Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
340 pages
Different from the movie, but equally awesome.
This wild roller-coaster ride of a novel is steeped in the heroin culture of Scotland. It's all written in dialect, which can be daunting at first but is surprisingly intelligible once you get used to it. I am an American English speaker and had little trouble with it after the first ten pages or so. My edition had a glossary in the back for some of the more unusual words (my favorite was "keks" for underwear). The author gambled on using dialect and won; the result is smoothly convincing writing that takes you all the more deeply into the characters' heads and the strange (but somehow familiar) counterculture they inhabit.
Compared to the movie, the episodes are more loosely related, and the overall plot arc isn't as clearly visible. It's not always clear when something is happening relative to the other events, and it may take more than one reading to fully appreciate the relationships between the characters, which are subtly drawn over time. But all the great scenes from the movie are there: the infamous toilet scene, the attempts to get off heroin, and the fated-to-be-awkward hookup between the main protagonist Mark Renton and a girl he met at a nightclub, to name just a few. These episodes are a lot of fun and yet have unexpected moments of pathos so deep and genuine they brought tears to my eyes. Reading it is like going out on the town and having the time of your life with your best friends, only to come home and be reminded of your own mortality and the fatal character flaws all of you share. The ethos of the novel is informed by punk music, and the political subtext is that these alienated youth seem to have no pride in their country or identification with the macroculture that produced them. The classic speech about "choosing life" in this novel shows just how little mainstream middle-class life has to offer:
“Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.”
If you're in the mood for quality literature with generous helpings of drugs, sex and profanity, you can't get any better than this.
Rating: 10 out of 10
Different from the movie, but equally awesome.
This wild roller-coaster ride of a novel is steeped in the heroin culture of Scotland. It's all written in dialect, which can be daunting at first but is surprisingly intelligible once you get used to it. I am an American English speaker and had little trouble with it after the first ten pages or so. My edition had a glossary in the back for some of the more unusual words (my favorite was "keks" for underwear). The author gambled on using dialect and won; the result is smoothly convincing writing that takes you all the more deeply into the characters' heads and the strange (but somehow familiar) counterculture they inhabit.
Compared to the movie, the episodes are more loosely related, and the overall plot arc isn't as clearly visible. It's not always clear when something is happening relative to the other events, and it may take more than one reading to fully appreciate the relationships between the characters, which are subtly drawn over time. But all the great scenes from the movie are there: the infamous toilet scene, the attempts to get off heroin, and the fated-to-be-awkward hookup between the main protagonist Mark Renton and a girl he met at a nightclub, to name just a few. These episodes are a lot of fun and yet have unexpected moments of pathos so deep and genuine they brought tears to my eyes. Reading it is like going out on the town and having the time of your life with your best friends, only to come home and be reminded of your own mortality and the fatal character flaws all of you share. The ethos of the novel is informed by punk music, and the political subtext is that these alienated youth seem to have no pride in their country or identification with the macroculture that produced them. The classic speech about "choosing life" in this novel shows just how little mainstream middle-class life has to offer:
“Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.”
If you're in the mood for quality literature with generous helpings of drugs, sex and profanity, you can't get any better than this.
Rating: 10 out of 10