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Loading... Shuggie Bain (2020)by Douglas Stuart
  
» 22 more Books Read in 2020 (413) Big Jubilee List (14) Books Read in 2023 (1,291) Books Read in 2022 (962) Five star books (438) Booker Prize (363) A's favorite novels (86) Wishlist (14) Historical Fiction (31) To Read (27) No current Talk conversations about this book. The relationship between young boy Shuggie and his beautiful alcoholic mother Agnes is the centerpiece of this depressingly well written novel. At times the author throws us into a high melodrama. Agnes gives up “the drink” a bit too many times for my taste. The books reeks of poverty in Scotland and is filled with enough metaphors to make you want to take a break before your head explodes. Yet this love between mother and son is excruciatingly emotional. (  ) GordonPrescottWiener | Aug 24, 2023 |  I adored this book. What stands out to me most is that I cared about the characters from very early on, but then with every page I cared about them more. That's true of everyone from the most central characters to the most peripheral. If the book had gone on much longer I would have had to start building a time machine (and whatever device is required to travel into fiction) and gone back in time to adopt Shuggie. But even when a peripheral character reached a fork in the road, I hoped they'd choose the right choice. In the book this often came in the form of a peripheral character doing something awful, and me hoping they had a good reason for it, or good intentions. I think this is a sign every character's actions are motivated - no one is bad just because. The other remarkable thing is that the narrator portrays everything without judgement. He doesn't romanticise the characters or their choices, but nor does he condemn them. Initially I found the violence and sexual violence confronting, but then I realised there was something moving about the frank way it was presented. It was as if Stuart was trusting the reader to handle it, and so I had to find a way to handle it. The prose is lovely - unfussy but descriptive. It really feels as if the author is just getting on with telling the story, but it's an incredibly rich and vivid story so it takes four hundred pages. ( ) robfwalter | Jul 31, 2023 | Well written but, literally, monotonous. The tone is uniformly grim, to the point where it feels pointless to carry on reading. A great novel on the same themes of drink and disadvantage, "L'Assommoir" by Zola, is all the more engrossing because its mood rises and falls as the protagonist goes through periods of hope and joy, as well as despair. It's a strange storyline that starts low, stays low, and ends low. (  ) fji65hj7 | May 14, 2023 | 4.5 stars (  ) proustitute | Apr 2, 2023 | This book left me scratching my head, wondering why I didn't like it more. Though the text rings with gritty, northern-U.K. authenticity written in flawless prose, the overall effect was, for me, numbing. And not the grand "all passion spent" numbness one likes virtuosically spun from a finale; instead, just numb, numb, numb, pretty much from start to finish. Was this the intended effect? Was this our chance as readers to chug down whole publoads of emotional devastation? Is it the book saying, look, reader dear, you don't know from devastation; just shut up and help me burnish my Booker? If so, point taken. But if so, may I beg leave to add that your narrative sometimes seems like a tableau from which the life has been artificially purged? (  ) Cr00 | Apr 1, 2023 |
Shuggie Bain is set in this world of men run aground after the closure of mines, women sunk under the weight of drink, families living week to week on public assistance and disability benefits. It speaks in a Scottish English whose rhythms, even whose vocabulary, can be alien for American readers: misty with smirr and dusty with stour, its bruisers glaikit in their foolishness, gallus in their pride.... At its center is Agnes Bain, an imperious former beauty in a now-ratty mink whose disintegration Stuart observes lovingly but unsparingly. Shuggie is her youngest, her ward, her protector, and her target. He bobs in her beery wake, no more able to save her than his baby doll, Daphne.... Stuart’s project as a writer is in part about clearing space for tenderness among men, space for love. It is in many ways a harsh, bleak novel, for that decade was a harsh and bleak time in Glasgow, when the shipyards, engineering works and the coalfields on the city’s fringe were closing, and so many of the working-class were no longer working but living on benefits.... There is poverty, squalor and degradation here, much foul language and causal, sometimes brutal sex. What redeems the novel and makes it remarkable is that its central theme is love – a caring, responsible love.... The relationship between Agnes and Shuggie is beautifully, tenderly and understandingly done. Stuart doesn’t sentimentalise it and he hides nothing of the horrors of galloping alcoholism, but there is a gallantry about Agnes which commands respect and admiration, however reluctantly. It is, then, a testament to Douglas Stuart’s talent that all this literary history—along with the tough portraits of Glaswegian working-class life from William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens—can be felt in Shuggie Bain without either overshadowing or unbalancing the novel ... Stuart’s [has a] Grassic Gibbon–like ability to combine love and horror, and to give equal weight to both. Not only is Shuggie Bain dedicated to his mother, but in the acknowledgments he writes that 'I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle'; he’s clearly determined to give all the contradictory aspects of that struggle their full due ... Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating ... Otherwise, the author is too generous—and, it would seem, too fond of his mother—for the central focus to lie anywhere but in the fierce, warm-hearted portrait of Agnes in all her maddening glory. As a result, this overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence. ... his novel is resolutely, wonderfully Scottish at heart ... such a delight. Rarely does a debut novel establish its world with such sure-footedness, and Stuart’s prose is lithe, lyrical and full of revelatory descriptive insights. This is a memorable book about family, violence and sexuality ... Agnes is drawn with extraordinary sympathy: she simply leaps from the page as she juggles motherhood, a violent and philandering husband and her own demons, drink foremost among them. She is troubled, lovable, vulnerable and resilient ... This is a deeply political novel, one about the impact of Thatcherism on Glaswegian society ... It is brilliant on the shame of poverty and the small, necessary dignities that keep people going. It is heartbreakingly good on childhood and Shuggie’s growing sense of his otherness, of not being the same as the other boys on the estate ... Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty. With his exquisitely detailed debut novel, Douglas Stuart has given Glasgow something of what James Joyce gave to Dublin. Every city needs a book like Shuggie Bain, one where the powers of description are so strong you can almost smell the chip-fat and pub-smoke steaming from its pages, and hear the particular, localized slang ringing in your ears.... Agnes...is the real heroine of this story, so evocative and striking that she may be one of those characters you never forget. Stuart writes about Shuggie, a lonely, loving boy struggling with his sexuality, with skill. But the depiction pales in comparison to the sheer, knock-out force of what he managed to create with Agnes ... Shuggie Bain is full of people doing and saying awful things to one another all the time, but nobody really seems truly awful. Maybe this is what makes the novel so powerful and sad—it turns over the ugly side of humanity to find the softness and the beauty underneath. Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
This is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking goodâ??her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefitsâ??all the family has to live onâ??on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Meanwhile, Shuggie is struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to herâ??even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.21)
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