“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?

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Another review of the “electrifying” Psycho Too and its “other-worldy brilliance” , from the New York Times.

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A couple of US reviews of Liver, published by Bloomsbury USA in hardback in the States, the first from the Washington Post, which said that the four stories collected here “are for those who like their stories brainy, cunning, hard-edged and diabolical”; and the second from the New Yorker, which said that the characters were, ahem, “difficult to like” …

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Geoff Nicholson’s review of Liver in the New York Times.

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A couple of reviews of Psycho Too; one by The Literateur; the other The Metro.

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Liver Let Die
Will Self’s newest collection, Liver, contains a novella, Leberknödel, that is set in Zurich and has a protagonist called Joyce Beddoes. Call me an obsessive Irishman, but put “Zurich” and “Joyce” together and you automatically come up with James Joyce, who wrote a number of chapters of Ulysses in Zurich, died and is buried there. The link seems obvious to me. When you discover that Self’s Joyce eats a meal at the famous Kronenhalle (James Joyce’s favourite hangout and the place where he ate his last proper meal) and that she has reserved a plot in Fluntern cemetery (the very same cemetery where James Joyce lies buried), then you know that the sequence of coincidences is not a sequence of coincidences. Strangely, in British reviews of Self’s book in the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement, not one critic has picked up on this. If the allusions to James Joyce were simply decorative then perhaps the reviewers could be forgiven for leaving it unmentioned. But to miss the ghostly absence of James Joyce in this occult novella is to read a different story then the one Self has written.

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“There are occasions when Archive on 4 just works. Saturday night’s Self on Ballard (Radio 4) was one. In the programme, Will Self reviewed the life and work of JG Ballard with both intellect and feeling. The men were friends until Ballard’s death in April. Self presented snippets of interviews with Ballard recorded at various stages of his life, together with judiciously selected readings of his works.”

To read the rest of the Daily Telegraph review of Self’s recent Archive on 4 programme, visit the Telegraph website.

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Karrie Higgins reviews Will Self’s first collection of Psychogeography columns from the Independent in the LA Times. The second collection, Psycho Too, will be published in November by Bloomsbury.

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“On holiday in a strange desert country, Tom Brodzinski unthinkingly throws a cigarette butt over a hotel balcony; it hits someone, and before Tom can do anything about it, he is accused of assault and swept up in arcane laws that set him on a journey of reparation. This is a fable as well as a slightly uneasy political satire about the indigenous peoples of Australia, and the West’s treatment of Iraq. Will Self has produced a fizzing cocktail of Conrad and Kafka that, while not his best novel, manages to be both immensely readable and mysteriously gripping. Philip Womack“

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“Tom Brodzinski, on holiday in a strange, unnamed country, decides to cave in to the strict anti-smoking laws and give up his nicotine habit. First, he wants a final cigarette. When he flicks the butt from the balcony of his rented apartment, it drops on to the head of a man sunbathing below. Forced to make reparations to the victim’s family for this “assault”, Brodzinski begins a nightmare journey of redemption through a crazy landscape ravaged by warfare and characterised by the tribal customs of its inhabitants. Self’s homage to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is written with razor-sharp descriptions and dark comedy which grip the reader until the concluding pages. Lucy Scholes”

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