5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Two new languages, July 30, 2008
DBC Pierre hit fame with his Booker Prize winning debut,
Vernon God Little. I suggest you start there, as Ludmila's Broken English can be seen as an evolution in his own style, which you may not take to. Still, I overall recommend reading LBE if you are seeking a genuinely funny novel, written in a style and voice distinctly different to anything else around.
The story comprises two threads; there is the travail of the titular Eastern European peasant girl, whose family is in financial and legal strife, amid the backdrop of a messy civil war; then there is a less funny but more nuanced account of the post-op readjustments of an adult English pair of erstwhile conjoined twins, Blair and Bunny. Ludmila has been entrusted with her family's future survival and is sent out into the world, largely because she possesses some rudimentary English -- a valuable commodity. The world, at first, is the fictional province of Ublinsk, which is slowly being overrun by fighting. The twins, meanwhile, are in London and are experiencing their first tastes of life outside of the protective nest of their old-fashioned asylum for medical oddities. Blair is the more virile twin and becomes obsessed with the flesh of the young women he observes on his first sojourn into a nightclub. Bunny is the book's hero, but possesses no desires at all, save for a constant yearning for a return to the familiarity of the asylum -- and a need for gin. He is cynical, misanthropic, witty and utterly pathetic, being dragged about by his libidinous brother. The two threads, of course, collide three quarters of the way through the book and make for a bizarre conclusion, where any manner of allegorical readings may enter the reader's mind.
An important note must be made about the language of the novel. This appears to be Pierre's gift. His previous work displayed his keen ear for the pleasantries of Texan and the lexicon of 15-minutes-of-fame America. LBE gives us not one but two rich languages to digest. The twins speak a sort of estuary-English infused with a range of affectations the twins presumably arrived at after a lifetime of enforced proximity. The mix of contemporary slang ("bit of a laff mate") and public school etiquette ("I mean to say, one doesn't like to complain") captures perfectly the dialect of 21st century upper-middle class England; namely, a robust retention of grammar and usage, but with concessional colloquialisms thrown in, as if out of some reflex guilt towards -- or perhaps envy of -- the lower classes.
For Ludmila and the other Slavic characters we get the novel idea of having the Easterns' language translated imperfectly or at least awkwardly from the original. As a result we have hilarious syntactic mash-ups and idiomatic expressions which are obviously lost in translation. The result resembles those often comical instruction manuals one may have for a European manufactured appliance.
But it is the relentless sarcasm and fatalistic cynicism of the Ublis which provide the page-to-page laughs. Somehow Pierre has managed to produce an entire novel's worth of completely original, imitation-eastern-European insults and put-downs. Analogies to goats, tractors, piss, manure, goat's piss and the other signifiers of cliché peasanthood are thrown around the Ivanova family shack with such relentlessness that it must help stave off the cold.
The narrator's own voice is one I would compare to Martin Amis's more recent fiction (
Yellow Dog for example); there is no question that the book was written very recently and there is even that technique whereby the reader is deliberately lead slightly astray from time to time, with unattributed dialogue, or a sudden switch to a new setting or point in time.
Second in importance to the language is the geopolitical significance of the story. One may read the deliberately cartoonish portrayal of the Ublis' language as a slight against the ignorance of the West to third (or second) world cultures. In fact one could compare this with the rather idyllic portrayal of Mexico in VGL. There is also the commercial exploitation of the poorer nation, though I'll spare the details as they are vivid spoilers. Finally, one may interpret the twins themselves as a metaphor for the conjoined nature of the former Soviet republics and their messy attempts at separation.
Some reviewers have criticised the climax of the novel, though I feel it works perfectly if one is approaching the novel with the above concerns in mind.
Other reviewers on Amazon have also suggested that Pierre's first novel was a fluke and that he is in some sense a literary phony. Perhaps this view is partly informed by his former life as a confidence man. My guess is that he is a natural writer. He needs to read more and write more, but I think there is a chance that with his originality, his knack for personal languages and his global focus, he may become one of the most important literary voices of this era; I consider myself thoroughly conned by DBC Pierre.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nearly, but not quite, June 20, 2006
An enjoyable read, but not without its faults. I found it a little awkward to get into, especially the Heath twin's annoying faux "northern" accents (or maybe because I read this whilst staying with my Grandparents with REAL accents made an unfair comparison. It could have been worse, but they could have had a bit more variety with their language. Repeating "I mean to say" just grated after a while). Despite this, I really did find the Heath twins endearing, but if DBC hadn't been watching Bottom, Young Ones or related shows he's got an uncanny knack of writing the leads to sound very much like Rik and Eddy. But once past the initial awkwardness, I found I got sucked in and really enjoyed the way the story unfolded and the humour and creativity it was written with.
The ending, though, felt forced - the clash of cultures was inevitable, but the way it was delivered just felt a little contrived and convenient (if not grotesque), and left me feeling a little let down and occasionally a bit confused. So much was set up throughout the book, it just didn't pay off in the end and perhaps the resolution a little too "easy".
All up, though, I did enjoy it and definately worth the read for DBC Pierre fans or fans of similar books if you can get through the first few chapters. Hopefully he can improve on his next effort and break free of the expectations and restraints of previous work.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This book is *not* Vernon God Little, May 21, 2006
This book fails, and it does not even fail grandly. The new language promised us obliquely, by the title, boils down to a tiresomely repeated set of pseudo-Soviet insults. The apparent structural innovation, Pierre's riskiest move, turns out to be only a bald ploy: he tells two alternating stories--i.e. the odd chapters take us to England, the even chapers to a Soviet province--whose plots have nothing to do with each other, and meet after three hundred pages to no pay-off whatsoever. Such impressive terms as "globalisation" and "post-modernity" are bandied about, but just a little -- and the attempt at social commentary is the most embarrassing (if Pierre bothered to try), or obnoxious (if he did not), aspect of the whole muddle. Does Pierre think his reader will be fooled, by the scattered presence of these terms, into imagining this book approaches social relevance? -- The book, strange to say, deals with matter that seems somehow irrelevant even to itself.
That said, I still hold Vernon God Little one of the very best books of the decade, and I encourage everyone to read it. It says a lot for that first book, that I can still praise it so highly. Those who have read Vernon, and loved it, will read the latter offering at some risk to their ability to enjoy the former.
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