PATT VAGG - QUASIMODO
“I will compare him to Bret Easton Ellis and classic Kerouac, he is one of the voices of this new generation and must be heard”.
MONIQUE ROTHSTEIN - PELICAN
“..touches on human emotion like few have been capable of achieving. Nothing is censored and it is refreshingly
authentic. There is so much about this book that is universal. It does something few authors have been able to do - move me to tears”.
NATHAN HOBBY - THE FUR
“squalid and brilliant. It reads to me like James Joyce getting blind drunk with bret Easton Ellis.
I dont recall a novel which has captured the breadth and depth of the city - from freeway to Fremantle,
river to beach - with such scope and energy. It is a blooded, passionately despairing portrait,
a testament not just to passion but to talent”.
LEVI ASHER - LITKICKS
“ a transgressive fever dream, an intense assaultive descent into the horrors of self”.
AMANDA HAINES - THE MANDURAH MAIL
“the sea is not yet full is as much a homage to Kerouac, Hemingway, Joyce
and the lesser-known but equqlly as inventive with language Bukowski, as
it is a portrait of the young man struggling to find himself. Here, Hemingway’s
bullfighters have been replaced with football players training on Fremantle Oval
and Kerouac’s wine-soaked Californian nights have been replaced with...well,
bourbon soaked Leederville Parties.”
GUY SALVIDGE'S BLOG
"The lifestyle is the problem, with its drinking and drug taking and debauched drudgery.
Sep knows this and yet he struggles to escape from it. I am reminded here of Andrew McGahan,
with his depressed, nihilistic characters and their futile obsessions. But where McGahan is
prosaic and pedestrian (with his appealingly frank straightforwardness), then Deceglie is more
cunning, more literary, more high-brow. It is a potent mix and, for the most part, a successful
one. There is a clash occurring in the sea is not yet full, between the world of twentieth
century European and American literature and twenty-first century Western Australia, with
its vacuousness and nihilism. This is an age after history is finished, Deceglie seems to be suggesting.
It is a time when there’s nothing left to tell. And yet our small lives flicker on.
I liked one passage so much that I will reproduce it in full here in closing:
“I say fuck you, trying to turn the world into a pile of sameness, into little
read stale waste balls of toe crust; all of you with anything inside you, rush
to the libraries and read the greats, make note to read the ones the publishers
rejected, the ones who refused to give in the to the suited devil average hack,
who wrote til their fingernails bled and then sold their manuscripts door to door,
send in your manuscript with the vomit stains you added whilst revolted by the
indiscretions of everyday bookshop blurbs [...] ” (p 88 )
If that seems disgusting, then you need not apply here. Deceglie is railing
against the smug world of publishers and contracts and signings, and I hear him."