The 3 best books by Irvine Welsh

El scottish writer Irvine Welsh He wrote at first perhaps not his best novel, but the most recognized thanks to his breakthrough into cinema. And Trainspotting had that flavor of a generational story of the wild side, of the extremes to be discovered by youth capable of peering into the abyss.

But in his literary and by extension also cinematographic irruption, Welsh also showed the daring to overcome the tremendous blow of effect of his success and continue that path of narco-literature, or at least of plots around the universe of narcotics and their underworlds.

So when we look for strong experiences, visiting that wild side of life that Lou Reed announced in his famous song, we can always reconnect with Irvine and his nihilistic characters at times, marginal, disturbing and radically confronted with life.

With a world created in parallel with Chuck PalahniukAs for excesses and violence as primary aspects of the human rampant, the exportation of the areas of our crudest reality takes on another dimension.

Irvine Welsh's Top 3 Recommended Novels

The sex lives of Siamese twins

Let's start with the different, with a novel that escapes from that Edinburgh of suburbs and drug-ridden destinations. Although not that Miami is the sunny place for hope in cures, precisely. Because in this story the dark side of the soul finds new spaces in which to summarize philias, phobias and new excesses to make us see life from the claustrophobic but magnetic feeling that everything is wonderfully lost.

In Miami, on the one hand, sculptural bodies coexist with the most rampant obesity in other cases. One of the possessors of a statuesque body, personal trainer and fitness expert Lucy Brennan, becomes a local hero when she disarms a man with a gun who was about to kill two people in the middle of the street.

The tabloid press loves her and quickly goes to great lengths to turn her into a media phenomenon. Also captivated by a witness of her performance, Lena Sorensen, an obese, obsessed and depressed woman. Fascinated by Lucy, Lena wants to hire her as a personal trainer to help her lose a few pounds.

And when the destinies of these two antithetical women intersect, a relationship full of crazy love, compulsive stubbornness and sadomasochism is set in motion, enriched with all a paraphernalia of handcuffs to immobilize, dildos and food, a lot of food, in addition to a corpse that we will have to hide somewhere. And, in the meantime, the two discover on television the story of some Siamese twins who have decided to undergo surgery to separate themselves and, incidentally, turn the surgery into a media spectacle.

The great narrator of addictions, puts the focus here on some genuinely American: sex, the perfect physique, food, the obsession with fame and the media's determination to turn everything into a circus. With Miami as a hot and colorful setting, this novel presents a Welsh in a state of grace, with a wild, crazy, hilarious and overwhelming story. A tour de force that applies the magnifying glass and distorting lenses to American reality and its excesses, with an explosive combination of body worship, sexual perversion, obesity and trash TV.

The sex lives of Siamese twins

skagboys

At Trainspotting we know the what, but we don't know the how and why. That a marginal youth ends up giving themselves with open arms to drugs has an undeniable point of a generation lost for something, or rather of generalized abandonment. In this prequel we know the reasons for the disaster or more closely related to the characters already known in Trainspotting, disenchantment as the germ of the worst.

Edinburgh, early XNUMXs. Margaret Thatcher applies her iron lady recipes in Britain and mining strikes break out, unemployment grows at a maddening rate and people wonder what the hell is happening to the country. And if the situation were not already complicated enough for the increasingly impoverished urban working classes, heroin and AIDS are beginning to circulate massively and uncontrollably in the streets.

And there are Renton, Spud Murphy, Sick Boy, Begbie ..., the characters of Trainspotting, a few years before becoming the protagonists of that novel that marked the dazzling literary debut of Irvine Welsh. In this equally overwhelming and fierce prequel, but more charged with political consciousness and social criticism, the author paints a devastating fresco of a country driven to disaster by savage neoliberal policies and a generation devastated by heroin.

skagboys

Trainspotting

Since other novels by this author are equally intense and even more successful as far as the writer's craft is concerned, I leave Welsh's boom in last place. And yet I know that I do not adjust to the reality of the phenomenon. Because nothing of Welsh's subsequent work reached the echo of Trainspotting. There was something besides the thriving profession of writer, still pending improvement.

It was the first straightforward account of the underworld to which more than a few young people traveled in search of heroin escape. And even in the imperfection in the way of narrating, the story scored points. Rarely did anyone dare to recommend a novel so fervently. "It deserves to sell more than the Bible," said Rebel Inc., an insolent Scottish literary magazine.

Immediately celebrated by the strictest critics but also read by those who rarely approach books, "Trainspotting" became one of the literary and extra-literary events of the last decade. It was quickly adapted to the stage and then brought to the screen by Danny Boyle, one of the young prodigies of English cinema.

Its protagonists are a group of desperately realistic young people, nor does it occur to them to think about the future: they know that nothing or almost nothing is going to change, inhabitants of the other Edinburgh, the one that does not appear in the famous festivals, European capital of AIDS and paradise of unemployment, misery and prostitution, embarked on a vital event whose fuel is drugs, "the elixir that gives them life, and takes it away."

Welsh writes in the harsh, colorful, vigorous language of the streets. And between peak and peak, between drunkenness and soccer, sex and rock and roll, the picaresque black woman, the astrous epic of those who were born on the hard side of life, of those who have no other way out than to escape, or to soften the pain to exist with the first thing that falls into their hands.

Trainspotting

Other recommended books by Irvine Welsh ...

The Blade Artist

Perdition is a centripetal force in which, once ventured with the vehemence of youth, it always ends up expanding its ring of influence. There is no time or space that can free one from that condemnation that at the time was all freshness and daring, like an infernal temptation...

Begbie -the psychopath of that gang of misfits who starred Trainspotting- has been refurbished. Now living on the California coast, he has a comfortable and elegant home, a wife named Melanie and two daughters, a new name - Jim Francis - and a new profession: he is a sculptor, renowned for his distorted and mutilated busts of famous faces. But the past always returns, and, after a strange incident during a walk on the beach in which her family is threatened by two guys, her sister calls to report that Sean, one of the two children from a previous relationship she left in Edinburgh, he has died. More specifically: he has been assassinated.

Begbie returns home, attends the funeral of a scion she barely knew and, in the absence of clues from the police, begins to investigate on her own. These detective adventures will lead to the reunion with old acquaintances, the destruction of valuable paintings, the burning of a house, a trail of corpses and various adrenaline-fueled situations of extreme violence ... until a resolution of the case is completely unexpected for the improvised investigator. Meanwhile, Melanie - who has also landed in Edinburgh across the Atlantic - begins to discover aspects of her husband's personality that she completely ignored ...

The author returns to the underworld of Trainspotting to talk about the past that haunts us pulling the thrilling and ultraviolent version of crime novels, with touches of fierce humor at the expense of contemporary art. A new installment of the most riotous, kaffir and vibrant Scottish novelist: Irvine Welsh! on fire!

The Artist with the Blade, by Irvine Welsh
5/5 - (12 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.