About Eloquent Sinking: A brilliant but degenerate alcoholic blazes a tragicomic trail toward self destruction, scandalizing his ancestral Gaspesian village at every turn. He embroils an old school friend in his downward spiral, as they compete for the favor of an eccentric Hollywood director. The satire romps through late twentieth-century Quebec’s English Protestant, French Catholic, and Jewish Montreal milieus, in a surrealistic panorama of irreverent wit and sardonic mirth.
Lou Tafler is the pen-name of Lou Marinoff. Tafler’s first novel, Fair New World, is ranked with works by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Jonathan Swift. Eloquent Sinking reminded one reviewer of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Mordecai Richler.
“Eloquent Sinking is a Canadian Pilgrim’s Regress for the times. Tafler’s merciless satire offers Tower of Babel dialects, punchlines from Hell, and even the odd bit of Tobacco Road. This black comedy is designed to restore your faith in human depravity.”
— Stan Persky, Book Reviewer, The Globe and Mail
“Reading this hilarious novel, Eloquent Sinking, is a delightful experience. Nothing quite compares with it, as it is the expression of a unique mind that best communicates its complex thought through a very elaborated yet enormously enjoyable satire.”
— Lydia Amir, Tufts University, Medford, MA
“Smart and sharp, Tafler mixes wit and insight to produce a story that is both entertaining and thoughtful, both biting and caring, both cerebral and tawdry. Reflecting the human condition in a circus mirror, Eloquent Sinking forces us to look at ourselves in ways that are alternatingly amusing and alarming.”
— Steven Gimbel, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
“What distinguishes Eloquent Sinking as a work of fiction is its broad comic treatment of a tragic theme. The satire is dismissive: the sweep of a hand across the face of the old order, no pity wasted. The language is endlessly, extravagantly inventive, the invective ruthless and unrelenting … the stage is peopled with grotesques both larger and smaller than life.”
— Michael Godfrey, Dawson College, Westmount, Quebec
“The most impressive aspects of the novel derive from Tafler’s sheer imaginative fecundity … The language is exuberant, clever, delightfully funny, depending on escalating rhythms created from modulated repetition and from abounding puns, some outrageously bad, some wonderfully bad … use of nomenclature and the backed-off steadily ironic tone of the narrative voice put the novel in the tradition of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, as well as Mordecai Richler … The combination of this mocking voice and Tafler’s flair for multiplying, or inventing grotesque detail produces effects that in themselves are worthy of Hieronymus Bosch … the ironic tones mingle with haunting descriptions of natural beauty in a way that lingers and haunts one’s imagination.”
— Kaye Stockholder, University of British Columbia, Vancouver