If you ever told me I'd cry reading this book, I'd be like, what? I've seen the movie, you see, a long time ago. But I did. I cried like a baby. I cried at a part in the middle of the book, the part that starts off the movie, the famous words of "Choose life. Choose…" Well, in case you haven't read the book and haven't seen the movie, you'll get what I mean, once you do both. I'm actually about to jump into re-watching the movie again, now that I'm done reading. And, WOW. Just, WOW. This is not prose, this is poetry, a powerful cocktail of juxtaposition, Scottish profanities galore injected with searching for the answer to this persistent question. Why live? Why go for hypocrisy, for squalor, for stark morose grim existence of the so called life if we're all going to die anyway? Why not get on the needle and not bother about anything, basking in that mythology of everything will be just splendid? There are so many layers here, I feel like I only started digging. And then, of course, I don't think I can read proper English after this, after indulging on phonetically spelled Scottish awesomeness, on top of it, me being not a native English speaker. It's a feast.
Well, so the story itself is a maze of episodes taken from the lives of junkie mates and their friends, narrated primarily by Rents, or Mark Renton. We jump back and forth between scenes of scoring drugs, injecting drugs, withdrawing from drugs, getting on drugs again, all the while revolving around everything that goes with it, HIV infections, sex, violence, death, neglect, you name it, everything under the sun is here, and more, the constant background of moral choice against pure survival. Which outweighs which? We get to see several different perspectives of different characters, most of them colorfully doused with all kinds of human liquid, like puddles of urine, vomit, feces, blood, and everything in between, with rare glimpses of love here and there and this strange soberness that causes them to look up and realize what hole they've sunk into, but only for a moment, before returning back to the needle. The power of language is such that when you raise your head to catch a breath from reading, you're disoriented for a while, not sure where you are and how you got there. The only wish I had was to get back into the book, annoying those around me, perhaps because the topic rung true to me. I've never been on drugs, but I've been suicidal, and maybe that's why I cried. I felt this desire to destroy yourself behind the rage, the anger, the need to escape it all, for not being accepted, for being lonely, for being so numb that the only way to feel something was to get high. You know it's an illusion, but you don't care. Anything goes. it hit me in the gut, this book, and it will hit me again and again, as I plan to reread it. Now I'm off, watching the movie, and I hope you're off to read this book, because you bloody have to.
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M E N T A L
Saw the movie at least twenty times. HAD to read the book. As an American this book was a bit tough to read at first but soon was breathing out the Weedjian saturated sentences that are sprinkled throughout the book. Begbie's dialogues were always a joy to hiss.The movie is very different than the book, h o w e v e r, a solid adaptation in its own right.This book made me laugh and cry. Welsh brews words into a jaeger cocktail of a book. Absolutely mental.Do read if you have seen the movie. You will not be disappointed.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2014
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Top reviews from other countries
Cliente de Amazon
Read it phonetically or else
Reviewed in Mexico on March 11, 2022
Tony Vickery
I recommend one of his other books Glue
Reviewed in Australia on November 3, 2014