HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Loading...

Lanark (1981)

by Alasdair Gray

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,034377,916 (4)97
'Probably thegreatest novel of the century'Observer 'Remarkable . . . A work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches'WILLIAM BOYD Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers.… (more)
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 97 mentions

English (35)  Norwegian (1)  French (1)  All languages (37)
Showing 1-5 of 35 (next | show all)
Big and baffling. Feels like it needs a re-read to comprehend, but it is big. There are Big Themes of socialism and capitalism and Freud and subconscious, but it's hard to know how seriously any of it is being taken. The parts (Books) that are fantastical are sort of compelling and sort of tiresome—lots of visual imagery and description that I find hard to keep in mind. The time-mangling stuff is well done, though. Plot is picaresque in these parts. The parts (Books) that are realist-ish are kind of straightforward and very much a reminder that the 1950s are now an awful long time ago. The protagonist is both fully realised and a cypher. The sexual politics and general attitude to women are both pretty dated. The whole is somehow less playful than I expected from Gray, though there is the odd good joke. It's certainly an achievement but I don't know what it achieves. ( )
  hypostasise | Sep 13, 2023 |
Wow! Joyce meets Vonnegut in Glasgow. Wohda thought? Wow! ( )
  Estragon1958 | May 23, 2022 |
This book was a bit patchy and long for me. There were sections I really enjoyed and yet as a whole I wasn't quite convinced by it. It's weird and inventive with some very memorable scenes, but its what I would characterise as 'men's fiction' where the women tend to be a bit poorly drawn and unconvincing. I probably most enjoyed some of the deconstruction towards the end. Its quite disjointed between the realism of books 1 and 2, and the fantasy of books 3 and 4, which by the way are not in that order in the book. I feel like its very much a curate's egg, but it's a cult classic and I'm glad I've read it. ( )
1 vote AlisonSakai | Jul 25, 2021 |
Fascinating, confusing, weird. I can't even begin to offer a plot synopsis. I was fascinated by parts and bored to tears by other parts. Epic strangeness that nevertheless strikes amazingly close to home at times. A novel not soon forgotten. ( )
  Charon07 | Jul 16, 2021 |
Most of the commentary on this book concentrates on its famous division between the Bildungsroman/roman à clef sections of Books 1 and 2, and the adult/fantastical sections of Books 3 and 4. That's true, and there's a lot to say about the way that Gray structured the book to enhance the parallelisms between Thaw and Lanark's lives (and he even says as much in the Epilogue), but I think the main division in the book is between the quotidian stuff - meaning the lives and loves of the dual protagonists - and the broader thematic stuff about society and its evolution.

The Introduction, which like all introductions should really be read last, claims that this is the Glaswegian equivalent of Ulysses. This is neither a true compliment, as Glasgow does not come off like a very nice place in the book, nor really all that meaningful, since Lanark and Ulysses are fairly different works. Lanark has some metafictional elements in it that I didn't enjoy much, but at heart it's divided between a sort of young adult novel about the adolescence of the artistic, asthmatic, alienated youth Duncan Thaw, who's openly based on the author; and a dystopian political novel about Lanark, who is Thaw's spiritual doppelgänger. Both halves of the book, somewhat reordered for artistic effect, have a lot of obvious parallels with each other, and while different readers will have their own favorite parts, I thought the "lovable loser" sections of Thaw's story were the strongest, both since they seemed to be written with real feelings, and because few people who grow through adolescence won't sympathize with his growing pains. By contrast, a lot of the Lanark sections consist of him essentially blundering around in a bizarre future landscape that's clearly based on Glasgow, yet alien enough to be offputting without truly being something new.

The real interest for me was in seeing how Thaw/Lanark's emotional turmoil got reflected in the world around them. One of the more interesting "soft" sci-fi novels I've read in the past few years is Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, wherein the main character sees the similarity of life at many different scales - conflict between individuals is like conflict between tribes, is like conflict between races, is like conflict between species, and so on. In Lanark, the author, in a cringingly awkward ex cathedra cameo that's reminiscent of nothing so much as the Architect scene in the second Matrix movie, says as much to Lanark: "The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason." That's the kind of stuff I like reading about, what the relationship is between the omnipresence of human frailty and the corresponding flaws in our societies, what our growth and change says about us, and whether our actions are really leading us anywhere or merely sublimating our failures into ever less satisfying receptacles. The novel doesn't talk about that stuff as much as I'd have liked, but it's good to know Gray was thinking about it when he wrote it.

The emotional turmoil stuff is good too, although better in the Thaw parts, where he's just a kid and can be excused for his weirdness and clumsiness, than in Lanark's, who spends a lot of time in baffling non-conversations with the people around him. Gray is very good at making emotional pain present, be it towards parents, friends, or lovers. Some parts of Thaw's story are actually hard to read, so vividly do Thaw's struggles with girls, his art, his parents, and his maturity come across. However, Lanark strikes me as a book that would have been improved without the metafictional Epilogue where Gray explains exactly that. I'm just not sure it's possible to be truly artistically successful when being so self-referential, even if the little list of plagiarisms is actually really helpful for thinking about what the novel means. I prefer works to stand on their own; it's the job of critics - who are actually encouraged to talk about books and their reactions to them, and reactions to other reactions, etc. - who should be trusted with that stuff, because otherwise the author's breaking of the fourth wall just emphasizes how artificial their work is, and all suspension of disbelief is lost.

Other than that, it's an immense, fascinating novel about a man's journey through the world and his relationship to it that will please both lovers of sci-fi and young adult literature, who are seldom in agreement. ( )
1 vote aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 35 (next | show all)
Bulk alone--560 or so pages--signals Scottish first-novelist Gray's determination: he means to make a detailed, leisurely analogue to today, to set it in a future-world city much like Glasgow. The main of Gray's big metaphorical structure is built on fantasy. And though this construct has its moments, it never even comes close to cohering. The eye, instead of being scathing, is more simply chafed; there's a sharp edge here, but it glints only once in a long while. Some appeal for fanciers of grand-scale sociological futurescapes, then, with more ambition than real imagination or power.
added by poppycocteau | editKirkus Reviews (Feb 1, 1980)
 
What's worth saying, these decades on, is that Lanark , in common with all great books, is still, and always will be, an act of resistance. It is part of the system of whispers and sedition and direct communion, one voice to another, we call literature. Its bravery in finding voice, in encouraging the enormous power of public, national, artistic, sexual and political imagination, is not something to take for granted.

Alasdair Gray's big book about Glasgow is also a big book about everywhere. Its insistence on the literal if mistrusted truth - that Glasgow and Scotland and every small nation and individual within it are part of the whole wide world - is something worth saying indeed. Dear reader, delay no longer. Engage with the text. Imagine. Admire the view.
added by SnootyBaronet | editThe Guardian, Janice Galloway
 
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
The Elite Cafe was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema.
Quotations
"Who did the council fight?"
"It split in two and fought itself."
"That's suicide!"
"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."
"It is plain that the vaster the social unit, the less possible is true democracy."
He wallows under, gasping and tumbling over and over in salt sting, knowing nothing but the need not to breathe. A humming drumming fills his brain, in panic he opens eyes and glimpses green glimmers through salt sting. And when at last, like fingernails losing clutch on too narrow a ledge, he, tumbling, yells out last dregs of breath and has to breathe, there flows in upon him, not pain, but annihilating sweetness.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

'Probably thegreatest novel of the century'Observer 'Remarkable . . . A work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches'WILLIAM BOYD Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (4)
0.5 2
1 9
1.5 2
2 12
2.5 5
3 57
3.5 19
4 120
4.5 26
5 125

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

Canongate Books

An edition of this book was published by Canongate Books.

» Publisher information page

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 202,660,281 books! | Top bar: Always visible