My interest in the band "Garbage" led me to this book - its title was used by them to create a chillingly magnificent song on their second CD. I found the book itself to be one of the most creative and compelling works I read this year. The story it tells gets under your skin to such a point that I don't recommend it for those already depressed. For the rest of us, it is a chilling look inside a sympathetic character, a young woman dancing around the border between sanity and madness. She knows she is on the verge of losing it all, and knows she is not getting the kind of help she needs from anyone - least of all the mediocre medical personnel who see her as just one more casefile. Yet she's unable to shake the helplessness and displays the lack of will to take control of her own life which is so often found in the insane and/or suicidal. Galloway makes extremely skilled use of innovative page layouts and even unexpected graphics to really show us her character's imbalanced view of the world. We see through her eyes.

Galloway's novel about the depression and life of a middle-aged, female drama teacher living in Scotland, is captivating and insightful. Galloway uses snapshots from Joy's memory as well as emotion filled diction to create a fictional novel with a lasting effect and unique style. This first person narritive, written from the point of view of Joy Stone, a female battleing a depression over the death of her lover. "Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes they just get worse. Sometimes all that happens is passing time...The whole point is that time passes. That things fade" (Galloway, The Trick is To Keep Breathing). The novel tracks Joy during a year of her depression and gives a more personal understanding of the world of female depression.

This novel is painful to read because Janice Galloway's descriptions of Joy Stone's feelings and experiences are so accurate. We've all felt the way Joy feels at some time or another. The accuracy is so startling that at times it's tempting to forget that this is fiction, and not a non-fiction depression narrative, like "The Beast" or "Girl, Interrupted." Perhaps this is why Galloway added the subtitle, "A Novel." This novel is truly inspiring; it's refreshing to read a novel about depression which maintains a sense of humor. Galloway uses a number of unusual narrative techniques, including spontaneously breaking into dialogues when she's on the phone or talking to doctors, and putting comments in the margins to represent the thoughts that we all have, but don't always acknowledge, even to ourselves. This is a novel I'm sure I'll go back to again and again, because even though the subject matter is depressing and painful, this novel is so beautifully written and the ending is uplifting. This novel will be with me for quite some time.

This book of short stories has no one theme, but gets it shape and unification from Galloway's strong, highly individual voice and the eerie atmosphere of fear and tenderness it manages to convey. From the very short (The Meat) to the longer pieces (A week with Uncle Felix) this collection rattles with desperate life, vivdness and a visceral edge all its own. I defy anyone to read BLOOD (the title story) without feeling the sensation of a former tooth extraction, though what she does with the story goes much further, turning an everyday, unremarkable mutilation into a parable threaded with loss, yearning and isolation from the the herione's dearest source of comfort, music. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to read more in the contemporary Scots voice or who enjoys virtuoso writing for its own sake. Galloway is a rare, brave writer.

Not for everyone, but it will appeal to those with macabre humor.

I make it my job to read some pretty weird books--as an aficionado of science fiction and fantasy, I sometimes run into some doozies-- but this novel by Gray has to be one of the strangest that I've run into recently. The fact that this novel was not published in the genre, and won a couple of mainstream awards makes me wonder what else I'm missing in the "mundane" fiction shelves.

Poor Things is supposedly non-fiction, as illustrated by its full title on the title page: "Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by Alasdair Gray." But this is all part of its mystique. Gray has constructed a literary puzzle, a Frankenstein's monster of a book that takes its inspiration from that novel by Mary Shelley as well as the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells. McCandless is the titular biographer, but the story is actually that of the eccentric Scottish doctor Godwin Baxter and his "creation," Bella Baxter, later known as Dr. Victoria McCandless. Set in Glasgow in the 1880s, the plot entails how McCandless met Baxter, how he then met Baxter's protege Bella and fell in love with her, her subsequent departure, and the circumstances of her return. To reveal any more would be to dilute the heavy stuff of the novel's innovative twists.

If Gray were writing with the Fantasy label stuck on the spine of his books, I would have termed this one a "steampunk" novel for its revisionist look at medicine and technology in a pre-auto world. Fans of Tim Powers and James Blaylock should definitely check this one out.

I just finished the book a few hours ago and it's the best book I've read in a while. "Poor Things" is the story of a lonely doctor, Godwin, who reanimates a beautiful woman's body who commited suicide (in a unique Frankenstein-esque fashion). Godwin's creation was meant to be for his own selfish desire but like every Frankenstein story it goes horribly awry. The books goes into detail bringing you into points of view from every character, not letting you forgot what happened, and using excellent foreshadowing. Make sure you read the extra writings at the end of the book to get the full impact of Alisdair Gray's skills.

Janice Galloway, Clara

The life of Clara Wieck Schumann, the most celebrated piano virtuosa of her time, wife of Robert Schumann and best friend of Johannes Brahms, has inspired writers, psychologists, feminists and filmmakers since Clara's death in 1896.
Clara and Brahms knew they would figure importantly in music history and they were discreet, returning a lifetime of correspondence to the writers, carefully selecting the letters they left for biographers and even, in Clara's case, repressing the report of an autopsy done on Robert Schumann. Because of this orderly editing, many details of the lives of these three have been left to the imaginations of those who followed them. Even a book by the youngest Schumann daughter, strongly biased and unfortunately nationalistic, has to be read with some caution.
Thus Janice Galloway's Clara, which does declare itself a novel rather than a biography, should certainly be regarded as fiction, and strongly slanted fiction at that. Clara's teacher-father, Freidrich Wieck, is depicted throughout as a villain; Robert as a madman and Clara as a victim of the two. Brahms, though he was a central figure throughout Clara's life after Schumann's death in 1856, enters the story only in its last chapters and is depicted as a saintly hero.
Although I enjoyed Janice Galloway's style and her story, her depiction of these personalities was strongly at odds with the view of them which we have from their letters, from previous biographies, and, above all, from their compositions.
Even Schumann's late musical works show a genius struggling with but not vanquished by dementia. Biographers have speculated as to the cause of this malady and have guessed at schizophrenia, syphilis, alcoholism (Galloway seems to lean toward this last diagnosis.) Whereas Clara, editing Schumann's music for publication, wished to withhold some works from the fear that they were the result of an unbalanced mind, Brahms insisted that the pieces were musically innovative and worthwhile. He wrote a set of variations on the theme Schumann transcribed "from the angels" in the older composer's final days.
Schumann's autopsy report suggested an inherited (genetic) disorder, and a family tree would suggest something like Huntington's chorea, but somehow this possibility has not intrigued biographers. A subsequent report published at Clara's request blamed overwork for Schumann's dementia. The august biographer Harold C. Schonberg in Lives of the Great Composers says that above all, Schumann was "pure"--a state reflected throughout his music, but not necessarily interesting in terms of music gossip.
One invented utterance Galloway put in the mouth of Schumann was so offensive to me that I actually deleted it with whiteout before continuing to read the book. "Mendelssohn is Jewish," Galloway had Schumann say as if that statement revealed some negative opinion about the character of Felix Mendelssohn. There is nothing in all the literature to indicate that Schumann even knew Mendelssohn was Jewish, much less that it mattered to him one way or the other. One of Schumann's pieces in "Album for the Young", a heartbreaking elegy entitled only with three stars, was written just after Mendelssohn's death. The youngest of Clara and Robert's children was named Felix, after their friend, mentor and colleague. As a musician, I consider invention such as this unfortunate sentence libelous to a human being no longer able to defend himself.
I do recommend Galloway's book, however; it has a vivid, easy, original style and some interesting quotations garnered from other books. The reader with more than a passing interest in the lives of the Schumanns and in Brahms, however, should take more seriously the recordings of their works, their letters, and the letters, comments and dedications of their contemporaries.

With single-minded determination, born from years of mental discipline, thirty-seven-year-old Clara Wieck Schumann, dressed in black, took the arm of her friend, Johannes Brahms, and was escorted to the piano, where she would begin a new phase of her life, as a widow and the sole support of the eight children she bore composer Robert Schumann. Clara was well schooled for her life of self-denial and duty. A brilliant pianist and former child prodigy, she had been controlled by her domineering father, and she had had to sue him so that she could marry Robert Schumann, an unstable composer whose own demons exerted control over her life.

Robert Schumann's instability, according to the author, began at a very early age. As a young man, he believed that he was inhabited by two people, Florestan and Eusebius, and he often alternated marathon composing sessions (once producing 27 pages of music in a single day) with times in which he could find no inspiration at all. He had to have silence when he was working, and he was inconsistent in his behavior, often blaming Clara for small infractions over which she had no control. She had no life of her own. She was the primary bread-winner in the family, giving concerts regularly, despite the arrival of eight babies and the difficulty of practicing without disturbing Robert. Unappreciated and unrecognized by the public, Robert became frustrated and depressed, eventually admitting himself to an asylum, where he died in 1856, at age 46.

The ill-starred love story of Clara and Robert Schumann is as romantic as the music of Schumann and his contemporaries, but Galloway keeps this novel on a factual level, as much as possible. There are no flights of fancy here, no imaginative soaring into the stratosphere of romance, and no attempt to recreate the passionate feeling of their love or of their music. She has done enormous research into their lives and presents her novel as if time and circumstance are being filtered through the consciousness of Clara, her father, or Robert. Her recreation of domestic situations and scenes, combined with what the various participants have said about them in their (real) diaries and journals allow her to reflect their inner turmoil while remaining fairly objective as a historian.

Galloway's novel is thoroughly researched, full of information about the Schumanns, and sympathetic to Clara's enormous personal burdens. She is largely successful in bringing Clara to life. We never see Robert as a "normal" person, however, and the reader remains at a distance from him, observing, rather than feeling, what is happening to him. Yet Clara lived for forty years after Robert's death, and this reader would have appreciated a brief Afterword telling what she did during that time. Tied inextricably to Robert throughout their marriage, one can only wonder if she eventually found happiness on her own after his death. Mary Whipple

Galloway's two previous novels were superb, but the ambitious "Clara" establishes her as a major writer of our time. Prodigious research allowed her to write Clara Schumann's story as if from within--as though she were a member of the Schumann household telling the story in a 19th-century coffeehouse. The style is colloquial and dramatic, like a barroom raconteur's. Galloway is aware of the repressive social customs that held Clara's abilities back--a few times she sneaks in the phrase "a room of one's own"--but doesn't allow ideology to mar the story.
Fans of the Schumanns' music and of innovative contemporary fiction will find much here to sing about.

Maybe I missed something, but this didn't do a lot for me. It's a jumbled up ragbag of ideas which don't fit together coherently while its characters are unlikeable and without much individuality.
The story starts in a depressing world called Unthank, and follows the character Lanark as he arrives in town. He craves for sunlight in a world where there is none and since he's fast turning into a dragon he decides to throw himself down a large mouth in the ground (as you do...).
He comes out the other end in an institute where he is cured of his dragonhide and becomes a doctor for a short while before, like me, getting very bored and frustrated with the place.
So he decides to leave but that's quite dangerous involving a trip across an intercalendrical zone. Inevitably he leaves the hospital and takes along his girlfriend who, unsatisfyingly, doesn't seem to display any affection towards him at all.
In the intercalendrical zone, time moves erratically, and his girlfriend discovers she's heavily pregnant. They return to Unthank in the expectation that shortly the place will be swallowed by an even larger mouth and they'll be transferred to a sunnier land.
But Rima leaves Lanark, taking the (talking) baby with her. Lanark is then sent on a mission to return to the institute to ask them to save Unthank, which has suffered a pollution spill that threatens to destroy the place. At the institute he is stitched up by his rivals and finds time to meet the author of the book, who spends a chapter trying to explain what the hell the book is about. Lanark returns from the institute to Unthank in time to witness the place destroyed.
Books one and two in the middle tell the story of Duncan Thaw (Lanark before arriving in book three) and surprisingly this part of the book is a lot more readable. The chapters follow Thaw as he grows from a child to a sickly adult. There are some parallels with the Lanark story (Thaw is emotionally inhibited, he suffers an illness as a result, he can't keep hold of the girl he likes). In my opinion, if this story stood alone it would be a much more satisfying read. It's very reminiscent of the writer Iain Banks who no doubt was inspired by Gray. Interesting also the split between contemporary fiction and sci-fi which Banks also practices. However, in my opinion, a book like Walking On Glass by Banks is far superior to Lanark in that it made me think about the connections between the strands of the stories.
I suppose my review is a little biased because I'm not a huge fan of science fiction any more. But since the author asserts in his incarnation as god in the final chapters that he doesn't write science fiction I suppose I shouldn't worry.

First published in 1981 and set in the dystopic cities of Unthank and Glasgow, Lanark: A Life In Four Books by Alasdair Gray is an emotional and starkly brilliant saga about the struggle to love despite contradictions and vices in human nature that attack bonds of care or trust. A bleak yet compelling vision of survival and the endless search for something more in life, Lanark consists of parallel tales of an eponymous hero living in a bizarre city of the future called Unthank, and Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian of the twentieth century. This edition of Lanark is enhanced with a new foreword by novelist Janice Galloway and includes Alasdair Gray's "Tailpiece" which serves as an unusual addendum to this surreal and highly recommended novel.

I don't know if no one has reviewed this tome for fear of where angels tread lightly or what, but I have to say something about this amazing book, if for no other reason than to start a dialogue.

I first heard of this book from a Village Voice article about the republication of "Lanark" in a four-volume set. The structure of this edition is that it begins with Book 3, followed by the Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, and Book 4 is divided by an Epilogue that takes place 4 chapters from the end. This convoluted structure actually makes the book rather fascinating, in that Gray has said that he wishes for the book to be remembered in a certain order, which is why he put "Book 3" first. This edition also features artworks by the artist at the front of each Book, and the Epilogue features some interesting typesetting.

For readers of science fiction, this book will offer an interesting challenge, for books 1 and 2 are more a coming-of-age of the artist sort of affair. Books 3 and 4 center around the Lanark character, who is called Thaw in 1 and 2. The Thaw books reminded me many times of Maugham and Joyce, while 3 and 4 seemed positively Dickian. (Not to be confused with Dickensian, which slant-applies, if at all.) There's a lot of ferocious literariness going on in this book, yet there's all sorts of humor. And also a slice of life in a city I know absolutely nothing about. The depictions and commentary on Glasgow reveal a lot about the self-consciousness of 2nd-tier and below cities--the cities that are not New York, London, Florence, Paris, Moscow, etc.

I found this a wise book, filled with difficult ideas and a morose feel for the future of mankind and the difficulties of being a solitary individual in the anomie-infested modern civilization. Book 4 I think is a fascinating attempt to turn Hobbes's Leviathan into a sentient being, as viewed by the hapless adventures of the eponymous hero. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

Galloway has been compared to Virginia Woolf and in the first few chapters of this novel is equally opaque. Where is the reader ? Who are these two women, which, if not both of them, is the psychiatric case ? Is there a horrible history hiding there ? In truth, the book rambles from scene to scene with a minimalist plot and is often tedious. It is enlightened by clever use of language, sharp observations and occasional humour. She makes frequentuse of metaphor - the frustrated boxer dog, the frog etc. - to demonstrate that men are shallow creatures and that women have better lives when they stick together. She laments the power of sexual attraction, however residual, that men still possess.

For a male reader it is a bleak read - are we that shallow ? - tarnished by generalisations which if written by a male writer (John Updike ?) would have led to cries of misogyny, but the book becomes stronger the longer it proceeds and in the end proves a worthwhile read.

Although I can't say this was a totally knockout read, I have to admit I thoroughly enjoyed traveling the French countryside with Cassie and Rona, the book's enormously likable female protagonists. Once I adjusted to Galloway's rather inventive literary style (no punctuation to denote dialogue, stream of consciousness narrative, loose spacing within sentences and paragraphs, etc.), I was off and running. Cassie's contrary and cynical nature is the perfect foil for Rona's perpetual Pollyanna personality, the clashes well illustrated in short vignettes and terse conversations that will leave the reader laughing out loud on occasion. Stopping at various French tourist attractions and sites along the way (many highlighted in hilarious travel book lingo within the text), the Scottish duo cope with rude male behavior, snarling dogs, decrepit hotel accomodations and their own dramatic mood swings. With a long history of taking "holidays" together, Cassie and Rona explore not just the unfamiliar terrain of the French countryside, but also the sometimes startling interior landscape of their own psyches. The resulting literary journey is well worth the reader's time, so sit back and enjoy the ride! This book is a wonderful testimony to the power of female friendship.

A fan of Galloway's first book, I loved this even more. I am horrified to read that the only on-line review here is by a man who think this book is somehow a slight to him! It's not about men at all, it's a book about two women, and their thoughts on men occur as part of the narrative they have between themselves. That the two women have an exrtemely funny, leg-pulling as well as tender relationship with each-other doesn't seem to reach the over-sensitive British male reader, though it does reach the male reader with a sense of humour. It's not a "story" (go to the movies for those), it's a meditation about love, aging, what success might be, European identity and, above all, companionship. I have taught this book in high school (Brit Lit) as well as given it to friends and have yet to find a US male who doesn't find it a hoot (or who didn't learn something from it about the weaknesses and strengths of women alone). In short, it's a wonderful, thought-stuffed, gentle yet stimulating book that says it all about modern Scottish fiction. If Galloway isn't appreciated at home, maybe she should to the States!