Impossible to work

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve spent the past week with my nose firmly stuck in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. If you haven’t read it, or don’t know who Alasdair Gray is, you should really get started on correcting this deficiency. I’ll help you out.

Alasdair Gray is a Glaswegian novelist, poet, playwright, visual artist and activist. I feel as though I’m leaving something (or some things) out there. The point is that the man does a lot. He illustrated the two books of his that I’ve read (Lanark and Poor Things). He’s a ridiculously talented man who writes lovely stories (and does lots of other things as well). He’s a firm supporter of Scottish Independence and has written at least two short volumes on why Scotland should be its own nation. This is a very important issue to him and it pops up in his fiction frequently.

He’s great. That’s all there is to it. His novels are books that want to be read (and in the case of Lanark, practically beg to be read). His style is overwhelmingly pleasant. I can’t read enough about people turning into dragons or being covered by mouths”^a1a” when he writes it. He’s also very Scottish, so be prepared to look up a few words if you don’t happen to have a good relationship with the dialect. Before long though, you’ll be thinking that “wean” is a completely normal word, and “auld” will all of the sudden fit into a context other than auld lang syne. Nonetheless, you will still most likely be unable to correctly pronounce the title of the book (I can’t).

Regardless, I strongly urge you to read something by Gray. His books are perhaps not the greatest, his politics might disagree with your own, but my experience with two of his works has proven that they are hard to put down. Since they are proving near to impossible to set down (I had read about 250 pages of Lanark on Thursday. I have practically finished the 573 page epic today, Saturday), I decided to look up some information about the man and his work.

Through the magic of the internet, I found more than one web page devoted to Mr. Gray. There’s his official web site, his blog”^a2a”, an unofficial and very informative site called Lanark 1982, and a few other web pages that are interesting in their own right, but not really worth mentioning here. His official site includes wonderful tidbits, like interviews”^a3a”, storyboards from a (never made) film of Lanark, and a link to Belle and Sebastian’s site. His blog will keep you up to date with performances of Gray’s work and the like (very nice if you happen to live in or near Glasgow) and is pretty interesting if for no other reason than its open letters. Alasdair Gray seems quite the eccentric man, and is definitely quite the talented writer.

His prose is playful, his books are fun (though you’ll probably find Lanark to be pretty depressing), he’s obsessed with Freud and Jung (seriously), and even when you anticipate an event in his work you look forward to reading the way it plays out. His writing has made my summer much brighter (with all of its darkness), and therefore, you too should check his work out.

1. or more amused to learn that Walt Disney’s Pinocchio was the inspiration for these things aaa
2. He started the blog in March and doesn’t post too frequently. Sound familiar? aaa
3. One with the late (great) Kathy Acker aaa