Draft:Performance

Performance is an experimental literary novel by David Coventry.

Major themes
The work follows the author as he attempts to describe life with the debilitating disease, ME/CFS, taking the reader on a series of journeys that repeat, contradict, and elucidate the condition. The book attempts to replicate the pains of his body and mind, described in the text as '"a bastard, a liar, a scoundrel... a traitorous fuck."' The novel is an intentional 'jumble: the Acknowledgements, Notes, and List of Illustrations all appear before the end – it is as confused as Coventry’s life is, a life with which he has a love/hate relationship, as he does with language, and with being an author. A life entangled with the perversities of ME.' The novel considers the vulnerabilities of living with disease: 'The book is like the author’s fractured life, his inflamed brain – it won’t draw together. Coventry writes as though bordering on Cotard’s syndrome – not believing he is dead but believing he can “die just by thinking about it”. Both Coventry and another character voice the thought that “to die unwillingly, it seems such a waste, you know, of volition”'; that the 'reader too feels a sense [of] falling into Coventry’s world as they read this extraordinary book.' It has also been stated that 'Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible.'

Development history
The novel was initially written as a section of Coventry's PhD thesis, ''PERFORMANCE - Narrative Reckonings with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Completed in 2022 the thesis was awarded a place on the Victoria University of Wellington's prestigious Dean's List.''

Publication history
New Zealand, Te Herenga Waka University Press, ISBN 9781776920808, June 2024

Literary significance and reception
The novel has received overwhelmingly positive praise as a work of high literary standing. Described as 'life transcription, a series of disorienting journeys, a self-portrait, and, in the words of writer Tracey Slaughter, ‘a monumental achievement.’. It has been described as 'a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond'; one which stands as a unique contribution to the literature of illness.' Described as heady, clever and fascinating literature, Performance is claimed as 'less a novel and more an act of creative transcendence. Transcendence of illness, of an impaired state, of the limitations of the body, and of the rules of linear storytelling. Writing of the work of an artist friend, Coventry wonders if "in the process of painting, the work itself will solve the illness, that escape is at the end of the correct brushstroke". Performance is a series of correct brushstrokes.' The novel has been compared to that of Thomas Bernhard, Virginia Woolf and Olivia Laing