Customer Reviews

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm a big fan of Mr. Welsh's work, it displays an exuberance and lust for language that's intoxicating. IF YOU LIKED SCHOOL...is a bit of a misfire, a collection of stories of uneven quality. The problem is, the author decided to set some of his tales in America and tried to adopt or, more rightly, imitate American speech patterns and accents. The weakest story, "Miss Arizona" is particularly guilty of this offense and the resolution to this tale is so weak, predictable and derivative,you wonder what the writer was thinking. The closing novella, "Kingdom of Fife", finds the author back on familiar ground, hobnobbing with losers and thugs and sex maniacs, the brogue so thick and heavy it's like reading CANTERBURY TALES in the original Olde English (and nearly as rewarding). "Fife" is vintage Irvine Welsh--he's not posing or pretending, he's telling it like it is, the only way he knows how.

This is the first Irvine Welsh book I've struggled to finish. The stories are trite, the attempt at capturing American accents falls flat and overall the whole thing just seems...uninspired.

I read Welsh's last book ('Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs') and was disappointed. With 'If you liked school...' he returns to good form a wee bit. The short stories are set in America and I can take or leave them, although they have their moments. As a Scot living in America, the dialect/accent that he gives the American characters made me squirm at times. The stories aren't his best writing, but there's some twists. The book is worth buying for the novella, set in Cowdenbeath. A breath of fresh air, moving away from his usual settings of Leith and Edinburgh. Interesting characters and a good bit of dialect and humour.

Irvine Welsh means to shock, but usually there is a point to it all. Previously, he's written short stories about such cheery subjects as armless, grown-up Thalidomide babies using chainsaws to cut off the arms of the people that created Thalidomide, and a guy who, after he's been fired, his girlfriend has dumped him and his parents have at long last kicked him out, gets turned into a fly by God and as a fly wreaks revenge on those who have wronged him, along the way seeing such things as his mother doing unto his father with a strap-on. But even those stories contain Welsh's trademark humor and observations about society. So what has happened to Irvine Welsh?

The first story, about a road trip gone horribly wrong, is a set-up in search of a story. There's no point, there isn't an ending, and the racial stereotyping is offensive even for Irvine Welsh. The second story, about a bar owner in the Bahamas who treats women as disposable, is really long and has no apparent point. After that, I pretty much gave up. No humor, no real commentary on life... not even anything particularly shocking. More Howard Stern than Irvine Welsh and not worth the bother even if you're an Irvine Welsh fan.

Irvine Welsh is known for his chemical romance genre novels and short stories. These narratives are both tragic, comedic, and as strange as any trip taken by an unreconstructed hippie or soccer hooligan. Even if you are not familiar with the drug milieu, the detailed and developed characters will feel all too real.

Enjoy anything written by this author and include this work in your library.

I've read pretty much every Welsh book, thoroughly enjoying them all (aside from Maribou Stork Nightmares, which despite repeated attempts I simply cannot get into, and cannot finish). While this collection of short stories is a quick-fire read, it reveals itself as more an effort to showcase (or test out) the author's abilities to capture voices and word patterns outside his familiar Scottish brogue. It largely doesn't succeed.

In particular, Miss Arizona is the most straightforward, predictable, plodding tale I've ever seen from Welsh. Even the opening story -- trying to capture American late-teen culture -- is somewhat predictable in its shockability.

Fortunately, the last -- and longest -- story in the book is back in familiar territory and rescues this hit and mostly miss collection. For Welsh collection completists only.

The "air-con" mis-step appears in the first couple of pages of at least two of the pieces. I am writing this here because I specifically googled to see how many others had caught this howler.
This reader almost (ok, only almost) put the book down to email his mate in Scotland who's another Welsh fan to share dismay.
Irvine, Irvine, Irvine!!!
Please tell me this is your editor's fault!!!
This Haddie boy in the US didnae appreciate.
The subbuteo story's barry, but.

I don't understand why there are so many negative reviews here, this is not bad stuff at all, it is typical Irvine Welsh work, not bad at all. If you know what to expect from Welsh, then you should be pleased with the works here.

These short stories are pretty fantastic, especially the opener "Rattlesnakes", a Welsh classic. As for the rest, I am partial to "DOGS of Licoln Park, because being from the Chicagoland area, he captures the setting phenominally, especially considering he is from over-seas.

Overall, this is not his best work (read "Filth", or "Trainspotting", especially if you are a Welsh virgin), but it deserves more acclaim than the harsh reviews laid out here. His novels are better??? Fact. But for 9/10 authors most reviewers will say the same thing. For some reason people just don't gravitate towards the short story anymore, and thats a shame. Give it a try.

After a couple of misfires, Irvine Welsh once again goes on the attack at human frailty. The first story is a sad but hilarious look at a trio of messups who run into a bad situation in the desert with a lousy Dodge Durango with super awful air conditioning and a rattlesnake that bites the protagonist right on the .... With a storyline like that, how can you go wrong?

If you are 25 pages into a book and the protagonist has his "wee felly doonstairs" bitten by a rattlesnake in the middle of the desert so that his friend has to suck out the poison under the watchful eyes of two Mexican criminals who accidentally hit upon the charming panorama..., odds are that you are reading Irvine Welsh.

Yet the first story is not actually a good way to introduce this book. It is the only example of the sickness-for-sickness-sake that has plagued many of Welsh's recent efforts. But fortunately, the other four stories to varying degrees see Welsh back in old form. When he takes the time to endow his characters with emotional and psychological depth, we know that Welsh is the master of creating the most politically incorrect, hilariously funny, pathetic, deeply tragic and yet perfectly real-world people that you just can't stop reading about. And as always, much of the beauty and the fun lies in the casual unfolding of events that will outrun the imagination of even an experienced Welsh reader.

My rating for the bundle is necessarily an average, but Welsh lovers cannot miss this one. Especially the last story (that covers almost half the book) ranks with his best work, ya hoor, sor!