celticman's blog

I loved this book. It should really be read in conjunction with Jed Mercurio’s debut novel Bodies . Yeh, that Jed Mercurio that writes scripts for the BBC, Bodies and Line of Duty . Adam Kay is following a similar trajectory, half way between the drama of Jed Mercurio and the upbeat chortleness of Harry Hill. You’re probably thinking why should the tax payer should spend all that money training junior doctors, indirectly subsidising the...

I don’t know Maggy van Eijk, but I’ve read her poetry on ABCtales. It’s memorable because it’s amazing. But don’t ask me to tell you the names of any of her poems. Often I can’t remember my own name. What stands out is her loopy ability to juxtapose two images that makes sense. I’d like to give you an example, but I can’t be arsed looking. I had her down at one of those exotic younger women that had pretty much everything and jam on top. ‘...

Usually, I know what I’m going to say, although I’m not quite sure how I’m going to say it. I guess I’ll start with the author, George Saunders. He’s won a stack of awards and a litany of writers—Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Hairi Kunzru and Tobias Wolff—are stacked like library cards to testify to his originality and brilliance. I find Saunders hard work. And I don’t like reading to be...

In my smug way I thought I’d read Morvern Caller before and been unimpressed. I vaguely remembered a film of Alan Warner's book starring Ewan McGregor. I was reading an interview director Lynne Ramsay gave to The Observer. I had another look at the book and realised I hadn’t read it, there was no film with Ewan or any other McGregor and I loved it’s in your face style. It’s the kind of people I know. Quite simply, Morvern Caller talks like us...

This is quite a simple book to read. There is no unreliable narrator to worry about. Time behaves predictably in a linear fashion and begins in 1945 with Mrs Goggins and ends with Mrs Goggins in a ‘New Ireland’ in 2015 getting married for the first time. In between the reader follows Cyril Avery’s life in seven year chunks for 588 pages that takes him into exile in Amsterdam and later New York. Ah, you might think, how can Mrs Goggins be Mrs...

I’m sure I’ve got a Scottish identity. You might have one too. I wasn’t looking for mine, but here it is. We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns. It doesn’t lie in that ear squeal we hear on every channel when counting down to New Year. Or the cheuctering twirling plaid and stripping the willow. Or the Scottish and Rye of The Still Game. These to me are fanny water. Listen instead to Anton Chekhov in A Dreary Story which sounds to me very Scottish, and...

Carl MacDougall’s grandfather was a head waiter in a hotel before the Second World War. What’s that got to dae with anything? you might be asking. Well, it changes the nature of time and the ordinary working day. When other workers are knocking off service staffs are going to work. They have a different sense of time. Andy Paterson was a waiter before he was fitted up on a drugs charge and sent to prison. Prison also changes a man’s sense of...

I’m a duff reviewer. The narrator is a former Glasgow journalist trying to make sense of his life after his wife dies, but I don’t know his name. I’m not sure he has a name. Let’s call him everyman adrift. His background is on the page. And I like to play detective and mitch and match with the author. She was a second-year student and I was her tutor; a disgraceful state of affairs, as popular then as now. I was attracted by the difference. My...

On the flyleaf Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz is ‘based on the powerful true story of Lale Solokov’. You see that kind of affirmation attached to film titles. Lion , for example, was based on the screenplay of a book by Saroo Brierly and Larry Buttrose and it’s Saroo’s story that is told. Morris’s book is based on the screenplay she wrote based on the life of Lale Solokov (Ludwig Eisenberg). Gita (Gisela Fuharmannova [Furnam]) also...

Why should we listen to Viktor E.Frankel? Well, he’s a scientist, philosopher, a psychiatrist and author, but the real reason we should listen to him is because of the time he spent as an inmate in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. That gives what he says heft, he’s walked the walk and suffered the indignity of being regarded as less than human and treated as a throwaway thing. His life and death as a Jew having little or no...