Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You have to be persistent in the land of Kelman, 14 Nov 2005
It's not easy being a James Kelman fan. You often find yourself defending him from the eternal optimists who think he's just a sour-faced old Weegie with an axe to grind. Then there's the London circle of the so-called 'quality' papers, lambasting his vulgarity and 'unnecessary' swearing . And to top it all, with his last effort, 'Translated Accounts', Kelman gave us a novel without chapters, characters or setting, a 300 page exercise in unreadability. The devil!Yet we endure all this happily for the following reason. Kelman is one of very the few writers out there who combines genuine literary talent with a true appreciation of what real life is really like for the average Joe, a million miles away from that which the dons of News, TV and advertising would have us believe. In 'You Have to Be Careful...', Kelman has evidently decided to treat us, the faithful few, to a slighly less-demanding but no-less serious a novel as 'Translated Accounts'. We get a protagonist, ex-patriate Scot Jeremiah Brown. We get a setting, an anonymous town in the backwater of the American Mid-West. We even get a love interest, ex-girlfriend Yasmin, albeit through Jeremiah's memories alone. Lucky us! The plot, so much as there is one (Kelman's not big on once-upon-a-time), is that Jeremiah, a Glaswegian, self-proclaimed 'unassimilatit alien' living in America, is holed up in a bar for a night (when he really should be catching a plane home as he promised his mother he would), letting his thoughts slide freely between past and present, hopes, fears and regrets. In this sense, the novel is really just an extended character study, but one which takes us deep into the psyche of a character caught between two worlds, not completely at ease in either. This is a definite return to form for Kelman, a writer who takes his art very seriously indeed. Although it may lack the punch of 'How Late it Was, How Late', or the complexity of 'A Disaffection', 'You Have to Be Careful...' stakes its worth in its creation of a character both flawed and dignified, pessimistic and witty. And by elucidating his personal history, full of the simple tragedies and triumphs that all ordinary people go through, Kelman performs that rare Frankensteinean feat of bringing his character to life. 'You Have to Be Careful...' is a wonderfully liberated account of one man's experiences on the other side of the pond, and with its subtle yet sardonic attack on the US Immigration Service, Kelman is as politically charged as ever.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Everybody vanishes, that is what life is, unresolved.", 5 Jul 2004
Jeremiah Brown, another of Booker Prize-winner James Kelman's down-and-out protagonists, thinks of himself as a writer and keeps a notebook into which he jots down his observations about his life, recording them in the vernacular--phonetic spellings ("Skallin" for Scotland, "Uhmerkin" for American, for example); pervasive profanity; and run-on sentences and paragraphs. No chapters interrupt or divide the stream-of-consciousness narrative, told by Jeremiah, as he drinks his way through a series of bars in Rapid City, South Dakota, the night before he is supposed to begin his roundabout trip home to Glasgow, by way of Seattle, Montreal, Newfoundland, Iceland, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh.As he reminisces about his life, especially his life with his "ex-wife" Yasmin, whom he never married, and their daughter, now four years old, he shows himself to be aimless, "a non-assimilatit alien...Aryan Caucasian atheist, born loser...big debts, nay brains." A compulsive gambler, pool player, and heavy drinker, Jerry has held a series of dead end jobs, the only kinds of jobs, he tells us, that are open to immigrants with Class III Red Cards--primarily bar-tending and nighttime airport security work. The novel follows no logical time frame, spooling out from Jerry's memories in more or less random fashion. We observe his relationship with Yasmin, his "ex-wife," and meet his acquaintances, including Suzanne and Miss Perpetua, two other security guards from the Alien and Alien Extraction Section who also patrol the periphery of the airport car park where he works; two down-and-out war vets, Homer and Jethro, who sleep wherever they can find warmth and space; and "the being," a grocery cart pusher who frequently disappears into thin air and about whose gender bets have been made. Obviously, plot is not the focus here. In choosing to recreate Jerry's aimless inner life in such a realistic way, however, the author has created a character who does not change or gain the self-awareness that makes his life relevant to most readers. As a character, Jerry does not really engage the reader, and that seems to be part of the author's point: Jerry is and always will be an outsider. Humor, most of it dark, permeates the novel, and an episode with "the being" in the airport VIP lounge is hilarious, but the ending is startling in its abruptness and may surprise readers. Kelman the iconoclast has, once again, produced an unusual and iconoclastic novel in which he experiments with form and structure, bringing to life a character who remains forever on the periphery, even for the reader. Mary Whipple
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
U S of Nay, 27 Feb 2006
This was a massive let down. Kelman has persistently turned out brilliant novels and short-story collections, most of which have been based in or around the milieus of the Scottish working classes. Thus you can see what he was trying to do with this book (and his previous effort, Translated Accounts): to show that he is not just a one trick pony.
The Scottish working class guy is still here, but Kelman has dumped him in America's nowhere land. Here he spends most of his time in bars making himself an object of suspicion and making others the object of his suspicion. When he has a bit of time left over he muses upon his girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and rails against bureaucracy.
It's fairly plotless, as is Kelman's wont, and this is not where my problem lies. The book just doesn't feel as authentic as his previous efforts. There are some fine set pieces, but the novel ultimately feels a bit tacked on, which is the antithesis of what Kelman has come to stand for.
It's hard to describe why this is, because, as I said, Kelman has never been one for plot, or characters you can empathise/sympathise with, so such absences are not why this book doesn't pull 'it' off.
The book started strongly, but dissipated into fritterings. I don't know if Kelman felt the need to produce something bigger than his standard 300-page novels (doubtful, considering the man's general disregard for most 'accepted' things), but 'Land of the Free' would've greatly benefited from losing 100 pages or so. Kelman's previous works use patois to develop a real narrative flow, creating a lyrical bounce not dissimilar to poetry. This was definitely lacking here, and is probably the key factor behind my dislike of the novel: it feels more like an Irvine Welsh than a James Kelman, which is no good thing. This lack of bounce also made it a slower and less enjoyable read than 'A Dissafection' or 'How Late it Was...'; and the protagonist, Jeremiah, had less Kelmanesque impudent charm as a result.
I still give it three stars though, because it is far superior to many other contemporary novels and because Kelman is to an extent a victim of his own high standards.
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