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Will Self ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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Book Of Dave, The Will Self
0670914436 / 9780670914432 Hardcover
I suspect this is not a book for the masses. As other reviewers have noted, the novel does have two strands narrated across alternating chapters - one set in the very recent past following Dave the Cabbie and one in the far future, where Dave the Cabbie's demented ramblings have sparked off a new world religion. I suspect that if one had the patience, there is a work of genius bursting to get out. The references from the future turn up later in the text as deriving from the past. Read across is not always obvious, and one comes to accept eccentricities from the future before realising how far out of context they have become from references in the present. The phonetically rendered vernacular is irritating, although I rather liked cloakyfings. But as with other texts written in vernacular, the use of it becomes both less frequent and less irritating as the novel progresses. And underneath it all is a brilliantly detailed vision of a future dystopian society. The plots in the two stories are set out in non-linear style and each has a cast of similarly named characters, makign it quite difficult to follow. However, each plot is engaging in its own way. And whislt the Dave the Taximan story is the most gripping, the far future story is more poignant because of its finality. The Dave the Taximan story offers a rationale for the later events, but one knows, ultimately, where the story will end up. The downside of the interleaved narratives, of course, is that the penultimate chapter has to reach a crescendo, and then the last chapter has to work up to a second one when you really feel as though the story's finished. The characters themselves are less well drawn in the future narrative than the complex characters of the recent past. Dave the Cabbie is not the racist, mysoginist bigot portrayed in the blurb. In fact, he is repelled by his colleagues who are that way inclined. He is caring and sensitive, and that is probably his downfall as he finds his life spinning out of control. This adds to the irony of Dave's book becoming a sacred text. There are wonderful cameos from the Skip Tracer and the Fighting Fathers (or whatever they called themselves). Overall, this is a wonderful and funny satire on the nature of religion and personal destiny, along with some dazzlingly imaginative speculation of a far future revisitation of mediaeval values. It is heavy going, though, with dense plotting and lengthy detail. Worth it, though, and it deserves to get somewhere in the annual awards round.
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22.95 AUD
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How the Dead Live Will Self
0140268650 / 9780140268652 Paperback
n 1988, sixty-five-year old Lily Bloom quickly succumbs to cancer in London. But after life there's death. Guided by an Aborigine named Phar Lap Jones, Lily is transported by a Greek Cypriot minicab driver to the North London dead neighbourhood of Dulston. There, accompanied by her lithopedion Lithy and her dead son Rude Boy, she's introduced to the twelve-step Personally Dead meetings, and watches over her living daughters--the cold, ambitious Charlotte, and her favourite, the heroin-addicted Natasha. Since Self's face, voice and, notoriously, his life story are familiar to millions who will never pick up his book, there's always the risk of over-reading his work biographically. Read this way, Lily is clearly based on his New York-born Jewish mother; large chunks of Self's much-publicised addictions are wittily retooled; and Self himself is sexily transmuted into the beautiful and glamorously doomed Natasha. But Lily is a feisty, articulate woman, with a complex history spanning two continents, two husbands, and a constantly recreated personality--a great literary creation. Self's longterm obsession with London provides us with the utterly convincing Dulston; his treatment of modern Jewish life in North London (versus New York) will find its fans and critics; and his sympathetic account of Lily's decline into her morphine-laden deathbed is deeply affecting. But ultimately How The Dead Live grows beyond such local concerns. Ultimately, this novel is about the vexed relationship between the local worries of contemporary Western life and a more transcendent non-Western spirituality--signalled by Self's opening gesture to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and by the all-seeing Aborigine Phar Lap Jones. Readers familiar with his satire and pyrotechnic wordplay--both still well in place--may initially be thrown by the book's unexpected lurches of narrative voice and locale and its mysticism--but they'd be well advised to give it a chance. How The Dead Live is a big book with big ideas, and quite definitely Will Self's most ambitious and mature work to date.
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22.95 AUD
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My Idea of Fun Will Self
0747582335 / 9780747582335 Paperback
Ian Wharton is a rather sad, lonely boy, growing up in a small town in Sussex, dominated by his over-sexual mother. He becomes the familiar of Samuel Northcliffe, a ridiculously obese caravan dweller and neighbour who intimidates and enchants Ian into a Faustian pact.
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22.95 AUD
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4 |
Psycho Too Self, Will
Steadman, Ralph
1608190226 / 9781608190225 Hardcover
Journalist and novelist Self... presents his second collection of those pieces with his friend and illustrator Steadman, whose pictures do far more than illustrate—they amuse, illuminate, amplify and, at times, almost editorialize on Self’s text... Self loves to walk, knowing, like some sort of 19th-century Transcendentalist, that truths lie along roads rarely taken—and he often finds them... his keen eye misses little... A journalistic feast best savored in small bites over several days.
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69.95 AUD
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5 |
Psychogeography Self, Will
Steadman, Ralph
Bloomsbury/Alliance 2008 0747590338 / 9780747590330 Hardcover
This artful and entertaining collection of essays by novelist Self (The Book of Dave) will delight anyone who enjoys his weekly column of the same name in the Independent or his last collection of essays, Feeding Frenzy. Here Self shifts from gonzo journalism to the study of psychogeography, the study of how geographical environments affect emotions and behavior. Setting off on a quest for the intrinsic character of various places as well as the manner in which the contemporary world warps the relationship between psyche and place, Self casts a dismissive eye on most of the world. Singapore strikes him as Basingstoke force-fed with pituitary gland; Sao Paolo's lack of a street plan makes it an unholy miscegenation between London and Los Angeles. But Steadman's beautifully harsh illustrations (worthy of their own book) and Walking to New York, a previously unpublished semi-autobiographical meditation on life and death, reveal a surprising depth to Self's cynical insights.
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44.95 AUD
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6 |
The Butt Self, Will
Bloomsbury/Alliance 2008 074759175X / 9780747591757 Hardcover
Will Self is a writer totally committed, like his idol, J.G. Ballard, to contemporary Western culture. Not for him the elegant, self-enclosed humanistic world of novels where rounded characters play out a parlour game morality tale, with a clear resolution at the end.
Self, quite rightly, prefers his fiction to cut a little looser than that. For nearly 20 years he has been holding a satirical mirror to contemporary British life, and forcing his readers to look again at what their lives, their very selves, actually consist of. (Sadly, the people who really need to do this most don't tend to read this type of book, but what can you do).
Away from the Grey Area of London, the Butt takes place in a completely fictional country, part Australia, part Iraq, part neo-Conradian heart of darkness. It is billed by its publisher as an allegory of the post September 11 Liberal conscience - but this is not a satire as you might expect, contemning the imperialist foreign policy of the Bush/Blair axis. Well it is. But not quite. And it certainly is strange.
Self has said in interviews promoting this book that he feels in contemporary British cultural and political life, you are at liberty to say pretty much anything, and nothing gets listened to. To make an impact, you need to start from first principles. So he creates a protagonist, Tom Brodzinsky (clearly American, though never explicitly stated) who carelessly hurls his cigarette butt off the balcony where he is vacationing with his family. It lands on the head of Reggie Lincoln and scars him. Reggie takes this amiably enough, but the problem is he's married to a Tayswengo woman, and this indigenous people's don't believe in accidents. After a kangaroo court, a sort of show trial, Tom is dispatched across a bizarre, Mad Max esque apocalyptic wilderness accompanied by the odious Prentice (English, though never made explicit). Prentice, Tom suspects, is guilty of a much graver crime (child abuse), but the two men are yoked together as they venture out to make reparations to the afflicted tribe.
Given that many people find themselves in a quandry as to what to make of current events in the Middle East - are you uneasy, for instance, with the way America is determined to impose it's curious cost/benefit analysis democracy through the barrel of a gun, yet certainly don't want to be seen supporting the murderous Baathist regime? - I think Self does an original and intelligent job in trying to make sense of our mental terrain. Tom and Reggie clearly have no idea what they are doing - they struggle with hypocricies (condeming genital circumcision/ogling the breasts of the native tribeswomen), are completely at sea with the prevailing moral culture, and face violent counter-insurgents and bizzarre local rituals.
Tom is convinced the trip is about dispensing with Prentice - yet as events grow darker, he is plagued by ever more weird dreams, including one in which is is turned into a cigarette. Things are not what they seem - and Tom and Prentice wind up in a confrontation with the Levi-Straussesque anthropologist, Von Sasser, who explains to them the truth behind the belief system they have been imbroiled in.
There is so much post September 11 fiction around at the moment, but most of it is facile, and written by men and women who clearly have no idea what the zeitgeist has turned into. Self is too intelligent a left winger to fall into the trap that many of his coevals have blundered into: letting blinkered anti-American thinking ally themselves with the worst reactionary barbaric people in the world. But making sense of the moral climate in a satire is very very difficult to do in todays uneasy climate, swinging as it does between hypocritical moral relativism and scary neo-con warmongering. A very difficult novel to pull off, and Self just about does it.
Price:
39.95 AUD
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