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashåomon, and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the known facts and events of the writer's life and inner world--birth to a mother who was mentally ill and a father who died shortly thereafter; his own battles with mental illness; his complicated reaction to the beginnings of modernization and Westernization of Japan; his short but prolific writing career; his suicide at the age of thirty-five--and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.

Book Synopsis

In these twelve interconnected tales, David Peace--acclaimed author of the Red Riding Quartet, Occupied City, and Tokyo Year Zero--weaves fact and fiction as he takes up the brief but fiercely lived life of the early-twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Unique and offbeat, Patient X delves into Akutagawa's rich and complicated private life: his fears and battles with mental illness; his complex reaction to the Westernization of Japan; his exacting creative process; and his suicide, weaving these facets into a hauntingly evocative portrait. But Patient X is more than a paean to one remarkable writer: it is also an incandescent exploration of the act and obsession of writing itself, and of the role of the artist in times that darkly mirror our own.

Review Quotes

"Dazzling. . . . An uncanny act of ventriloquism, fusing Akutagawa's jagged storytelling voice with Peace's own pulsing narration." --The New York Times Book Review

"A lyrical masterpiece that takes up Japan and the circumstances of life in the past, present and beyond. . . . Astounding." --The Japan Times

"His best to date, to my mind." --David Mitchell, The Guardian

"Superlative: exacting, precise and filled with the suffocating sense of foreboding generated by the master's own best stories. . . . Peace is not simply a masterfully controlled stylist but a magnificently atmospheric one, composing hypnotic collages." --Financial Times

"One might say that what Peace does with words is impossible to adequately describe with words. . . . [He] has written a biography in fiction. He has assumed Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's writing soul. . . . Yet, the possibility that Peace's fiction is not all his own never enters the reader's mind. To not only attempt such a feat, but to carry it out in a work that is not autobiographical in any shape or form is further proof of Peace's mastery of the art of fiction." --Counterpunch

"David Peace is not a writer who obeys the usual conventions and assumptions: his work defies expectations. . . . With Patient X, one begins to see that Peace's achievement is not merely as an English prose stylist, or as someone who merges genres, or indeed even as a political writer challenging what appears to be the natural order, but as a transnational figure challenging all categories of containment." --Ian Sansom, The Guardian

"[A] forceful stylist with . . . a taste for the weird, all of which makes [Peace] a good match for Akutagawa." --The Wall Street Journal

"Beautiful, gothic and powerfully mysterious." --Esquire (UK)

"An imaginative glimpse behind the curtain of a sheltered, definitively troubled writer of a century past. . . . [Patient X] has an elegant poetry to it." --Kirkus Reviews

"By combining history, oral tradition, surrealism, and a Poe-like grittiness, the always innovative Peace reimagines the life of a gifted writer who died young by his own hand." --Booklist

"A surreal world in which madmen, doppelgangers and demons rub shoulders with Christ, Buddha and Jack the Ripper. . . . One of the most original and intriguing books you'll read this year." --The Mail on Sunday

"Brilliant. . . . Peace is one of the best and most peculiar writers in English today. . . . The kaleidoscopic effect of Patient X gives English-language audiences their best chance of insight into the strange mental amalgamation that allowed Akutagawa to construct his fiction." --The Washington Free Beacon

"Further proof, if proof were needed, that David Peace is one of Britain's (and the world's) most gifted and original novelists." --Sydney Morning Herald

"A riskily complex novel. . . . Think Dostoevsky, but also Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Auster . . . Intricate. . . . Lyrical." --Clive Lowdon, The Sunday Times (London)

"The most illuminating commentary possible that Anglophone readers could find on this compelling figure." --The Daily Telegraph

About the Author

David Peace--named in 2003 one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists--was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three); GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. The final part of his Tokyo Trilogy--to follow Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City--will appear after Patient X, his tenth novel. He lives in Tokyo.