Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)

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I’m so intrigued by the intricate design of the story and respect how much time and consideration has obviously gone into creating such an incredibly detailed fictional world. I'm too caught up in the experiencing part and there are other factors like what was the point of MY reading it? Glasgow Cathedral is yards away from the Necropolis to the east and the M8 motorway (and unfinished Inner Ring Road) to the north and west. Although it is an amalgamation of many things--weird sci-fi dystopia/apocalypse, coming-of-age artist portrait, and political and class satire among them--it is one of the most wholly original works I have read, and it is deeply affecting. But rarely does a book offer me such a good excuse to stop reading it with just 60 pages left to go.

Instead it floats in the streams of sci-fi and the rests on the clouds of meta fiction to disrupt any such thing as an established narrative. In those days I'd identified the character(s) Lanark/Thaw to the person I was in love with (especially the artist parts). Lanark is a self-aware novel in which the main character switches back and forth between an allegorical post-apocalyptic world and the grim landscape of industrial Scotland. Benim açımdan ise, Lanark'ı fikir olarak ve Gray'in selam çaktığı birçok yazar ve eser doğrultusunda değerlendirdiğimde elimden bırakmak istemediğim bir kitap oldu.At times I found the book to be incredibly pretentious (the Epilogue, oh dear lord the Epilogue), and found myself wanting to repeatedly roll my eyes. The principal character, Lanark, always hoping to see the sun, the word "dawn" a forgotten, exotic, romantic idea. Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. But I do think its gnostic pedigree might add something significant to the comprehensibility of its otherwise alien life-forms.

But okay, maybe it's just comparison with the other part that's the trouble, and it's not like actively bad except for maybe some of the stuff about girls, which while we're probably not meant to actively endorse, is still wildly fucked up and not clearly satire or unreliable narrator either. Bu durumda, kitabın geleneksel ve yenilikçi türleri çok başarılı şekilde içinde barındırmasına ve okuyuca alışıldık olmadığı süreçlerin içine dahil eden bir okuma deneyimi sunuyor. This now classic postmodern novel is thought by many to be one of the greatest novels of all time and is undoubtably the finest novel from Scotland of this century. Tıpkı ergen Thaw gibi motifleri nerede kullanmak konusunda kararsız ya da haddiden daha büyük şeyler anlatmak ve göstermek istiyor, bilmiyorum. I will say though that the structure of the novel was superb - extremely well done and a very different way of reading.The early Desert Fathers and strange stylites, sitters on poles, and other ‘martyrs to the flesh’ are examples; as are the medieval Cathars and Bogomils and their spiritual heirs, the strict Calvinists, and the even more enthusiastic adherents of the Republican Party in the United States. This work, originally published in 1981, has been hailed as the most influential Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century.

I read to understand (I don't understand anything) the yearning something or other, the thing that makes someone tick. After these, I pretend it's all only because I don't want it to be a spoiler that I didn't disclose what happened or what the book is all about. Not only that, but in the margins of the Epilogue there is an "Index of Plagiarism" which ostensibly acknowledges Gray's literary debts, but really seems like a desperate ploy to convince the reader of Gray's erudition and consummate literariness. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Within the po-mo sections of the book, Gray even acknowledges how many of his ideas were “stolen” from other books and how artificially jammed together the two sections are.

To eschew the linear narrative style helps draw back the curtain in a theatre of the absurd mirroring at work in fiction. Lanark, alışılmış olmayan (dönemine göre ve bence hala şu an da geçerli) farklı edebi perspektiflerin bir araya getirildiği ve kahraman- yaratıcı temasını bilimkurgu, büyüsel gerçekcilik ile harmanlandığı, ya da diğer bir deyişle Gray'in bilimkurgu ve fantazi edebiyatı bir aracı olarak kullandığı müthiş bir postmodern eser. But a key to both might be found in what I think is its philosophical, and therefore essentially literary, context.

What we must unite to prevent are half-baked revolts which might give desperadoes access to those doomsday machines and bottled plagues which stable governments are creating, not to use, but to prevent themselves from being bullied by equals.Books One and Two constitute a realist Bildungsroman beginning in pre-war Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("based on myself, he was tougher and more honest"), a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. Lanark, hem okunabilirlik açısından hem de yazımsal olarak bakıldığında okuru ciddi olarak farklı duyguları ( sıkılma, sevinme, üzülme, heyecanlanma, sabırsızlık, estetik) tam olarak yaşatabilen tarif edilmesi zor kitap. Perhaps this is why I have pressed Gray’s novels on my friends with such disturbing intensity: here, read this and then you will know how I see the world. And also the monthly discharge of these from the Moon, its waning, through the vault of heaven as they are merged with the infinite light beyond.