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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful, 19 July 2007
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.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great novel, 18 Dec 2006
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.
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10 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The worms can carry me to heaven - review, 5 Aug 2006
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. He remarks that life is too short to waste it on books, good or bad - while I don't quite agree, life is too short for this book, which is let down by appalling English (and, consequently, by a weak editor) that too frequently stops the reader in his tracks. The protagonist's excuse that he doesn't like English cuts no ice, given that, in the book, he doesn't speak a word of it.) Examples are...
p55: "It took years for all the traces to wear away and some still remain." Well, have they all worn away or do some still remain?
p56: "The dust coated Verona's and my skin." Skins, surely, unless they're sharing one skin between them.
p169: "Father and Mother... stood next to [Verona and] I." Stood next to I? How about "me", the object of the sentence? And again (p180): "[It]became... a diversion for [Sagrana and]I." And (p278): "Now they moved [Mother, Sagrana and] I out of the room." And p327; "He watched [Aracelli and] I help the old ladies..." They moved I? He watched I? etc
p207: "Sagrana had extracted the price of the magazine down." What is it to extract down? p302: "... I retreated out." p310: "She vomited out." etc
p229: "Myself and the other boys were asked who wanted to go first." And (p289): "Myself... and your mother will go to the bank." And p326: "When [Aracelli,] myself... and Beautiful Screamer... were next in line..." Myself will go? Myself was asked? What's the reflexive pronoun doing there? I ask myself...
p330: "... a driver who [sic] I recognised..."
pp255 and 281: "if... was..." Where's the subjunctive, if... were...?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of errors that impeded this pedant's reading pleasure. Page numbers included, should Jonathan Cape wish to do Mr Warner a favour when publishing the next edition.
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