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Review
"A savage, surreal and very original imagination."
-"Sunday Telegraph"
-"Sunday Telegraph"
"From the Trade Paperback edition."
Guardian: Rev'd Caroline McGinn
`Macabre, witty, elegant and acclaimed... erotic... one of the
most imaginative British Writers.'
most imaginative British Writers.'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I am actually laughing out loud at how Angelica No has completely misunderstood this book and listed so many spelling and grammatical "errors". Oh dear.
The voice of the first-person narrator - Angelica No, please note, this is supposed to be a native Spanish speaker with no English (as he frequently mentions) - so the errors are of a Spanish person's voice being "translated" to render the Spanish into slightly artificial English. It is the internal monologue of a non-native speaker thinking in his own language, NOT an English speaker making a litany of howlers...
This literary artifice is so very well done that suspending disbelief comes as no chore. It was surprising to keep remembering that Alan Warner is a native English speaker from Scotland as his first-person voice of slightly stilted non-standard English is utterly, utterly convincing. The narrative takes the form of a personal history where, through sudden news that he is suffering from a terminal disease (The Condition) the narrator casts a somewhat Proustian look back at his life and the events and the events and emotions that have coloured it - the cruelty, kindness, passion, love and hatred. As all the best-written characters are, Lolo is flawed, supremely engaging and never dull. A truly rounded character, he experiences a range of emotions and reactions and whilst we may not always like him - his behaviour does tend towards the effete and he is rather reminiscent of Niles Crane in Frasier - he engages our sympathy and affection and just as we think we are getting to know him he does or says something quite unpredictable, often something deeply cruel.
One of the strengths of the novel lies in some beautifully written and often extremely moving set pieces describing in beautiful detail certain events in Lolo's life - lunch with the intern in his office, going to see Jaws at the cinema, feeding the stray cats by the shore. As if this engaging narrative weren't enough, we also have Warner's comments on the immigration issue, seen through Lolo's befriending of a starving illegal immigrant Moor, who takes on the role of Lolo's priest, as he hears the "confession" of this man whose life seems, thanks to Warner's gift for storytelling, really quite extraordinary.
The voice of the first-person narrator - Angelica No, please note, this is supposed to be a native Spanish speaker with no English (as he frequently mentions) - so the errors are of a Spanish person's voice being "translated" to render the Spanish into slightly artificial English. It is the internal monologue of a non-native speaker thinking in his own language, NOT an English speaker making a litany of howlers...
This literary artifice is so very well done that suspending disbelief comes as no chore. It was surprising to keep remembering that Alan Warner is a native English speaker from Scotland as his first-person voice of slightly stilted non-standard English is utterly, utterly convincing. The narrative takes the form of a personal history where, through sudden news that he is suffering from a terminal disease (The Condition) the narrator casts a somewhat Proustian look back at his life and the events and the events and emotions that have coloured it - the cruelty, kindness, passion, love and hatred. As all the best-written characters are, Lolo is flawed, supremely engaging and never dull. A truly rounded character, he experiences a range of emotions and reactions and whilst we may not always like him - his behaviour does tend towards the effete and he is rather reminiscent of Niles Crane in Frasier - he engages our sympathy and affection and just as we think we are getting to know him he does or says something quite unpredictable, often something deeply cruel.
One of the strengths of the novel lies in some beautifully written and often extremely moving set pieces describing in beautiful detail certain events in Lolo's life - lunch with the intern in his office, going to see Jaws at the cinema, feeding the stray cats by the shore. As if this engaging narrative weren't enough, we also have Warner's comments on the immigration issue, seen through Lolo's befriending of a starving illegal immigrant Moor, who takes on the role of Lolo's priest, as he hears the "confession" of this man whose life seems, thanks to Warner's gift for storytelling, really quite extraordinary.
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This was one of the best novels in 2006, totally misunderstood by what reviews I've read. It's a very subtle attack on Europe's attitude to immigration and the plight of those dying of AIDS in Africa. It's a fascinating, moving and spectacular novel. I don't know why another reviewer bothered ignoring the story and writing a bad review from the "Correct English" lobby, especially on a Scottish novel. If you want to play at pedantry you could just argue, "Oh, but all those `mistakes' were in the ORIGINAL SPOKEN SPANISH. For of course, this novel is a completely fabricated language construct full of very many odd English sentences, if you read closely, which have been magically transmitted from one language to another, which the CHARACTER cannot write as he speaks no english. This novel is not a third person narrative it is a written TEXT, it is a VOICE in the FIRST PERSON, like Warner's `grammatically incorrect', truly great novel, Morvern Callar. Our Pedant friend fails to distinguish between a third person narrative voice and the first person expressive voice which - sorry all pedants - can write and express itself in any way which it pleases with as many FIGURES OF SPEECH as it wishes. We don't talk in grammatically correct sentences.
Alan Warner has said in an interview in 2004, "I write from spoken language. Correct English is a foreign language to me and one I have no interest in mastering. All that stuff is out of date. Its boring. Like saying Jimi Hendrix or Ornette Coleman plays too loud or out of tune. Correct english is always a middle class complaint because its through that voice they define themselves. I feel closer to some American or some African writers who write in so- called Pidgin English."
Please don't be put off this novel; read for yourself and his other novels too. This is an author who is not showing off he is clever or better than us, you feel he and his characters are one of us.
Alan Warner has said in an interview in 2004, "I write from spoken language. Correct English is a foreign language to me and one I have no interest in mastering. All that stuff is out of date. Its boring. Like saying Jimi Hendrix or Ornette Coleman plays too loud or out of tune. Correct english is always a middle class complaint because its through that voice they define themselves. I feel closer to some American or some African writers who write in so- called Pidgin English."
Please don't be put off this novel; read for yourself and his other novels too. This is an author who is not showing off he is clever or better than us, you feel he and his characters are one of us.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Alan Warner escapes his usual setting in his native Scotland to write the story of an ageing Spanish roué in this faultlessly voiced novel. Verisimilitude is brilliantly conveyed with a narrative of lost loves, old loves and loves abandoned. Erotically charged and yet disarmingly inoffensive, the story of a life is told with a mixture of charm, honesty and self-doubt so that we see past the façade of a man of the world to the mendacity and egoism of the boy beneath.
As the novel opens 40 year-old Manolo Follana is told by his doctor and friend of many years that he has a certain "condition" from which he will certainly die. The terror and shock has him ranging back over his past as the child of rich hotel-owning parents, his design company's beginnings, his marriages to two wives and liaisons with many girlfriends, to the present day, and the inexplicably strong bond he feels for the lowly immigrant Ahmed, with whom he shares his luxurious apartment.
The novel builds in intensity towards its riveting climax and a new, ironic and devastating revelation. The journey is richly rewarding in this beguilingly meandering novel.
As the novel opens 40 year-old Manolo Follana is told by his doctor and friend of many years that he has a certain "condition" from which he will certainly die. The terror and shock has him ranging back over his past as the child of rich hotel-owning parents, his design company's beginnings, his marriages to two wives and liaisons with many girlfriends, to the present day, and the inexplicably strong bond he feels for the lowly immigrant Ahmed, with whom he shares his luxurious apartment.
The novel builds in intensity towards its riveting climax and a new, ironic and devastating revelation. The journey is richly rewarding in this beguilingly meandering novel.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
yoo doo right to try this after morvern callar
this is warner's 2nd best novel (after the brilliant morvern callar of course). i would definitely urge folk to read this before any of his other scottish-grounded novels. Read more
Published 3 months ago by soundofsleep
Dissapointing
Alan Warner is a fantastically talented author, Morvern Callar and the The Sopranos are among my favourite novels, But he can be a bit hit and miss, and The Worms.... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Lendrick
The worms can carry me to heaven - review
An inconsequential book about a middle-aged, disagreeable man who reminisces over a life led almost in its entirety in a Mediterranean sea-side town. Read more
Published on 5 Aug 2006 by Angelica No
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