28 April

I remarked a little while ago that Mr Salman Rushdie writes terrible novels but wonderful paragraphs. Mr Alasdair Gray, I have decided, writes terrible paragraphs but wonderful sentences:

My business acquaintances, some of them in the Labour Party, had told me that the new administration would be as conservative as it dared to be without provoking a trade union revolt. They were wrong. It became so conservative that it eventually provoked a trade union revolt. 

I am sure he felt in his bones that sexuality was wicked. Which is why I feel in my bones that wickedness is sexy.

But I always praised her cooking as I praised her lovemaking, because both were better than I could do for myself. 

His appearance puzzled me for he had very large testicles and no apparent penis. This was an optical misreading. 

Like "Lanark", "1982, Janine" is a book of two halves. Most of the text is weird, surreal, pornographic (but not very pornographic) fantasy with lots of funny type faces and meta textual games; and a single, very long chapter, taking up about half the book, describing the ordinary life of the person who is writing or imagining the rest of it. Grey claims the idea is borrowed from At Swim Two Birds which wouldn't particularly have occurred to me.

I enjoyed the novella about the young man who nearly has a success in the world of theatre but ends up making an unwise marriage and living a disappointed life quite enjoyable, although I have read other things quite like it.

Perhaps you need to be Scottish to pick up the wonderful nuances of Glasgow life.

He really doesn't think much of his old school teachers.

What very long book which I've been meaning to get around to do you think I should read next?

1: The long one about angels by the self-obsessed Norwegian guy I enjoyed so much
2: The long mystical one by the guy who writes the super hero comics I enjoyed so much
3: The long fantasy series that the long fantasy TV show I enjoyed so much was based on.
4: The long Irish one that I have been pretending to have read since college.


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