Praise for Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?
‘…what makes this novel remarkable is its style… the only recent comparable fiction would be Will Self’s Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, which also features a prolonged, digressive sequence set on a London bus. Simon Okotie’s book will receive less attention, but it is equally audacious, and in its own, low-key way, just as compelling.’ David Evans, Financial Times
‘Modern clever and fizzing with humour, Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? not only maps in brilliant detail the pressures of every urban living, it also marks, in Simon Okotie, the arrival of a staggeringly original voice.’ Lee Rourke, author of The Canal
‘There is a danger that Okotie will not reach the readers he deserves, and that those who do pick up the book… will be left feeling baffled and annoyed. There will be others, however, who will see the ambition, originality, thoughtfulness and, crucially, the humanity in Simon Okotie’s writing, and in Absalon the making of a modern classic.’ Adam Biles, 3am magazine
Praise for In the Absence of Absalon
‘The detective story as existential crisis took form with Beckett’s Molloy more than 60 years ago; and the concept of the novel as crazed digression was first incarnated in Tristram Shandy, over 250 years ago. Okotie is in very good company – and has also set himself a high bar. He succeeds. Superbly.’ Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
‘Okotie has here further refined not only his comic creation, but also his unique narrative style – the hyper punctilious – to mesmeric, Zenoesque effect.’ David Rose, author of Vault
‘Okotie’s labyrinthine syntax and meandering thought loops bring to mind the works of David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker… Delightfully eccentric… brilliantly funny.’ Houman Barekat, The Spectator
‘…a seriously funny novel of great range and depth… In the final chapter the pedestrian business of putting one foot in front of the other is subjected to a virtuoso deconstruction which builds on the mind/body disconnect explored throughout the two books. There are echoes of Henri Bergson’s theory of the comic… in which the human approximation of the mechanical is a source of laughter. Some readers may baulk at the inconsequentiality but more patient ones will admire the beauty and precision of Simon Okotie’s prose.’ David Collard, Times Literary Supplement
Praise for After Absalon
‘Discussing aesthetics in his book The Rebel (L’Homme révolté, 1951), Albert Camus coined an epigram: “Realism is endless enumeration”. Expanding on the thought, he imagined a new literary genre, a kind of extreme realism, which would spare no detail. Even Stendhal used only one sentence to tell us that Lucien Luewen had walked from one room to another. An extreme realist would go further, filling entire volumes with minute descriptions of characters and settings.
Camus thought that fiction in this style would be impossible to pull off – but he hadn’t reckoned with the Absalon novels of Simon Okotie…
Camus’s misgiving about extreme realism was that it might seem oppressive. But Okotie’s writing is deliciously funny and full of playful digressions, with its shuffling syntax and proliferation of subordinate clauses. It bears comparison to Nicholson Baker though it also fits into a British comic tradition of elaborate pedantry, surreal wordplay and winking sexual jokes that runs from Laurence Sterne to Monty Python.’
David Evans, The Times Literary Supplement
‘As a detective you have to watch your step, in order that your operations remain clandestine, and no detectives in literature have ever watched their steps as literally as Okotie’s two detectives. Much of the first novel is taken up with Marguerite’s efforts to walk along the top deck of a bus and descend its stairs; the whole of the second with his successor’s attempt to gain access to a house by a front gate and front door; and the whole of After Absalon with Marguerite’s descent along a ramp leading from a pavement to a pedestrian subway. In real time, each foray might take a minute or two. In fictional time they last an eternity. No action can be performed without first being scrupulously examined, and examination invariably reveals a problem: the insufficiency of saying ‘he put one foot in front of the other,’ for example (when one foot is also put to the side of the other), or the paradox that walking down a ramp requires upward motion (the raising of one’s feet).
…Is it presumptuous of Marguerite to think “that his investigation was sufficiently seminal to live on, through whatever means ongoingly mysterious to him, into another age, or other ages”? Maybe not: fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’
Blake Morrison, London Review of Books