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adam_mcphee's Reviews (2.87k)
I don't know, I've had some trouble judging Spring Snow. I think my biggest problem is with the concept of elegance. I have this niggling worry that it doesn't actually mean anything, that it gets used as a compliment to an aristocrat for a perceived betterness that can't be quantified because it doesn't really exist. Sort of like how people started to worry about 'character' once blacks, Catholics, poors and other former undesirables were finally allowed to start attending places like Harvard and Yale in the States. That being said, I'm open to the idea that elegance is just something I didn't catch on to and that maybe I just wasn't able to grasp it on this read through.
The last third of the book is actually great. Things start happening again. Kiyokai is such a passive little shit that I actually kind of cheered for him when he tried to blackmail Tadeshina, just because it's nice to see him do something other than brooding. I read that the rest of the books in the tetralogy focus on Honda, which I think will make me more likely to read them eventually.
The last third of the book is actually great. Things start happening again. Kiyokai is such a passive little shit that I actually kind of cheered for him when he tried to blackmail Tadeshina, just because it's nice to see him do something other than brooding. I read that the rest of the books in the tetralogy focus on Honda, which I think will make me more likely to read them eventually.
It's not his best work but it's not far off when you consider he wrote in secret code while locked up in a Nazi asylum. He got the highly-rationed wartime paper by promising Goebbels he'd write an anti-Jewish novel, but nope, he wrote a book critical of the prison system and his own addictions.
Similar to Hamilton's [b:Hangover Square|133238|Hangover Square|Patrick Hamilton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1362955226s/133238.jpg|865124], a nice guy's (read: repugnant misogynist's) personality cracks in two as he travels deeper and deeper into a world he can't handle. Though Hamilton's character mostly just contemplates murder, this is a Thompson novel, so the list of crimes include embezzlement, repo work, sex trafficking, murdering an old woman, murdering an immigrant, murdering a woman and throwing her body into a coal train, bank robbery, baby kidnapping (maybe), blackmail, and so on...
This was supposed to be the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it didn’t catch on. I liked it just as much if not more. A Swedish kid trying to live the Stureplan life hooks up with a Chilean immigrant to sell coke for the Yugoslavian mafia. It’s by a Swedish defence attorney and some parts of the book read like instruction manuals for importing drugs or laundering money or escaping prison. Loved it.
Everyone likes to shit on this because it got popular with the soccer mom crowd, but I genuinely enjoyed it.
I love Irvine Welsh, but this was far from his best. It reads like a standard thriller. His ear for American dialect pales when compared to what he's capable of when writing about his native Scotland. None of the characters stood out. Welsh is capable of so much more.
