The Guardian’s condensed send-up of How The Dead Live’s plotline.
The condensed version of the condensed version is particularly good:
“Reworking of the fucking Tibetan Book of the Dead in which Lily Bloom lives, dies and finds some form of fucking redemption”
Self reads an extract of his novel How The Dead Live for Salon Audio
“Considering his past antics, Self had to do something pretty special to whip up interest in “Great Apes” — and coyly confessing to shooting skag on the Major’s plane definitely qualified. If there were any doubts about Self’s motives, they were answered by his publicists, who thoughtfully included an array of clippings on the campaign heroin incident and his junkie past in the “Great Apes” press kit.
This wasn’t the first of Self’s media manipulations. When he first appeared on the literary scene over five years ago, the word got out that he was a hoax, possibly a front for some extracurricular writing by his friend Martin Amis. It didn’t hurt the mini-controversy that Self, in interviews, seemed much more interested in discussing his Nintendo scores than his writing. Self’s career has further benefited from high-class logrolling on his book jackets, where Amis, Nick Hornby, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard and the Sunday Times regularly sing his praises. (Some of these blurbs are somewhat underwhelming: of “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” Hornby negligibly trumpeted “There isn’t anything like this in British fiction.”)
Self has often stated his admiration for playwright Dennis Potter and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who both used terminal illnesses to focus the British media on their final testaments. Self wants the same kind of glory, and has done his best to make sure he doesn’t have to die to get it.”
Nicholas Wroe interviews Will Self in the wake of How The Dead Live’s publication:
“Looking back, Self thinks that getting his first book accepted was the high point of his literary career. “By this time I had children to support, but more than that, at a personal level, it was enormously liberating knowing I could do this thing. Whether out of anxiety or productivity, I just didn’t want to stop doing it.”
In the decade since he has produced four novels, another two collections of stories, a pair of linked novellas, a book of collected non-fiction and, last year, a meditation on masculinity that focused on the case history of a transsexual. His most recent novel, How the Dead Live , is published in paperback this month. It echoes one of his earliest and best short stories, “The North London Book of the Dead”, in which a young man has the unsettling experience of meeting his recently deceased mother in Crouch End.
“I was very interested in writing about this idea of what it was like for materialistic, atheistic people to die with no sense of spiritual transcendence,” he explains. “I’d seen my mother and, to a degree, my father, die like that, and it had a profound effect on me. In order to write a book that would do justice to the subject, I realised that my own lifestyle, which at that point was completely mired in active addiction, would have to change. So in a sense the book became something of a vehicle of recovery, and possibly even redemption, for me.” ”
To celebrate the paperback release of How the Dead Live, Will Self’s inventive, savage meditation on life after death, Penguin have rejacketed several of Will’s books with stunning new artwork from some of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.
In an exclusive interview, we asked Will his thoughts on everything from drug addiction and Jewishness to the disintegration of the soul.
You’re involved with many things; journalism, short-stories, novels. Do you regard these as being quite different activities?
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer first and foremost, the whole business of my work is to mediate the world through language, whatever form that language takes. However, that being said, my heart lies in a particular kind of fiction, fiction of the alternative world. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
You display an interest in science fiction, and in the writing of JG Ballard. Was this your childhood reading?
As a child I absolutely gorged myself on sci-fi, I’d eat it in great truckles and sort of chewed it up, I could not get my hands on enough of the stuff. There are certain writers who are kind of science fiction, but something more, like J G Ballard, arguably even somebody like Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick. I ate these along with the whole mush and brew.
From The Guardian review of Feeding Frenzy by Zulfikar Abbany, November 11, 2001
Feeding Frenzy sets a marker on Self’s career, not least because the unorthodox restaurant reviews he wrote for The Observer, from 1995-97, are collated here – reviews that afforded him a notoriety with which he colluded. While readers choked on their laughter, cooks across the country were after Self’s blood.
The selection in Feeding Frenzy is vast. Essays taken from art catalogues sit comfortably next to travel pieces and a notable interview with Salman Rushdie, a man, who, perhaps not unlike Self, has been ‘demonised by the media and popular perceptions’. But before reading any of Feeding Frenzy, it is advisable to consult the index, which covers not only the usual ‘people, places and things, but also ideas, obsessions and my own irritating stylistic tics’, so as to include ‘tongues, locking’, matching socks and shoes, co-ordinated foot- and sockwear’, and ‘snicker-snack, fateful, of psychosis’.
Self has always considered himself a writer, as opposed to either an author and/or a journalist. He writes to commission. And although there are certain things he would rather not touch, such as reviewing the screenplay of Natural Born Killers, throughout this collection he displays a severe knack for turning the merest detail into the most essential one. Just turn to the index and look up Barratt Homes and read how Self indulged one Friday morning in ‘reverse commuting’ to discover that there existed at least one word that, until then, he didn’t know: ‘flaunching’.
Will Self – Perfidious Man
Synopsis:
Through text and pictures, this book will explores what it is to be a man at the turn of the century, whether masculinity can be said to have any currency any more, and asks “where have all the real men gone?”
Will Self – Sore Sites
Synopsis:
A collection of articles from Building Design architectural magazine which present Will Self’s idiosyncratic view of the built environment.
Synopsis:
Mother crops up dead but talking in Crouch End; a cellular telephone scam ends in drugged psychosis; a mental ward captivates then captures an art therapist; motorcycle messengers mystically intuit London traffic flows. These are some of the stories featured in this collection.
Synopsis:
It looks like it is going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, a Christmas powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded, as trapped in the bosom of the nastiest, most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts.
