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Will Self
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Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place Hardcover – October 30, 2007

by Will Self (Author), Ralph Steadman (Illustrator)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 35 ratings
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For those interested in the connection between people and place, the best of the decade long collaboration between literary brat packer Will Self and gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Opening with a dazzling new 20,000-word essay on walking from London to New York, Psychogeography is a collection of 50 short pieces written over the last four years, together with 50 four-color illustrations by Ralph Steadman. In Psychogeography Self and Steadman explore the relationship between psyche and place in the contemporary world. Self thinks most people have a "wind-screen-based virtuality" on long- and short-distance travel. We drive, take buses and trains, fly. To combat this compromised reality, Will Self walks, relating intimately to place, as pedestrians do. Ranging in subject from swimming the Ganges to motorcycling across the Australian outback, shopping in an Iowa mall to surfing a tsunami, Psychogeography is at once a map of our world and the psychoanalysis of the way we inhabit it. The pieces are serious, humorous, facetious, and rambunctious. Psychogeography, the study of the effects of geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, has captivated other writers including W. G. Sebald and Peter Ackroyd, but Self and Steadman have their own unique spin on how place shapes people and vice versa.

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Bloomsbury USA
  4. Publication date
    October 30, 2007
  5. Dimensions
    7.59 x 1.3 x 9.16 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1596914661
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1596914667
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This artful and entertaining collection of essays by novelist Self (The Book of Dave) will delight anyone who enjoys his weekly column of the same name in the Independent or his last collection of essays, Feeding Frenzy. Here Self shifts from gonzo journalism to the study of psychogeography, the study of how geographical environments affect emotions and behavior. Setting off on a quest for the intrinsic character of various places as well as the manner in which the contemporary world warps the relationship between psyche and place, Self casts a dismissive eye on most of the world. Singapore strikes him as Basingstoke force-fed with pituitary gland; Sao Paolo's lack of a street plan makes it an unholy miscegenation between London and Los Angeles. But Steadman's beautifully harsh illustrations (worthy of their own book) and Walking to New York, a previously unpublished semi-autobiographical meditation on life and death, reveal a surprising depth to Self's cynical insights. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Self reveals a profound truth about place and our contemporary psyche . . . Steadman's illustrations dazzle in their imagination, wit and fancy.” ―Los Angeles Times

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury USA (October 30, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1596914661
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1596914667
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.15 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.59 x 1.3 x 9.16 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

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Will Self

Will Self

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
35 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Concerned citizen
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect order.
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2020
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Absolutely perfect. Thank you!!
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Matthew Rivett
4.0 out of 5 stars Self is a wizard of the English language.
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2010
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Sorted into column sized vignettes, Will Self paints an amazing picture of a scrambled world. With an even steady hand, he's able to make English suburbs seem as exotic, absurd, and strange as Singapore or Kashmir. For anyone's who's flown and felt the disorientation of modern air travel, Will speaks to the 21st Century traveling man. In addition to Will's stupefying master of his native language, the book is wonderful illustrated by Ralph Steadman.
4 people found this helpful
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Sirin
4.0 out of 5 stars Modern Situationist
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2008
Psychogeography in its contemporary manifestation owes much to the 1950s situationists from the Left Bank of Paris believing (this was after several carafes of vin de table) that by traversing the city on foot they could bring down the micro climate structures of capitalism - the pod like enclaves of home, train and office and instigate the revolution.

They failed. But Guy Debord, a founder member of this group, with his seminal text 'The Society of the Spectacle' laid the foundations for a Marxist interpretation of modern life as a chimera, mediated through the lens of the media and technology, so nothing is real any more.

Will Self, himself a long time lancer of contemporary societal virtues and mores, tries to reorient himself eotechnically amongst the modern climate of car and aeroplane. (For an interesting exposition of this concept, check out his google lecture on the subject, available easily via, er, google). He walks, not in the standard fashion - rugged Appalachian trail, romantic sunset beach - but amongst the Ballardian structures of urban life - the motorways, industrial estates, retail boulevards and urban hinterlands, traditionally neglected by the visually snobbish flaneur.

Starting out, he details a walk he took aiming to fuse the twin parts of his psyche - his base in Vauxhall, South London, and his mother's homeland, New York. He walks from South London to Heathrow, flies business class to New York - giving opportunity for a delicious metaphor of forming a cupola with fellow traveller 'anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf' - and walks from JFK to the centre of Manhattan accompanied by several members of the great and good of New York literary society who become puzzlingly engaged in the walk (and cop quite a few blisters on the way).

The rest of the book consists of bite sized articles from Well Self's Independent newspaper 'Psychogeography' column. A vast array of points on the globe are covered: Morocco, Ohio, Barcelona, Dublin, Rio (though not so much east of Suez). Reading these pieces as a collection you pick up a sense of how the flow of the column works: Self visits a place, often in the context of a book tour, or a family trip, or sometimes - as in the case of a visit to the Buncefield oil depot leak - purely his own curiousity. Once there he puts out his imaginative and surrealist feelers to get a sense of how the architecture, landscape and people of a place rub him up and affect his sense of psyche. Hence the pieces in urban areas are written in a more boiler plated, grittier style, with appropriate metaphors than those in cleaner, sparsely populated areas. The resulting text is often far more surreal, and studded with more references to contemporary culture, architecture, politics (anything that fills Self's voluminous memory) than you could probably imagine.

Generally, the book is an entertaining coffee table work, full of well written, 'glib satires' as Self terms them. They are generally not his greatest journalistic performances. Sometimes he draws up a keen sense of psyche and place, at other times clearly nothing much is happening and Self draws on his vast memory reserves to regale us with a tale from his myriad past. The writing is always fresh and pungent and the illustrations by Ralph Steadman - engorged, satirical grotesques in the spirit of Dali - are ideal accompaniments.
33 people found this helpful
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Casey F
1.0 out of 5 stars More frustrating than satisfying
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2010
I enjoy a good read that introduces me to words I do not know- it's a great opportunity for me to attempt to build my vocabulary. However, a work in which the author strives to pull the most archaic, out-of-use, and unknown words into every sentence is not a good time. Will Self seems more interested in trying to prove that he is a poetic writer with a encyclopedic thesaurus at his fingertips than actually conveying a well written story. Granted, some of the jargon is simply british-english slang that doesn't ring a bell in american-english, but for the most part the author purposefully chooses words that are completely outside of the common lexicon and unknown to the masses.

To further complicate matters the majority of his antiquated verbiage isn't even in an average dictionary. The words are simply ones he stumbled across and fit to suit his purpose. (Within 6 paragraphs I came across 11 words I was unfamiliar with- 6 of which were not in my run-of-the-mill dictionary)! If you want to try and read this work of mangled words I suggest you have a hefty encyclopedic dictionary by your side.
7 people found this helpful
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Julie
1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading title
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2011
Don't read this if you are interested in psychogeography - it's more autobiographical. So if you are a fan of Self's, go for it.

I found it pompous and couldn't get through the first 10 pages.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

nitpick
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2015
Verified Purchase
I think I'll enjoy this one, like the pictures!!
One person found this helpful
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ARW
4.0 out of 5 stars More quality writing from Will Self
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 9, 2011
Verified Purchase
Part memoir, part travelogue, this book displays all the qualities you'd expect from Will Self. As is his wont, he mixes the high brow with the demotic, his sentences are beautifully written and there is some laugh-out-loud humour. Naturally, one needs a dictionary to hand at times, but that's no bad thing.
4 people found this helpful
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Stewart M
3.0 out of 5 stars Good start, but becomes rather predictable
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2013
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Psychogeography is, at best, a rather slippery idea. People and places interact with each other in many ways - and it would be crazy to think that landscapes not have a psychological edge to them. Different places come to mean different things to different people; the psychology of landscape is clearly an individual thing.

Having swum reasonably deeply in the waters of "conventional" writing about landscape and place, I thought I'd give this book a go.

I had hoped for an edgy, possibly less risk averse, approach to the description of landscape than occurs in the majority of travel writing. The presence of Ralph Steadman as an illustrator made me hope that things would be more Hunter S. Thompson than Arthur Rackham. And initially that seemed to be the case.

The opening - and longest - essay in the book is about a walk from London to New York (via two well known airports). As far as I am concerned this was the books highlight. But very soon the book drops into predictable two page essays, that all seem to have a similar structure and rhythm. In all probability this as a result of the works originally being published as a column in a newspaper - where there may have been more constraints than freedom.

The essays in this book are not dull - but they do become rather too familiar, and a shorter version (say 30% smaller) would have been no less enjoyable.

If you are already a fan of Will Self's work, you probably consider this review to be madness. If, like me, this was the first time you have read his work, you may find the last part of the book drags a little.

Recommended for the first essay, but much beyond that it all becomes rather less interesting.

Proceed with caution.
7 people found this helpful
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SecretsofVoodoo
3.0 out of 5 stars Well written but Self's persona is so grating.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2014
Verified Purchase
Not much more to say beyond that...Self is incredibly readable and an excellent writer, but so bloody pleased with himself that I couldn't be bothered to finish it.
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars A book by a small man with a big dictionary.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2013
Verified Purchase
A lot of purple prose and literary posturing, and very little substance. The book is a collection of essays about Will Self's upper middle class travels. I was fooled by the fact that Ralph Steadman had agreed to illustrate the tome; generally anything Steadman agrees to put his name to tends to be subversive and thought-provoking.
Will Self's travels are very dull. Apart from walking long distances, he does nothing out of the ordinary; he never subjects himself to any kind of danger, travels in great comfort, stays in fancy hotels and wherever he goes he does your typical, run-of-the mill middle class tourist stuff.
In most of the essays, Will Self takes a long time to make a very simple point, using needlessly complicated language to deflect the fact that what he has to say isn't particularly orignial or interesting.
12 people found this helpful
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