How Late It Was, How Late [Paperback]

James Kelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

Winner of the 1994 Booker Prize, this witty, controversial, and brilliant bestselling novel has been compared to the works of Joyce, Beckett, and many other masters.

A raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world, How Late It Was, How Late opens one Sunday morning in Glasgow, Scotland, as Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting, awakens in a lane and tries to remember the two-day drinking binge that landed him there.  Then, things only get worse.  Sammy gets in a fight with some soldiers, lands in jail, and discovers that he is completely blind.  His girlfriend disappears, the police probe him endlessly, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare system.

A masterpiece of black humor, subtle political parody, and Scottish lower-class vernacularHow Late It Was, How Late is a classic-to-be from one of today's most talented novelists.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man." From the moment Sammy wakes slumped in a park corner, stiff and sore after a two-day drunk and wearing another man's shoes, James Kelman's Booker Prize-winning novel How Late it Was, How Late loosens a torrent of furious stream-of-consciousness prose that never lets up. Beaten savagely by Glasgow police, the shoplifting ex-con Sammy is hauled off to jail, where he wakes to a world gone black. For the rest of the novel he stumbles around the rainy streets of Glasgow, brandishing a sawed-off mop handle and trying in vain to make sense of the nightmare his life has become. Sammy's girlfriend disappears; the police question him for a crime they won't name; the doctor refuses to admit that he's blind; and his attempts to get disability compensation tangle in Kafkaesque red tape. Gritty, profane, darkly comic, and steeped in both American country music and working class Scottish vernacular, Sammy's is a voice the reader won't soon forget. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Set in Glasglow and written in dialect, Scottish novelist Kelman's controversial black comedy won the 1994 Booker prize.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Delta (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385315600
• ISBN-13: 978-0385315609
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,810,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars blow-your-mind-beautiful-prose, January 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: How Late It Was, How Late (Paperback)

This book is like getting your first stereo. At first you might not know how to hook it up, but once you figure it out it's sheer heaven. Not since The Butcher Boy have I been carried through a text by the sheer beauty of the words juxtaposed against such intestine-tightening despair. Sure, the dialect can be tricky to grasp. But don't the greatest pleasures in life take some training. And admitedly there's a way in which "nothing happens." But really, who cares (And actually a lot DOES happen). This is one of the most beautifully panic-producing novels I've ever touched. For the first half of the book I could only read 10 pages at a time because it made me so nervous. But once I hit around page two hundred I finished it in one sitting. People who don't get this book are the same ones who think Saving Private Ryan is how a movie should be. There has to be action, action, action and some soppy something or other to hang your heart on. Well, pick up this book and hang your heart on poor old Sammy. He's a heartbreaker extraordinaire, if I ever met one.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not too late to read a great book, March 2, 2001

By 

Bernard M. Patten "Book worm" (Seabrook, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: How Late It Was, How Late (Paperback)

"No frigate like a book to take us lands away," said Emily Dickinson. Oh my, she's right. There are other worlds out there, lots of them. Kelman's book takes us to one, a unique one, right in the middle of Glasgow, in fact in the outer limits of consciousness somewhere - in the mind of a low-life petty thief named Sammy who stupidly assaulted two policemen and got beaten so badly by them that he is blinded. After that, everything in this book is generated, more or less, in Sammy's head as interior monologue (not stream of consciousness as others say) or by the speech of the characters Sammy deals with. Those characters do plenty of talking with an extremely limited vocabulary that nevertheless has an amazing expressive range proving, again, that Scotland is a nation of talkers, great talkers. It is also a welfare state with lots of red tape and institutionalized dullness. So much so that Sammy's difficulties with the DSS Central Medical board and with the DSS in general call into question the Scottish I.Q. and raise the query that they might have there some institutional madness as serious as that discussed in Bleak House. Some advice: Donay be turned off by ye Scottish dialect. Read the first three pages aloud. Aw fine. Aye, they make sense. Ah stories, man, stories, life's full of stories, there to help ye out. Aye right pal okay.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a wonderful drunken, beautiful mess., August 21, 2005

By 

Listen2Me "I know what I am talking about!" (Guess) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Late It Was, How Late (Paperback)

This is one of my favorite books of all time but let me warn you it is a mess to read and if you are easily offended this is not the book for you. Full of swear words and written in dialect (which makes it very hard to read) this one is an acquired taste. If you have just finished reading Trainspotting (the only good book by Irvine Welsh & not the greatest movie) which has a glossary of terms it is a little easier. Winner of the Booker Prize because it is pure genus and a one-of-a-kind read. Completely original, written well before Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and much, much better.