Redefining Victory: a post-truth novel

by Anthony Stevens

A middle-aged man leaves his wife for a younger woman... or is it to 'find out who he really is'? You've heard it all before, of course - but not like this! REDEFINING VICTORY takes a banal situation and transforms it into something harshly comic, strangely surreal and disconcertingly archetypal. How? By making the characters talk and think entirely in clichés - rather like robots in some future experiment in AI. But the setting is now, and everything in the novel is so familiar - the characters, the situations, the words used - that it becomes paradoxically alien, weird and even, at times, a little grotesque. Both as an entertaining satire on 'middle England' and as a tragicomic vision of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of people whose language does their thinking - and their feeling - for them, REDEFINING VICTORY will make you Do we all (sometimes) mistake the right phrase for the raw truth?And it's a must for anyone who loves the English language, revealing its world-beating richness in clichés, platitudes, euphemisms and hackneyed phrases. You'll be amazed at how many expressions there are that we really ought to avoid!

176 pages, Paperback

Published June 21, 2017

About the author

How did I get here? The short answer is, by a roundabout route. When I was working on my PhD (completed 1980), I was deeply involved with literary and cultural theory, so abstruse and arcane that only a small circle could understand it - and maybe I didn't belong to that circle! In a big reaction against that, I turned to theatre: acting, writing and directing. Theatre work is collaborative and social, and you get into direct contact with the audience. It's also physical - you can't solve a problem by sitting and thinking about it, you have to get on your feet and experiment. Writing for theatre (which I taught at university for a time) is a special skill; you have to be very economical with words, because you mustn't try to do the director's, designers' and actors' work for them. I love the way that a good theatre script is an invitation to the creativity of others. Over time, I learned a lot from performance work, so one of my motives for turning to the writing of books is to share some of that. The non-fiction I've written and plan to write has grown out of that experience. As for fiction, for a long time I didn't much like the idea of writing a novel - the form seemed to me too loose, at least compared to a play script. But one day my wife, who is a very accomplished and fine artist with lots of great ideas, suggested that I write a novel entirely in clichés. That was a real challenge! So I did, and of course when you work on one creative project you get ideas for other projects too. In any case, I realized that while a book needs to be more 'finished' than a play script does, since the latter can be tested and revised in rehearsal, a book is also an invitation to the reader to collaborate with the writer in the creation of a world or a story or characters or meaning. A book, in fact, is a relationship, to which the reader brings their own wealth of lived experience and unique point of view. To create at least the possibility of such relationships is why I now write books.

I retired from teaching in 2016 in order to devote myself to writing. For half my working life I taught in the UK at De Montfort University. The other half was in Greece, teaching at The Moraitis School, La Verne University, Athens, and The International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies. My theatre work has been seen in many parts of Britain and in Greece, Lebanon and Australia. I now live both on the Aegean island of Patmos and in Cambridge, England - two very beautiful and inspiring places!

Reviews

[Evie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly entertaining, with more than a dash of Don DeLillo.