“A bravura collection of short stories about a much-abused human organ”
Will Self is rightly admired for the sheer energy of his writing, his pyrotechnic wit and wordplay, and his willingness to experiment with genre and narrative. He is also criticised as ill-disciplined, self-indulgent and more concerned with style than substance. These strengths and weaknesses are both on display in Liver, which he characteristically subtitles A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. This is not simply a fancy way of saying the book consists of four interrelated stories: “surface anatomy” is a technical term for the description of features that can be discerned merely by looking at, rather than dissecting, an organism. So, is there more here than meets and dazzles the eye? More...
This week’s Real Meals column from the New Statesman:
Circa 1969 the only restaurants in Britain were Chinese ones – or at least, that’s the way I remember it. They had placid aquaria in their front windows and strange, liquidly bubbling music was piped through their dimly lit interiors; the piquant aromas of chicken and sweetcorn soup, Peking duck and sweet-and-sour pork balls rolled across the dusty-red carpets, while the staff padded to and fro with the soundless self-effacement of sorcerers’ apprentices. To us kids, Chinese restaurants were all the fun of the fair as we faffed about with chopsticks and contemplated the unbearable lightness of being a prawn cracker; but most exciting of all, the arrival of the food was preceded by the lighting of a candle inside a tabletop heater. What was this? As a child, I assumed it was of a piece with shrines and gongs and burning paper money at funerals – another figure in the strange chinoiserie of suburban London. More...
The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:
At a Sunday lunch in the ‘burbs of north London, the kids run amok around a play fort in the garden that resembles a pocket Alamo; meanwhile, us grown-ups dissect chicken, then use our teeth to suture it to our stomach linings. In the febrile atmosphere of the power vacuum enveloping us – the infinitesimal gap between Gordon and Dave – all seems at once momentous and trivial, as if every question one asks were a request that Bertrand Russell pass the salt. The subject of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent comes up, and our hostess – who, while by no means stupid, has fewer political bones in her body than the chicken – ventures: “But if we were to get rid of it, what if Iran gets the bomb?” More...
As Werner Herzog releases Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call – New Orleans, Will Self pays tribute to a maverick director whose work pits humanity against the elements – and watches the elements win. You can read the article here in GQ magazine.
What I do is this; I leave the city and go about 50 miles away to a town in the county of Wiltshire called Swindon. This place has a bit of a joke reputation in England; it’s our dinky version of Motown, with a Honda factory and no Berry Gordy – but that’s besides the point. I have a friend there who keeps my alternative identity stashed in the back room above his shop (which sells model trains, cars and aeroplanes to serious hobbyists; but that too is besides the point). It’s a small room with a tired atmosphere, the single bed covered with a quilted nylon spread that hangs down to the floor. From the window you can see a stack of car tyres piled up by a chainlink fence and two small boys poking a dead frog with a length of bamboo. More...
Bloomsbury filmed Will Self in a teaser for Walking to Hollywood – a mixture of fact, fancy, memoir and invention – which was published on September 6 2010.
“Walking to Hollywood is an extraordinary triptych in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with his characteristic fearlessness and edgy humour.
“In the autumn of 2007, Self became ill with an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The first part of the book is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada and the USA, but in fact the record of a nematode’s progress, as the worm of obsession – with scale and packing and the ‘stuff’ of our lives – bores through a mind in extremesis. It is a journey that leads to three suicide attempts.
“On his return to England, Self put himself in the care of Dr Zack Busner, one of the originators of The Quantity Theory of Insanity. As the symptoms of OCD diminish, the obsession with his own inability to suspend disbelief in narrative art forms takes over. Self convinces himself that film itself is dead and becomes determined to find the murderer of the medium he once loved. ‘Walking to Hollywood’ is the story of his week-long 120-mile circumambulation of Los Angeles which led to his abduction by members of the Church of Scientology, a passionate affair with Bret Easton Ellis, and mortal combat with the reanimated corpse of Walt Disney.
“Back in London, the writer recovers from his flamboyant psychosis of the summer, only to become aware of a new malaise. Prey for some years to ordinary amnesia, Self now realises he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. However, remembering that Holderness in East Yorkshire has the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe, the writer decides to take a 40-mile walk over a weekend in late July, a walk akin to a magical rite and one that no one would ever be able to replicate.”
The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:
A long time ago, when I could still bear to eat in social contexts, I attended a dinner at London Zoo given by the Royal Zoological Society. I was seated beside an expert on crustaceans who told me two things: first, that the fattest and tastiest crabs lifted in Cromer, north Norfolk, were found in the proximity of the town’s sewer outfall pipe; second, that he and his crustacean-expert pals liked to go on holiday to Belgium, where they would go from one moules frites joint to the next, challenging each other to identify the greatest number of parasites in any given kilo of mussels. Strangely, they never tired of this little game. More...
“Obviously the most important duty of our new prime minister is to acquaint himself with the circumstances of those whom he is about to immiserate. I suggest a brisk tour of the horizon of poverty and deprivation in order to ready him for the wielding of the axe. Why not begin with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London? As an ex-public school boy he may find it easier to empathise with an Old Etonian on the skids – alternatively, Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier gives a journalistic – if still convincing – portrayal of what life is like for a working class deprived of both work and a social safety net. For a more elegiac account of poverty, try Knut Hamsun’s classic Hunger – the title says it all. More...
The other day I was walking with a brace of my children up the steep road that approaches Brighton Station from North Laine when I observed a long, dark, liquid rivulet flowing down the pavement, and then a young man, blind drunk, and hobbled by his jeans, which were at half-mast. I pointed out to the boys the paradoxical purity of the line of pee – it’s unusual to see an entire urination so graphically demarked – and then the high-fashionableness of the dosser, whose boxer shorts were fully exposed. More...
“I set out on my great adventure to the wilder shores of linguistic competence only six weeks ago – and yet already I feel I’m floundering. Those who read my earlier piece will recall that I had opted for the Berlitz method in order to take my French from the three-year-old-getting-along level: ‘Train station, where, go now, please?’ to one where, by the autumn, when I have a new book out in France, I would be at least capable of conducting a basic press interview.”
The rest of the second part of Will Self’s attempt to learn French is ici.
