From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Trainspotting |
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| Author: | Irvine Welsh |
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| Genres: | |
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| Publisher: | W. W. Norton & Company |
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Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh’s spectacular career—an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for its own time and place what Hubert Selby, Jr.’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn did for his. Rents, Sick Boy, Mother Superior, Swanney, Spuds, and Seeker are as unforgettable a clutch of junkies, rude boys, and psychos as readers will ever encounter.
Trainspotting was made into the 1996 cult film starring Ewan MacGregor and directed by Danny Boyle (
A Shallow Grave).
Reviews
Amazon.com
Irvine Welsh’s controversial first novel, set on the heroin-addicted fringe of working-class youth in Edinburgh, is yet another exploration of the dark side of Scottishness. The main character, Mark Renton, is at the center of a clique of nihilistic slacker junkies with no hopes and no possibilities, and only “mind-numbing and spirit-crushing” alternatives in the straight world they despise. This particular slice of humanity has nothing left but the blackest of humor and a sharpness of wit. American readers can use the glossary in the back to translate the slang and dialect—essential, since the dialogue makes the book. This is a bleak vision sung as musical comedy.
Related works
Trainspotting
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With its hallucinatory visions of crawling dead babies and a grungy plunge into the filthiest toilet in Scotland, you might not think
Trainspotting could have been one of the best movies of 1996, but Danny Boyle’s film about unrepentant heroin addicts in Edinburgh is all that and more. That doesn’t make it everybody’s cup of tea (so unsuspecting viewers beware), but the film’s blend of hyperkinetic humor and real-life horror is constantly fascinating, and the entire cast (led by Ewan McGregor and
Full Monty star Robert Carlyle) bursts off of the…
