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My picture of Claire-Louise Bennett, taken at Le Rostand, Paris, in 2018, appeared in the Irish Independent on 29 May 2025.
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“In Loren Ipsum language itself is up in arms, subverting syntax and blasting holes in meaning left, right, and centre. Gallix’s gleeful opus of literary insurrection is a rogue assemblage of styles and strategies that bristles with cunning stunts, skilful swordplay, and meta-tricksy in-your-endos, with a JPM — jokes per minute — count that’s right off the page”
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Loren Ipsum is a roman à clef which gleefully scrapes its keys over the surface of the realist novel, turning it inside out and revelling in the carnage it creates. It forms an anti-biography which spills the tea on several lives, teases truth like a saucy flash of knickers, artfully nicks from several sources and spins puns to make sense unspun.
Dazzlingly comic and profoundly serious, this novel — like all great writing — is utterly futile and absolutely essential, both confounding and illuminating. Loren Ipsum writes, rewrites and unwrites the great Anglo-French novel, destroying then re-creating the world with each chapter.