Isabel Waidner

This is a bit too self consciously weird and there is a bit too much going on, but it does eventually coalesce into some sort of sense. There is some fun with a Google street view connected time travelling spaceship and street attacks become bullfights. I'm not sure I entirely understood it or connected with it, but it was definitely interesting!

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AlisonSakai | 3 other reviews | Apr 14, 2024 |

Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner

“Different doesn’t need to be scary. It can be fun,” says Isabel Waidner in a Guardian interview on the occasion of the release of their new novel, Sterling Karat Gold. The book takes a zany, surrealist route in exploring issues of racial, sexual, and class oppression in modern day Britain. For every brutalist migrant detention center, there’s a micro-dragon and a living pink fountain with a black hole in its center. For every murder of a racial/sexual minority, there’s a bullfight that goes to penalty kicks. In its best bit, there’s a time-traveling spaceship that operates through the channels and limitations of Google Street View.

The characters here live on the edge in more ways than one. Their vulnerability is expressed brilliantly in the naming of their two-man amateur drama series staged periodically in a cheap flat: Cataclysmic Foibles, which has a central role in the novel (Justin Fashanu, mentioned below, was a black and gay professional footballer for those like me who didn’t know already):

Take Cataclysmic Foibles, the name, which referred to a state of precarity in which any foible, character flaw, or momentary slip up can and will have cataclysmic personal consequences, imagine, e.g., that all you did was walk down Delancey Street, white football shirt wrapped round your waist like a skirt… That’s what years ago we somewhat childishly, imprecisely - liberally, even - called a cataclysmic foible, the fact that you wore that stuff, the skirt in particular, the fact that it was never actually about your clothes but always about you, and that if you hadn’t worn this or that skirt, or those socks, you would’ve had the exact same thing coming, the kind of thing, Justin Fashanu, that doesn’t happen to everybody, but that happened to us, Justin, and to you, a lot, that’s why we developed a language around it, we were kids, didn’t care for the precise or even correct use of words, we still don’t, we care for their capacity to give life, and to take it away.

The plot has Sterling, our central character, on trial for something or other, basically for being himself, whatever the official reason, as suggested in the above passage. But this is surrealism, so the judge has the body of a crustacean and reigns above a hole in the floor in their flat, with the assistance of an AI-run drone armed with knives.

Does it all make for fun? Surrealism is not really my favorite so ymmv on that, depending, but be aware that there is a twist at the end, twice; in that Guardian interview, Waidner puts us all on note: “don’t think we’re so harmless”.… (more)

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lelandleslie | 3 other reviews | Feb 24, 2024 |

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what I like about Waidner's books, and I recognise very much the ways they might frustrate and confuse other people. I think it's like, the dreamscapes they make are both very appealing to me in themselves and also recontextualise real world issues in a way that skips my defences about things being too cringe or sincere or whatever by taking something weird sincerely but in a way that also obviously analogises to real life. I think it's something you either instantly warm to or you find alienating. I like it. It's sentimental and sincere and meaningful and fascinating… (more)

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tombomp | 1 other review | Oct 31, 2023 |

We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner

Like the other book of theirs I've read (Sterling Karat Gold) this is a book where I can so easily see someone hating it and not getting anything out of it - stuff just Happens and it's more about the imagery and feelings and there's some stuff that's just like, straight quotes/references to Theory - but somehow it just connected with me a lot. They really write well about the experience of Being in Britain, being queer, the hostility and also decrepitness of it all.

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