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Loading... Filthby Irvine Welsh
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Not a book for everyone but I highly enjoyed the creativity invovled with the tape worm. I also admire how the character is portrayed even though he's a complete fucking asshole but he's honest about it. I love the twist concerning his ex and how tragically it ends. Makes you hope for the best just to completely smash that hope to pieces. Beautiful. (  ) sydculture | Jan 14, 2009 |  I tried reading this book a few years ago, and like many of the other reviewers found it just too distasteful to continue... the Scottish writing and slang notwithstanding... it's hard to get into a book where you despise the main character from the get go. But I tried it again, and I'm glad that I did... Like most unpleasant things, if you just try to power through it you can get to something rewarding. Once things really start falling apart for Mr. Robertson I couldn't put the book down... my poor neglected girlfriend can attest to that. Now that I'm done I'm going to take a shower and read something fuzzier... like the new Stephen King I just got. (  ) wpschlitz | Dec 14, 2008 | Yes, this book (and most others by Welsh) is about unseedy behavior, and, up until page 80, where I put the book down for good, that's about all that "Filth" contributes. The Scottish brogue is not as daunting as I thought it might be, but the lack of a point, an insight, a reason to the incorrigible behavior is. It seems tailor-made for those who enjoy discovering dirty words and prurient thoughts as they read, with little else to get in the way of their adolescent enjoyment.However, I have heard a few good things about Welsh's other books, so I would like to give him another shot. (  ) sailornate82 | Jul 15, 2008 | Yes, this book (and most others by Welsh) is about unseedy behavior, and, up until page 80, where I put the book down for good, that's about all that "Filth" contributes. The Scottish brogue is not as daunting as I thought it might be, but the lack of a point, an insight, a reason to the incorrigible behavior is. It seems tailor-made for those who enjoy discovering dirty words and prurient thoughts as they read, with little else to get in the way of their adolescent enjoyment.However, I have heard a few good things about Welsh's other books, so I would like to give him another shot. ( ) sailornate82 | Jul 15, 2008 | I had to give this 1 star as it is well written, but it is one of the few books I couldn't finish. It started to get boring wanting to strangle the main character all the time, and the other review which says you'll want to take a shower after reading it was dead on. I will probably try to get through it again, as I do like his work in general. If you haven't read him yet, I'd recommend starting with Ecstasy (if you like short stories) or Trainspotting (if you prefer novels.) Oh, and for all you non-Brits out there (like me) "the filth" is slang for the police. (  ) amandrake | Jun 29, 2008 | 
 Those who make it through Bruce's gruesome abuses and the difficult Scottish dialect will be left with something to think about. As in the past, Welsh himself sometimes seems rather compromised as a satirist by the glee he takes in his characters' repulsiveness. Yet if this hypnotic chronicle of moral and psychological ruin (funnier and far more accessible than Welsh's last full-length novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares) fails to charm a wide readership, it will not disappoint devotees.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0099284294, Paperback)Talk about truth in advertising! Irvine Welsh's novel about an evil Edinburgh cop is filthy enough to please the most crud-craving fans of his blockbuster debut, Trainspotting. Like Trainspotting, Filth matches its nastiness with a maniacal, deeply peeved sense of humor. Though one does feel the need to escape this train wreck of a narrative from time to time for a shower and some chamomile tea, just as often Welsh provokes a belly laugh with an extraordinarily perverse and cruelly funny set piece. Nicely violent turns of phrase litter the ghastly landscape of his tale.Our hero, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, is a cross between Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and John Belushi in Animal House. His task is to nab a killer who has brained the son of the Ghanaian ambassador, but bigoted Bruce is more urgently concerned with coercing sex from teenage Ecstasy dealers, planning vice tours of Amsterdam, and mulling over his lurid love life. He's also got a tapeworm, whose monologue is printed right down the middle of many pages. Here's one of this unusually articulate parasite's realizations: "My problem is that I seem to have quite a simple biological structure with no mechanism for the transference of all my grand and noble thoughts into fine deeds." Welsh's real strength is comic tough talk and inventive slang. The murder mystery helps organize his tendency to sprawl, but the engine of his art is wry, harsh dialogue. At one point, his books hogged the entire top half of Scotland's Top Ten Bestsellers list--and half the buyers of Trainspotting had never bought a book before. The reason is not that Welsh is the best novelist who ever got short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is that he is that rarest of phenomena, an original voice. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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