277 - ] English Literature
Andrew Crumey
Andrew
Crumey (born 1961) is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh
newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate
elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and
Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical
fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the
most interesting and original European authors of recent years."
Life
and career
Crumey
was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Kirkintilloch. He graduated with
First Class Honours from the University of St Andrews and holds a PhD in
theoretical physics from Imperial College, London. His thesis was on integrable
systems and Kac-Moody algebras, supervised by David Olive.
Crumey's
first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language, won the Saltire Society First Book
Award in 1994. Its theme of alternate history was inspired by the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics.
His
second novel Pfitz was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" in
1997, described as "cerebral but warm and likeable". The sequel,
D'Alembert's Principle took its title from a principle of physics.
Crumey
was a regular book reviewer for Scotland on Sunday from 1996 and became the
newspaper's literary editor in 2000. He won an Arts Council of England Writers'
Award, worth £7,000.
In
2000 Crumey's fourth novel Mr Mee was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and
won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. He followed it with Mobius Dick,
described by Joseph O'Connor as "perhaps the only novel about quantum
mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach."
In
2003 Crumey was selected for Granta's "Best of Young British
Novelists", but had been incorrectly submitted by publisher Picador, being
over 40 at the time.
In
2006, Crumey became the fifth recipient of the Northern Rock Foundation
Writer's Award for Sputnik Caledonia, which was also shortlisted for the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize and Scottish Book of the Year.
In
2006 he became lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University. In 2011 he
was a visiting fellow at Durham Institute of Advanced Study, then became
lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. It was during this time
that he wrote The Secret Knowledge, published in 2013.
His
PhD students at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities have included Alex
Lockwood, Guy Mankowski and John Schoneboom
He
has an interest in astronomy and in 2014 he published on the subject of
astronomic visibility and Ricco's law.
His
short story Singularity was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2016 and later published in
The Great Chain of Unbeing.
In
2017 he was a contestant in the St Andrews team on BBC Two's Christmas
University Challenge.
In
2018 The Great Chain of Unbeing was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Award.
Adam Roberts wrote in Literary Review: 'Andrew Crumey’s new book is a
quasi-novel built out of connected short stories. It’s something for which we
English have no specific term, but for which German critics have probably
coined an impressively resonant piece of nomenclature
(Kurzgeschichtenverkettung, maybe?). It’s as good an example of the form as I
know.'
In
2023 he published his ninth novel, Beethoven's Assassins, described in The
Irish Times as "a deliciously intellectual, ambitious book that explores
time, metaphysics, narrative and pretty much everything, all at once."
Critical
reception
Jonathan
Coe described Crumey as "a writer more interested in inheriting the mantle
of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble... Crumey seems so untouched by the
post-war British tradition that he simply writes as if it never existed."
The
Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, commenting on unorthodox
approaches to genre fiction by writers including Crumey, Frank Kuppner and Ken
Macleod, said "Andrew Crumey is one of the most innovative and engaging
Scottish writers to emerge out of this context in the last twenty years. His
speculative fiction has a strong European and global dimension, drawing on the
influence of Borges, Calvino and Milorad Pavic in its intricate, nested
narratives, non-linearity, and ludic encyclopaedism."
In
Twenty-First-century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices, Daniel Lea put
Crumey in a list of "post-postmodernist" British writers that
included Iain Banks, Bernardine Evaristo and Neil Gaiman, characterised by an
"intermingling of genre and literary fiction."
Bent
Sorensen bracketed Crumey with another physicist-turned-novelist, Alan
Lightman, and discussed their move from science to literature using Pierre
Bourdieu's concepts of "field", "position-taking" and
"gatekeeping". Sorensen wrote that Crumey was "opposed to the
postmodern epistemology when asked to define his world-view in philosophical
terms... his fictional practice, however, can still fairly be characterized as
postmodern."
Timothy
C. Baker described Crumey's novels as "monadological", citing
Deleuze's reading of Leibniz, and observing that "The relation between
[Crumey's] novels is unusual: five of his seven novels explore, in various
ways, the legacies of Enlightenment thought, often drawing upon the same ideas
and figures. These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the
relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each
novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining
narratively distinct."
Cultural
theorist Sonia Front wrote, "The notion of parallel universes seems to be
Andrew Crumey's favourite physical theory... His writings can be seen as a
multiverse themselves, with the characters reappearing to live an alternative
world-line in another novel."
Florian
Kläger sees "a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel" in the
writings of Crumey, Martin Amis, John Banville, Zadie Smith and Jeanette
Winterson.
Works
Music,
in a Foreign Language (1994)
Pfitz
(1995)
D’Alembert’s
Principle (1996)
Mr
Mee (2000)
Mobius
Dick (2004)
Sputnik
Caledonia (2008)
The
Secret Knowledge (2013)
The
Great Chain of Unbeing (2018)
Beethoven's
Assassins (2023)
No comments:
Post a Comment