Name: Matthew Jackson's review of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Item: Trainspotting
Rating: 4
Author: Matthew Jackson

Irvine Welsh

Trainspotting

Matthew Jackson

Ils sont quatre amis inséparables qui ont en commun une enfance, une ville, des voisins, le chômage. Et surtout une dévotion appliquée pour une seule et unique héroïne en forme de seringue. On entend ces quatre-là, on les écoute : chacun raconte son Edimbourg, entre deux pintes de bière, après un fix, avant une tasse de thé, ou pendant une baston à coup d'aiguilles à tricoter taillées en pointe. On voit les corps mangés par le virus, la drogue, les hallucinations, et puis quelque chose se détache : on est d'Edimbourg, mais comme on est de Fresnes ou de la Santé. Il faut s'échapper. Livre culte des années 90, Trainspotting a été porté à l'écran par Dany Boyle.

roman

Matt Eaves

“Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem.”

 was a book that went way over my head both in style and subject matter. Why did I think I would be particularly interested in a bunch of Scottish assholes doing drugs, fighting, and causing general havoc is a mystery yet to be solved.

However, I do know that this book (and the following cult classic film adaptation) has quite the cult following, and so I wanted to give it a go. The whole thing would be a futile exercise in stubbornness (if not a complete failure) if I didn’t pull up a white flag 3 pages into the story and got the audiobook version to accompany the book. Written in a Scottish accent, it felt like learning to read a whole new language at times. The constantly changing narration between numerous boys (all referred to at different times with different nicknames) did not help.

That being said, the book has a sense of importance, a sort of “voice of the times” feeling. I can’t claim to know very much about the social context: Scotland in 1980’s in social and political upheaval (especially due to the HIV pandemic outbreak) is not a part of history I am familiar with. But the story is unflinchingly ugly, destructive, loud, and sometimes reactionary just for the sake of it. With a full cast of despicables, as well as addicts (to heroin, alcohol, violence, and any other means to disconnect or get the upper hand in whatever high they might chase), the tragedies large and small do nothing to slow the downward spiral of this group. It does have its witty, bittersweet, and powerful moments, but it was an uphill battle for me to enjoy those parts amongst the rest of the chaos.

“Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.
Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem.”
---------------------------------
Unfortunately, Trainspotting was a book that went way over my head both in style and subject matter. Why did I think I would be particularly interested in a bunch of Scottish assholes doing drugs, fighting, and causing general havoc is a mystery yet to be solved.

However, I do know that this book (and the following cult classic film adaptation) has quite the cult following, and so I wanted to give it a go. The whole thing would be a futile exercise in stubbornness (if not a complete failure) if I didn’t pull up a white flag 3 pages into the story and got the audiobook version to accompany the book. Written in a Scottish accent, it felt like learning to read a whole new language at times. The constantly changing narration between numerous boys (all referred to at different times with different nicknames) did not help.
That being said, the book has a sense of importance, a sort of “voice of the times” feeling. I can’t claim to know very much about the social context: Scotland in 1980’s in social and political upheaval (especially due to the HIV pandemic outbreak) is not a part of history I am familiar with. But the story is unflinchingly ugly, destructive, loud, and sometimes reactionary just for the sake of it. With a full cast of despicables, as well as addicts (to heroin, alcohol, violence, and any other means to disconnect or get the upper hand in whatever high they might chase), the tragedies large and small do nothing to slow the downward spiral of this group. It does have its witty, bittersweet, and powerful moments, but it was an uphill battle for me to enjoy those parts amongst the rest of the chaos.

Definitely not for the weak stomachs.

A jarring, fragmented ride through the dark underbelly of Edinburgh, the festival city. There is not an advocate, a festival performer or a fur coat in sight as, with bitter passion and rancid humour, Welsh lays bare the lives of this ill-starred bunch of addicts, alcoholics and no-hopers.

Mark

Just as good as the first time I read it, back in 1995.

Gavin

Minking, mankit, but only superficially amoral - the spike in the femoral artery, the period blood in the soup, the desperate crab-bucket scrabble away, away from the meaningful (the comparatively boring).

Genuinely part of a renaissance in Scots self-consciousness. Which tells you more about how low that was, before. (This was me and my mates' mantra at school:

 Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that's different; pakis, poofs n what huv ye. Fuckin failures in a country full ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, tha's what, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots. 

)

Film's better than the book, mostly because of the music but also its rendition of that soliloquy.

Nicolás Niño 

Kayleigh hughes

I love Trainspotting and I love Irvine Welsh, to be honest in my eyes he can do no wrong.

One of my favourite aspect of this novel is the language used, both the phonetic Scottish brogue and the stream of consciousness first person narration utilised through most of the book. The rough and almost indecipherable Scottish brogue used in Trainspotting forces you into the world of the novel, into the mindset of the characters and it doesn't let you free until you reach the end of the book. Even then it is hard to stop thinking in the accent for a few days, at least it was for me. 

Each chapter is narrated by a different character, some like Renton feature predominantly, while others have single almost self-contained chapters which serve both as an individual story and as another thread connecting the tangled knot that is the entire novel.

One of my favourite parts of the novel is the chapter 'Bad Blood' which is a short story following Dave and the revenge he takes on Alan Venters, the junkie who knowingly passed on the HIV virus to Dave's girlfriend who then passed it on unknowingly to him. His role in the novel is contained within this one chapter, and yet it perfectly reflects the general emotional and social landscape of the novel. The story ends with a twist and even though it is only just over 20 pages long it is full of detail and character depth and all the good things you hope for in a book.

There is no getting used to this novel, just as you get used to the thick Edinburgh accent it switches to plain English or vice versa, it leaves you constantly waiting for the next change and hunting the dialogue for those character quirks. I found this format extremely challenging and rewarding. 

For the rest of my review check out my  blog

Harriet Moar-Smith

I listened to this instead of reading it and I don't think I missed out on any of the Scottishness of it being written down. 

There were some passages of this book that truly will stick with me for life, some that made me laugh out loud in public and others that were disturbing in wonderfully descriptive ways. It's absolutely made my swearing even worse as well, if that was even possible.

"The best book ever written by man or woman...deserves to sell more copies than the Bible."—Rebel, Inc.

Eugenia Andino

I know this book by heart - in the Spanish translation. Let's see how well I can understand Welsh's original Scots.

Mirjana Prodan

Rachel

I've been wanting to read Trainspotting for years and I finally did it! It wasn't easy at first, the Scottish and junkie slang was slowing me down a lot, but you do get use to it. The book is about junkies and friends of junkies in Scotland. The shot story structure takes awhile to get use to as well. Yes the stories mostly focus on the main group, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie, and its mostly about their need for heroin or their life in Scotland, but the stories jump around and your don't get a full scope of what happened between them. While it annoyed me a lot at first because it felt like what the fuck is going on and whats the point of the book when it didn't feel like there was much development, just random things going on. The more you get into the book though, it feels like each chapter is more of a snapshot of the dynamics of junkies and their friends and the final chapter really drives the point home of drugs > friends and maybe its where you live and who you are friends with that caused it to be drugs > friends. 

*Edit 03/11/2014: After watching the movie I feel maybe I misread the ending? I thought for sure after reading the book Renton was stealing the money not only to get away from his friends but to buy drugs with it, he was using again at the time and even though he was hopeful about starting a new life it felt like most of that money was going to be spent on heroin still. In the movie though it pretty much concluded Renton is getting his life together and joining the regular people of life. Either way both the movie and book are great and I feel they compliment each other well rather than one being better than the other.

jane

Jesse White

Laura Kurth

Stefano

Porno

François Declercq

Nelson Gonçalves

Cams Campbell

Hanna Schacter

Helen Bright

Emma Tamburrini

The bestselling novel by Irvine Welsh that provided the inspiration for Danny Boyle’s hit film Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Matthew Jackson &
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

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