Reheated Cabbage: Tales of Chemical Degeneration

Product Details

• Inure: New
• ISBN13: 9780393338027
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Description

Never-collected tales, including outrageous early stories from the Trainspotting years, plus a raucous new novella. Reheated Cabbage gathers stories showcasing Irvine Welsh’s trademark skills: vaulting imagination, brilliant vernacular ear, scabrous humor, and the ability to create some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction. You can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie at his Ma’s and see how he greets his sister’s boyfriend and news of their engagement. You’ll discover in “The Rosewell Incident” why aliens speak hardcore Scots English and plan to put Midlothian roughs in charge of the planet. And you’ll be delighted to welcome back “Juice” Terry Lawson and now internationally famous DJ Carl Ewart, and watch them as they meet an old nemesis, retired schoolmaster Albert Black, under the strobe lights of a Miami Beach nightclub. These stories, most first published in small magazines and out-of-print anthologies, are all wildly offbeat and will delight both fans of and newcomers to Welsh’s world.

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Customer Reviews

They All Get Lots of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
"Reheated Cabbage" gives us seven previously uncollected short stories and one never published novella by Irvine Welsh, international best selling author known as the master of "Scotsploitation." Welsh, author of ten previous works of fiction, including Porno, Crime: A Novel, Glue, Filth, and the classic Trainspotting that was adapted into the 1996 international art house hit of the same name (Trainspotting), has culled the stories from out-of-print magazines. They are all set in Edinburgh, Scotland, but it sure isn't the tourists' Edinburgh: most of Welsh's characters appear to be out-of-work layabouts from the working class port area of Leith: one of them makes a crack about the working class origin bona fides of Edinburgh's current patron saint, Sir Sean Connery, who hails from the now-gentrifying area of the city known as Fountainbridge.

Could Welsh be considered also a practitioner of the current Scottish school of tartan noir writing? I would say so: most of these stories are violent, bloody, grisly, and laced with profanity: yet they are scathingly funny, with the darkest of Scots humor. His characters, none of whom seem to be burdened with jobs, are still, somehow, getting lots and lots of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The stories are largely written in dialect, for which the author has a pitch perfect ear: they are somewhat more difficult to read through than I, for one, would have liked, but, believe me, I haven't a drop of Scots blood, and I didn't find them that difficult. The author's imagination doesn't flag; stories rise to the heights of absurdity, and fall to the depths of depravity. The author's command of the ambiance of his home city is, of course, absolute.

Fans of the author's previous work will find some familiar faces in this collection. The novella, "I Am Miami," which does seem to present an unexpected softer side of the author, reacquaints us with "Juice" Terry Lawson and now internationally famous DJ Carl Ewart, the main characters from the 2001 "Glue," as they meet up with, in Miami, their old enemy and schoolteacher Albert Black, now retired. The volatile drunk Francis Begbie, of "Trainspotting," is back, angry as ever, as star and narrator of "Elspeth's Boyfriend." In "State of the Party," two friends high on LSD drag the corpse of a recently overdosed young friend across town, and get into a fight with some heat-seeking soccer hooligans. In "Victor Spoils," Gavin and Victor fight over a young woman getting her teeth pulled, as the dentist is sexually aroused by her mouth. In "A Fault on the Line," a young husband whose wife is emergency-room bound after losing her legs to a train station accident, wants only to be dropped off at home so he can catch the day's big game, Hibs versus Herts. In "The Rosewell Incident," a venture into science fiction, we learn why the inter-galactic aliens think in and speak the Scots inflected English of these young men, and plan to put them in charge of the planet.

Welsh's world isn't for everyone, what with one thing and another, but for those seeking the offbeat and the unexpected, here it is, and welcome to it. I don't think I'd personally want to meet any of these young men, but they sure are fun within the pages of a book.

2010-06-24 (Carolina Beach, NC USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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If you care about Juice Terry, Begbie, Carl Ewart, and Blackie-- Then buy this book. Period!
Killer couple of stories here. There's only 1 or 2 that are kind of abstract little tales with no solid conclusion-- but even those are good. If you're thinking about this as a first read-- i would suggest something different.

Irvine Welsh is the greatest writer who ever lived. If you're interested in finding out why--- i suggest this order::: glue, trainspotting, porno, filth, crime, bedroom secrets----- and then check out the story collections.

If you're familiar with Juice Terry & friends-- then just get this. you'll like it.

2010-02-20 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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All around it isn't a bad collection
I first began reading Irvine Welsh when Trainspotting became super popular in the 1990s. What wasn't to love? It was gritty, foul, decadent, hopeless, and had fantastic music. Additionally, the story was all about that hidden, forbidden world of heroin and drugs, which enticed the teenager in me. I was completely sold when I saw that it was written in dialect, so the words are spelled as one would hear them, because my little language-loving heart was transported.

Strangely, all these elements are found equally throughout his books (Except the music, since I'm probably just imagining the Iggy Pop music in the background). Reheated Cabbage, too, channels all these things. In truth, Welsh hasn't changed much--or really at all--since his hit Trainspotting. Like Trainspotting, Reheated Cabbage tells its stories through the eyes of an individual who is usually pretty damned unlikable and worthless. (In fact, in one story, the protagonist is the young Begbie--who is quite possible the worst, meanest character ever created by Welsh, but a memorable one.) These worthless protagonists usually end up in severe trouble (young addicts carrying their dead friend around, Begbie ruining a family get-together, a homophobe trapped forever buggering his friends in a strange time loop, etc.)--but rarely realize that they're busily destroying their own life or how they ended up in such a situation.

The short stories span Welsh's career, but I'd find it hard to separate the new from the old. The themes, tone, and protagonist is almost always the same, even if the outrageous situations are different. In a way, this is exactly what hooked me on Welsh to begin with and I love it, but in another way, it makes most of the stories fade into the one after...

All around it isn't a bad collection. It's actually nice to see little snapshots of these protagonists, even if they all seem a bit similar. For those uninitiated in Welsh, I'll warn you that if you are in any way squeamish about anything at all (sex, death, rape, misogyny, idiots, cruelty, random violence, domestic violence, drugs, curse words) then I advise not picking up anything by Welsh because he engages every topic. And the "bad guy" is often the protagonist. A lot of the time the protagonist never figures out that he's a bad guy at all. For those initiated already: this is just more Welsh in the same line as all his other works and you shouldn't be surprised by anything here, so enjoy.

2010-02-18 | DreamsAndSpeculation (California) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Great collection of stories
I have read quite a few of Irvine Welsh's novels, and I have enjoyed every one that I've picked up. This collection of short stories is amazing. Quick read, each tale keeps you entertained. Good purchase for an avid Irvine Welsh reader.

2010-02-08 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

Product Details

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• Qualification: New
• ISBN13: 9780393330779

Description

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, is up to his old tricks with his new work of transgressive short fiction.

Irvine Welsh's first short-story collection since his debut work The Acid House presents five extraordinary stories, which remind us that he is a master of the short form, a brilliant storyteller, and—unarguably—one of today's funniest and most subversive writers. In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker—an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava—tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters.

In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.

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Customer Reviews

The Chemical romance on holiday, in concert, and at work.
Irvine Welsh is known for his chemical romance genre novels and short stories. These narratives are both tragic, comedic, and as strange as any trip taken by an unreconstructed hippie or soccer hooligan. Even if you are not familiar with the drug milieu, the detailed and developed characters will feel all too real.

Enjoy anything written by this author and include this work in your library.

2010-02-25 | zenflea (locum tenens) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Hodge meets podge
I've read pretty much every Welsh book, thoroughly enjoying them all (aside from Maribou Stork Nightmares, which despite repeated attempts I simply cannot get into, and cannot finish). While this collection of short stories is a quick-fire read, it reveals itself as more an effort to showcase (or test out) the author's abilities to capture voices and word patterns outside his familiar Scottish brogue. It largely doesn't succeed.

In particular, Miss Arizona is the most straightforward, predictable, plodding tale I've ever seen from Welsh. Even the opening story -- trying to capture American late-teen culture -- is somewhat predictable in its shockability.

Fortunately, the last -- and longest -- story in the book is back in familiar territory and rescues this hit and mostly miss collection. For Welsh collection completists only.

2008-12-28 (CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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The "air-con" thing really, really grates
The "air-con" mis-step appears in the first couple of pages of at least two of the pieces. I am writing this here because I specifically googled to see how many others had caught this howler.
This reader almost (ok, only almost) put the book down to email his mate in Scotland who's another Welsh fan to share dismay.
Irvine, Irvine, Irvine!!!
Please tell me this is your editor's fault!!!
This Haddie boy in the US didnae appreciate.
The subbuteo story's barry, but.

2008-05-29 (merix) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Irvine, what happened to you?
Irvine Welsh means to shock, but usually there is a point to it all. Previously, he's written short stories about such cheery subjects as armless, grown-up Thalidomide babies using chainsaws to cut off the arms of the people that created Thalidomide, and a guy who, after he's been fired, his girlfriend has dumped him and his parents have at long last kicked him out, gets turned into a fly by God and as a fly wreaks revenge on those who have wronged him, along the way seeing such things as his mother doing unto his father with a strap-on. But even those stories contain Welsh's trademark humor and observations about society. So what has happened to Irvine Welsh?

The first story, about a road trip gone horribly wrong, is a set-up in search of a story. There's no point, there isn't an ending, and the racial stereotyping is offensive even for Irvine Welsh. The second story, about a bar owner in the Bahamas who treats women as disposable, is really long and has no apparent point. After that, I pretty much gave up. No humor, no real commentary on life... not even anything particularly shocking. More Howard Stern than Irvine Welsh and not worth the bother even if you're an Irvine Welsh fan.

2008-04-30 | jax76 (Los Angeles, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 2

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Why So Harsh??? This Is Good!!!
I don't understand why there are so many negative reviews here, this is not bad stuff at all, it is typical Irvine Welsh work, not bad at all. If you know what to expect from Welsh, then you should be pleased with the works here.

These short stories are pretty fantastic, especially the opener "Rattlesnakes", a Welsh classic. As for the rest, I am partial to "DOGS of Licoln Park, because being from the Chicagoland area, he captures the setting phenominally, especially considering he is from over-seas.

Overall, this is not his best work (read "Filth", or "Trainspotting", especially if you are a Welsh virgin), but it deserves more acclaim than the harsh reviews laid out here. His novels are better??? Fact. But for 9/10 authors most reviewers will say the same thing. For some reason people just don't gravitate towards the short story anymore, and thats a shame. Give it a try.

2008-03-04 | Spin Doctor (Cavernous Churn, IL) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Glue

Product Details

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• ISBN13: 9780393322156
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Description

An epic novel about the bonds of friendship from the author of Trainspotting. The story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh projects, Glue is about the loyalties, the experiences, and the secrets that hold friends together through three decades. The boys become men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer, driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally, exceedingly thin-skinned and vulnerable to catastrophe at every turn. We follow their lives from the seventies into the new century—from punk to techno, from speed to E. Their mutual loyalty is fused in street morality: Back up your mates, don't hit women, and, most important, never snitch—on anyone. Glue has the Irvine Welsh trademarks—crackling dialogue, scabrous set pieces, and black, black humor—but it is also a grown-up book about growing up—about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.

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With a title like Glue, it would seem reasonable to assume that Irvine Welsh's fifth book is a meditation on the pitfalls of solvent abuse. In fact the word refers to the bonds that unite four boys, all of whom have grown up in "the scheme"--i.e., Edinburgh's slum-clearance flats, whose optimistic construction in the 1970s give way to the poverty, unemployment, and crime of the succeeding decades. It is the pervasive despair of these crumbling projects that defines the lives of the protagonists: budding DJ Carl Ewart, boxer Billy Birrell, work-shy, sex-mad Terry Lawson, and Andrew Galloway, a drug addict who has tested HIV-positive.

Recounted in the author's inimitable style, Glue is a grungy, Scots-accented bildungsroman. The novel follows the boys through their early forays into sex, drink, drugs, and football violence. Contemplating his erotic initiation, Carl Ewart poses such crucial questions as "How dae ah chat up a bird?" and "Do I wear a rubber johnny?" Here and there Welsh injects political commentary into the mix: Billy Birrell, for example, reflects that "having money is the only way to get respect. Desperate, but that's the world we live in now." For the most part, though, the author sticks to sex and violence and his famously offhand one-liners: "Guilt and shaggin, they go the gither like fish n chips." Fans of Trainspotting will love the book, even down to the brief appearance of Begbie and Renton. Others may feel that Glue is more of the same, and that, despite its graphic charms, the book finds Welsh stuck in a rut. --Jerry Brotton

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Customer Reviews

glue review
Doesn't disappoint if your a Welsh fan. Trainspotting characters appear and the grim realism of modernity appears through this well written novel. obviously ot as remarkable as Trainspotting.

2010-04-15 (swansea) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Mair ay the same oany no sae guid
With "Glue," the fourth full-length novel ("Trainspotting," "Filth", "Porno") in which he mines the rich seams of low-level criminality and violence of the Edinburgh housing projects, Irvine Welsh has gone to the same well once too often, and this time the bucket only comes up half-full.

Focusing on a quartet of "schemies" or project-dwellers who have appeared as bit players in earlier novels, "Glue" has a wider scope, following the friends from adolescence through early middle age. As they come of age in the economically and socially devastating Thatcher years, we watch the friends struggle with the searing effects of institutionalized unemployment, omnipresent drugs, AIDS and serial, constant infidelity - growing older but not necessarily wiser in the process.

Unfortunately for what could have been a brilliant slice-of-slum-life story, Welsh has done this before, more than once, and he's done it better. As with "Trainspotting," different sections of the book are told from the perspective of each of the characters, in Welsh's trademark more-or-less thick Edinburgh dialect. However, the more equal parceling out of the narration actually serves to weaken the book, as we never get enough of a sense of the story from a unified perspective (such as Renton provided in "Trainspotting") to really hold all the different angles together.

The ending, in which a pair of deaths and an implausible deus ex machina involving a washed-up American diva pulls everyone back together, is redemptive in more ways than one - while re-sealing the bond between the men, it also gives us a glimpse of what "Glue" could have been if Welsh were more interested in telling a story than stacking up shock set-piece after set-piece. Sadly, it's not enough to pull the preceding 460 pages out of mediocrity.

2009-01-11 | Voracious reader | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Scottish deadheads grow up the hard way
Irvine Welsh is certainly a unique writer. His prose is written in a language spoken by Scottish youth, which makes it barely understandable for most everyone else (at least in the beginning). And his knowledge of the Scottish youths lost to drugs is scarily in-depth. Unfortunately 'Glue' doesn't break new ground for the author. All the drugged out characters have already been hashed through in his earlier works. And 'Glue' doesn't have the sort of extra madness found in 'Filth'. But 'Glue' is an interesting story of four Scottish youths who fight drugs, alcohol, and each other until they reach their middle years. There is also a rather good, moving ending (no spoilers). So 'Glue' isn't special by any means. Just a fine read.


Bottom line: best left to those who've read better works by the author. Yet recommended nonetheless.

2008-01-07 (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Glue Is "Fasten"ating
This is my first Welsh novel. Written in a Scottish dialect, it takes time to understand what he has written. After the first 50 pages or so, you become accustomed to the style of writing. At times you feel you are reading another language. The dialect actually helps you become one of the onlookers and puts you right there with them, their "5th friend" in this group of 4. Others here have reviewed the "dog cruelety" scene. Bewarned, it is extermely graphic. But the scene is there for a reason showing the cruel and sadistic nature of one group outside of our bunch. This is one of the best books I've read and will definitely read Welsh again.

2006-09-14 | The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage. (Ann Arbor, MI) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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glue
A good read well written, but could do with shortening. And kind of clichéd; haven't we got passed the idea that the only way onwards and upwards for your urban poor is music and boxing? Stuck in the past.

2006-06-26 (Quebec) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs: A Novel

Description

"A family saga, a revenge fantasy, a Twilight Zone-esque parable, and, most importantly, a very fun read." —Entertainment Weekly This story of two men locked in a war of wills that threatens their very existence is vintage Irvine Welsh. Troubled restaurant inspector Danny Skinner is on a quest to find the mysterious father his mother will not identify. Unraveling this hidden information is the key to understanding the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. His ensuing journey takes him from the festival city of Edinburgh to the foodie city of San Francisco. But the hard-drinking, womanizing Skinner has a strange nemesis in the form of mild-mannered fellow inspector Brian Kibby. It is Skinner's unfathomable, obsessive hatred of Kibby that takes over everything, threatening to destroy not only Skinner and his mission but also those he loves most dearly. When Kibby contracts a horrific, undiagnosable illness, Skinner understands that his destiny is inextricably bound to that of his hated rival, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma. Irvine Welsh's work is a transgressive parable about the great obsessions of our time: food, sex, and celebrity.

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Customer Reviews

No secret Welsh is a great author
While not as start-to-finish brilliant as "Trainspotting" or as sincere as "Glue," "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs" did not disappoint.

Welsh adroitly writes both a suave playboy type and quiet loner character more than believably, which is half the battle in a book like this. Not only that, he builds a background for each that drives actions further along in the book.

I also enjoyed the metaphysical twist, which reminded me a lot of"Maribou Stork Nightmares," another Welsh must-read.

I read this several years ago and don't remember all the nitty-gritties of the plot, but I do remember liking it and I recommend reading it.

2009-06-17 (Downers Grove, IL) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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easy read, not a whole lot of soul searching however
It's an entertaining book. The ending is somewhat predictable. I bought it because I wanted to read something by Welsh besides Trainspotting or Porno. This book is nowhere near as good, I guess Trainspotting is his Magnum Opus. It's not bad but not great either, and in your heart you kind of know that although it's an alright book, it's actually just... Buy it if you are going on vacation and want an easy read, just don't expect too much.

2009-05-31 (Ecuador) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Running out of steam
There's some good stuff in this book, but Welsh is running out of steam. Maybe he's trying to be more disgusting than Chuck Palahniuk? Surely there are better motivations for writing. Try his earlier works, such as Porno, Marabou Stork Nightmares, and of course Trainspotting. This one is not quite up to it.

2008-08-13 | Word. (Lincolnshire, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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A delightfully disgustig read.
I'm a big fan of Irvine Welsh and I was not disappointed with this great book. I think it is a masterpiece of social commentary, One scene with some old hag getting her knickers down was absolutely disgusting and very close to the bone and that's just one of the things I love about the author's work because it's so true to life. The man can do no wrong in my eyes. If you enjoy this kind of reading I recommend checking out this bombshell of a book.Mind Bomb

2008-04-11 | Nova Loka (Spain) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Masterclass from Welsh
Another pageturner from Irvine - hope to see this on the big screen sometime in the future.

2008-04-07 (Houston, TX) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Ecstasy

Description

A bestsellig romance author suffers a paralyzing stroke and her philandering husband wonders how this will affect his gambling and whoring budget; two young lovers must come to terms with their chemically induced deformity; Lloyd from Leith transfigures his passion for an unhappily married woman. These three tales confirm Irvine Welsh's position as a master of the "chemical" romance genre.

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With three wickedly funny and harrowing tales of love and its ups and downs, the ever-surprising Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, virtually re-invents a new genre of fiction: the chemical romance. In "Lorraine goes to Livingston," a best-selling author of Regency romances, paralysed and bedridden, plans her revenge on a gambling, whoring husband with the aid of her nurse, Lorraine. In "Fortunes's Always Hiding," flawed beauty Samantha Worthington enlists a smitten young soccer thug to find the man who marketed the drug that crippled her from birth - in order to give him a taste of his own disastrous medicine. In the upbeat final tale, "The Undefeated," we experience the transfiguring passion of the miserably married young yuppie Heather and the raver Lloyd from Leith - a grand affair played out to a house music beat.

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Customer Reviews

tales of love, drugs, and raves
this was an interesting book. it involves the lives of people what are into the UK club scene. there wasnt a ton of chapters about the partying, and thats why i gave it 3 stars. i expected a little bit more from it.

2007-06-27 | tolkien stalker | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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modern romance
Irvine Welsh takes the readers creature comforts and beats him or her over the head with them.
This book is divided into three short stories about chemical romance:
Lorraine Goes To Livingston - this story was just bizarre
Fortune Always Hiding - a tender story about backwards love and
The Undefeated - my favourite out of them all with a surprising ending.
Irvine Welsh delivers romance with urgency in this fast read.

2006-03-22 (UK) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Written for the stonger stomached
when people speak of shock writers Welsh is brought up for good reson... his stories are like seeing a car accident... you don't want to look but something tell you that you must... his stories twist and turn, and so do the characters, through hospitals, clubs and the streets of England. Americans be warned this is a book sometimes hard to follow because of the diction... but as in all of his work, Welsh will leave you speechless in the end.

2004-07-25 | Student of Life (San Diego, CA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Addictive
Irvine Welsh, of "Trainspotting" fame, delivers three edgy stories that are somehow related to one single element: ecstasy. In "Lorraine Goes to Livingston", the author offers a multi-layered, sometimes confusing tale about love and the twisted nature of some people. "Fortune`s Always Hiding" is a powerful and unsettling revenge story that resembles Quentin Tarantino`s movies at parts, due to its explicit violence, badass characters, non-linear storytelling and a very acid sense of humor. "The Undefeated" focuses on the relationship between a yuppie woman and a bohemian, messed up man. Altough far from a masterpiece, "Ecstasy" is a fun and enticing read nonetheless, presenting an author with a personal, recognizable, harsh, direct and gritty style. This book is not for everyone, but those who enjoy this kind of stuff may find it compelling.

Deserves a look.

2004-04-23 (Portugal) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Three novellas - one drug
I am a big fan of Irvine Welsh so I was anxious to get my hands on ECSTASY: THREE TALES OF CHEMICAL ROMANCE. Sadly, I was left disappointed. The premise of each novella as described on the back of the book is excellent, but Welsh's execution was very poor. For example, in the first story, "Lorraine Goes to Livingston", Welsh was not consistent in his use of Scottish dialect for the main character which was more than distracting. Also, the idea of a mortuary worker having free sex with the corpses in full knowledge of everyone in the hospital is a little too far fetched, even for Irvine Welsh. I will not bother to continue with the shortcomings of the other two stories.

Although I was disappointed in ECSTASY, I will not give up on Welsh as I still believe he has an amazing talent.

2003-12-06 | rhymeswithorange (Chicago, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 2

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Marabou Stork Nightmares

Product Details

• Quarters: New
• ISBN13: 9780393315639
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-assurance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and armed forces to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

The acclaimed author of the cult classic Trainspotting presents his newest and most audacious novel--a brilliant (and literal) head trip that introduces Roy Strang, whose hallucinatory quest to eradicate the evil marabou stork keeps being interrupted by the grisly memories that brought him to this dysfunctional state. "A fantastic trip."--Madison Smartt Bell, Spin.

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Customer Reviews

A novel that doesn't live up to its reputation
I had a good preconception about this book prior to my reading because I am a Welsh's aficionado and all the critics I read were quite positive so I was expecting to be finding belatedly one of Irvine's vintage masterpieces. But I was wrong.

Having read all Irvine Welsh novels I can't really say this one stands out. I found it lackluster compared with the praiseworthy author's literary corpus and even plainly boring from time to time.

The main character is the stereotypical antihero Welsh is so keen about: Low-class Scotsman, brought up in housing schemes who eventually becomes a deranged part-time hooligan although he manages to be a more or less successfull and well-paid worker during the week until he fells into a comma. The exceptional thing about this character is that he was partly brought up in South Africa and had a very troubled childhood that sort of crippled him emotionally. So, through this novel we are witness to the mishmash of memories this man has in its boiled up mind, sometimes stopped by the voices sneaking from the real world he struggles not to hear so to remain in his inner world due to his lack of confidence for facing reality again. After an original but somewhat tedious narration we start to unveal the terrible things this poor soul was victim to and the hideous thing he has done too. Finally, the story draws to a close in a predictable way that lefts you completely unimpressed and with a bitter final taste of the whole story, the opposite effect that Welsh managed to craft in Filth, for instance.

2009-09-17 (Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, España) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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My favorite Welsh novel
I am still thoroughly impressed each time I think of the effort and thought and pure genius imagination that must have gone in to creating this twisted, cerebral, and completely innovative story. Certainly not for the faint of heart, but if you can stomach violence, rape, drugs, and other forms of abuse and deranged characters, this book is worth the read. There's nothing quite like it.

2008-09-01 (San Francisco, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Not Welsh's best, but better than the best of most others . . .
Although I didn't plow through this as quickly as I did "Trainspotting" and "Filth," it was still a spirited read. As usual, the focus is on characters who exhibit morally and/or socially reprehensible behavior and, as always, leads one to wonder how Welsh ever sold his stuff to a publisher in the first place. He remains, however, one of my top five favorite writers because he is inventive, he can turn a phrase and he will dare to go where many will not. Definitely not for the squeamish.

2008-07-07 (Orlando, FL USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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An uneasy subject
I found this book to be quite entertaining once I got into it. Welsh takes the reader into the mind of Roy Strang, a man who I could never imagine relating to, sympathizing with, or understanding. The dialogue is cool and not difficult to interpret. Welsh makes a good moral argument about powerlessness and the hatred it can bring into people's lives. The book's two victims, Roy himself and the woman he later brutally rapes, are both turned into violent souls seeking to regain the power that was stolen from them. I thought the rape scene went a bit far. What the main character does is just about the worst thing one human being can do to another. It's hard to believe that a person capable of such things is not pure evil. I warn anyone who may not want to read a detailed account of a brutal gang rape to not pick up this book. I question the ethics of writing such a scene, especially when you are a man. But that will be for you to think about. On Welsh's defence he makes every argument against the brutality of rape as well as the justice system's inability to protect women.
The ending is fascinating and worth debating about. All in all a recommended read.

2006-01-10 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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A bad trip.
Irvine Welsh has been a lot of things to a lot of different people- some say he's the best thing to happen to British writing in a decade, some say he's just a flash-in-the-pan with uncouth sensibilities who writes thoughtless, violent stories about amoral scumbags. Say what you will about Welsh as a writer- be it that he's talented, sick, brilliant, strange or just plain nuts- but he is, and has never been, boring. Until now. "Marabou Stork Nightmares" is a colossal letdown after the one-two punch of "Trainspotting" and "The Acid House", a jumbled, convoluted tale about a repugnant [man] trawling his last moments away in a life that most closely resembles a bedridden hell. This is not the first first-person account of a psychopath that Welsh has written- see later, his aptly-titled "Filth"- but even at his worst, D.S. Bruce Robertson had a sort of perverse wit to him, while this story lacks anything short of coherence, wit, humor or even plot.

The protagonist of this brutish tale is Roy Strang, a bedridden criminal pissing the last moments of his sad life away in a bed, ready to die. As he slowly slips in and out of consciousness, Roy reflects on the family upbringing- that entailed rape, sexual molestation and the vicious abuse of his right-wing Uncle- that led him to this state. We see later in his life, as Roy attempts to straighten himself out, get a job and "choose life", as it were, but we continue to see that he cannot escape the sins of his past. All the while, he hunts the formidable African Predator the Marabou Stork- a personification of all the misery, evil, hatred, pain and badness in Roy himself- on a wild Safari in Africa, that ostensibly all takes place in Roy's morphine-and-depravity-addled brain.

The novel proves that Welsh can still pull plenty of tricks out of his proverbial hat when it comes to language- some of his bawdy, boy's-night-out Scottish dialogue still provokes a chuckle or two, while the disgusting gangrape scene towards the book's denouement is one of the more haunting I have read in recent memory. And yet, for all its mild pleasures, this book still sees Welsh falling majorly short of the mark, sinking into the endless mire of Roy Strang's egomaniacal fever dream. Consider this one a real "Nightmare".

2005-10-30 | Nick (California) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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