| Trainspotting
is the novel that launched the sensational career of Irvine
Welsh - an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating group portrait
of blasted lives in Edinburgh that has the linguistic energy of A
Clockwork Orange and the literary impact of Last
Exit to Brooklyn. Rents, Sick Boy, Mother Superior, Swanney, Spuds,
and Begbie are as unforgettable a clutch of rude boys, junkies, and nutters
as readers will ever encounter. This novel is set in a working class neighborhood
in Edinburgh. Narrator Mark Renton tells the story "of young junkies in their
20s living on the dole, fending off adulthood and trying to escape from a world
of AIDS, death and national despair." |
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| Irvine
Welsh, born in 1961, is a Scottish author who is acknowledged as the voice
of British youth culture in the '90s. Writing in a crude, phonetic dialect about
drugs, sex, violence, and soccer, Welsh captured the imagination of a generation
not thought to be easily seduced by books. After debuting in March 1994 with
The Acid House, a hilarious, soulful, and
shocking short-story collection, Welsh became a full-fledged media phenomenon
with the publication of his first novel Trainspotting,
published that August. The book, by turns depressing and exhilarating, shone
mordant insight into the lives of junkies in the same Edinburgh housing projects
where the writer grew up. As well as earning Welsh heady comparisons to the
likes of Celine, the book was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize,
stayed on besteller lists for over two years, and in 1995 was adapted for the
stage. The hyperkinetic hit movie version of Trainspotting
(1996), coming on the heels of Welsh's ambitious, hallucinatory second novel
Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), engendered a level of press attention
that led Welsh to retreat to relative anonimity in Amsterdam. The negative reviews
that were accorded to Welsh's next book, a slightly uneven short-story triptych
Ecstasy (1996), may have been as much a comment
on the media overkill surrounding the writer as the quality of his work. |
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