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weighty in places, both intellectually and emotionally, but Joanne Limburg renders her autobiographical tale with charming gusto and boundless energy while referencing everything from medical journals, Freud and Dante to Hollywood films and Prefab Sprout. As a result it’s a lovely read, expertly crafted and imbued with wry humour. These very personal and extraordinary accounts of a difficult life feel markedly different from the norm, resonating, no doubt, with a lot of people. Interestingly too, the work is as much a story about a burgeoning young literary talent finding her feet as it is about the difficulties of living with OCD. (Camilla Pia)
ROAD DRAMA STONA FITCH Give + Take (Two Ravens) ●●●●●
MUSIC BIOGRAPHY GAVIN BAIN California Schemin’ (Simon & Schuster) ●●●●●
It’s not difficult to see why Irvine Welsh has been so drawn to this story of two Scottish boys who fooled the music industry into believing they were a pair of Californian rappers. There’s a fair smattering of sex, large dollops of drugs (legal and otherwise), a gutful of surreal setpieces and vast amounts of brass-balled derring-do as Gavin Bain and Bill Boyd transform themselves into Silibil ‘n’ Brains, and scoop a very healthy record deal before encountering the frustrating reality that fleeting fame can unleash upon the unsuspecting.
Their venture is no ordinary prank project, though. Bain and Boyd set out with admirable intentions of making it in showbiz, ambitiously trying to become the UK’s answer to Eminem. But when the pair are laughed out of one especially awful A&R audition and branded the ‘rapping Proclaimers’, they conclude that dropping the mother tongue and keeping it unreal is the only way to go. And so convincing are they in their new identities that not even D12, Madonna or Eminem smell a rat. But for two individuals with such all-consuming personalities, it’s only a matter of time before they are at each other’s throats with the end of the road all too nigh.
Bain’s writing is sensibly measured as he allows some of the more ludicrous events to be rendered without laying it on too thick, and he just about avoids making the inevitable fall from the heights of near-glory sound too familiar. The proposed future movie, with a screenplay by Sir Irvo, just about writes itself. (Brian Donaldson)
PUBLISHING SATIRE ALESSANDRO GALLENZI Bestseller (Alma Books) ●●●●● Not so much an affectionate look at the world of publishing as a weary procedural of the soul-destroying day-to- day life of those involved in it, Bestseller comes from the heart, at least. Alessandro Gallenzi, a novelist, playwright, poet and publisher,
quite possibly writes from exaggerated experience of Jim Talbot, a frustrated amateur author whose thoroughly conditioned social maladjustment gives him ‘a medieval idea of women’ as ‘a mean-spirited enemy of promise’. Charles Randall, meanwhile, is the founder of the independent Tetragon Press, although not for much longer if the business’ new consultant has his way. There’s a close
affiliation with the world described, which will surely raise either smiles or grimaces from those within it. Some dryly amusing lines are offset by a palpable distaste for Talbot’s character but the writing lacks dynamism, slowed
down by chunky paragraphs of plot. Gallenzi is also the founder of Alma Books, which may explain how he avoided Jim’s fate. (David Pollock) SOCIAL MEMOIR JOANNE LIMBURG The Woman Who Thought Too Much (Atlantic Books) ●●●●●
Leafing through the chapter titles of this memoir – ‘Nightmares’, ‘Habits’, ‘Sin’, ‘Grief’, ‘Risk’ and ‘Losses’ among them – and learning that it’s the story of a celebrated poet’s quest to understand her OCD, you might assume that The Woman Who Thought Too Much was a heavy read. But you’d be wrong. Yes, it’s
After two wildly acclaimed novels, Scottish-Cherokee writer Stona Fitch comes crashing back to earth with this lumpen affair about a jazz pianist who goes around stealing from the reasonably well-off to give to the faceless poor. While Senseless and Printer’s Devil received plaudits for bold evocations of dystopian and existential universes, Give + Take hits one bum note after another. When he’s not tickling his ivories, Ross Clifton (real name Wolfshead) is seducing women to get his paws on their
diamonds or breaking into BMWs and sticking the proceeds into the mail boxes of the dispossessed. But when his counterfeiter brother’s teenage son drops in on Ross on tour while he is pursuing a sassy chanteuse, the writing gets wonkier than a Thelonious Monk solo and any tension that Fitch has built up simply melts away. Where Give + Take seeks to swing, this jazz-crime-road hotchpotch simply staggers into one literary cul de sac after another. (Brian Donaldson) SUPERVILLAIN COMIC MARK MILLAR & STEVE MCNIVEN Nemesis No.1 (Icon) ●●●●●
With Mark Millar’s last creation currently tearing up cinema screens, what better way to drum up interest in his new project than with a cover strapline bearing the claim ‘Makes Kick- Ass Look Like S#it’? Another collaboration with Steve McNiven (following Marvel hits Civil War and Wolverine: Old Man Logan), it simply can’t live up to that billing. Kick-Ass was, after all, something very, very special.
What Nemesis does do is once more confirm Millar as a master of the widescreen, sadistic and patently ridiculous action set-piece. McNiven’s clean and dynamic art is stretched to the limit by the title character, a white-suited master-villain whose modus operandi is the public and hugely destructive ruination of one international police department after another. Having laid waste to Tokyo with booby-trapped buildings and crashing trains in the first nine pages, he turns his attention to Washington DC with the
ALSO PUBLISHED
5 BOOKS COMING SOON IN THE MONTH OF JUNE Yann Martel Beatrice and Virgil The third novel from the man who brought the Booker to Canongate spins a mystery around a letter from an elderly taxidermist and raises questions about cruelty, kindness and storytelling. Canongate.
Alice Thompson The Existential Detective The former List editor and Woodentops keyboardist’s fifth novel features a private eye investigating the disappearance of a scientist’s wife but leads him into some dark corridors of his own past life. Two Ravens. Gavin Pretor- Pinney The Wavewatcher’s Companion One day the founder of the Cloud Foundation diverted his gaze from the sky to the sea and watched the waves rolling into the shore. And then he decided to write a book about his new obsession. Bloomsbury.
Jackie Kay Red Dust Road The Scotland-born author dips into her own history for this new book with a look into what makes us who we are, particularly if we never truly knew our birth parents. Picador. Renata Salecl Choice Do we really have as much freedom of choice as we are led to believe? Has unfettered western capitalism merely woven new tyrannies that are eating away at our souls? Kind of sounds like it. Profile.
kidnap of the US President from a mid- crashland Air Force One. Insane, amusing, and surely being costed by Hollywood accountants right now. (David Pollock) 15–29 Apr 2010 THE LIST 35