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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a very entertaining book,
By
This review is from: My Idea of Fun (Paperback)
Unlike most of the below reviewers, I found this book to be quite engaging. I can't help but think them put off by the horrid nature of the tale. Call me childish and sick, but I liked this well written and quite fantastic story. An unabashed five stars. Also, what's the problem with big words? If you'd rather read at a tenth grade level then go ahead and stick with most any other contemporary writer. I think you'll find that Self's choice of an exotic word over a more mundane possibility often adds to the detailed desciptive quality of his writing. Note that no one has accused him of mis-using his large vocabulary. This book is not a great work of literature, BTW, but not all books are supposed to be. Some are more for fun, and this one is just not everyone's idea of it apparently. Disclaimer: I am a big Will Self fan. However, I am not liking his new novel (_How the Dead Live_) very much, so know that I can also be critical of his work.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sensitive little bildungsgroman really,
By Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Idea of Fun (Paperback)
My Idea of Fun is an early Will Self novel from the time when he was high on drugs and waved his satirical windmills with abandon against the whole gamut of self-enclosed humanistic metropolitan society.
Essentially, this novel is typical first novel territory - charting the development and maturity of a young man, Ian Wharton, from school, through university, the world of work, relationships and ultimately marriage. But this book is a little different in that Ian is a deeply disturbed individual who plummets the depths of the human psyche - at the start of the book, he announces he is about to go upstairs to disembowl his wife, pregnant with his child. Why? Well that's a complicated tale that requires some 300 pages to unravel. His mental strings have been played mercilessly throughout his life, first by the Churchillian The Fat Controller (definite article very important) who appears at vital junctures in Ian's life, such as when he is about to sleep with a woman, and ruckles the texture of his reality. Then there is the left field psychiatrist Dr Gyglle, who submits Ian to a terrifying series of mind calming experiments. No wonder Ian is messed up, as he pursues his marketing career - that ultimate 90s job, just as corporate law is for the upwardly mobile graduate in the 2000s - and tries to make sense of his self, that mysterious id, that lies within. Overall, a scatalogical, shock novel that showcases Self's trademark style - each sentence with pistons grinding furiously to add value to the reading experience, words gyrating together like go-go dancers. It is a vigorous, entertaining style, that shakes up the grey area of London, the mundane office blocks and infrastructures in a toxic cocktail of verbiage. Overall the book is a little like some of the efforts of Martin Amis, one of Self's heroes - dazzling on the surface, but a little light underneath, which prevents it from being truly shocking, unlike some of his really sinister work like the Kafkaesque Cock and Bull stories, or 'Understanding the Ur-Bororo' or 'Grey Area' in his early short story collections. Doubtless Will Self would refute this, but I remain convinced that he is a better short story writer and journalist than he is a novelist. And this effort, for all its high points and scintillating riffs, confirmed it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Disgusting and entertaining,
By "jade_nb" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Idea of Fun (Paperback)
My only prior experience with Will Self was through The Quantity Theory of Insanity, a collection of short stories that defiantly refused to be what I expected of them; whether that's really a good thing or not I have yet to decide, but sampling once his bizarre (and unhealthy) imagination let me know I had to have more, so I immediately picked up a used copy of this book when I saw it on sale.My Idea of Fun starts off with a gripping opening, continues with a gripping and slightly baffling inner story, and then becomes, frankly, sickening -- but by the end one is so wrapped up in the story that one can't turn away as depravity after depravity comes to light. (I have only read one other book, Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, that made me feel literally dirty after reading it. While reading this book, I almost choked on the meal I was eating when I came to the protagonist's second visit to the Land of Children's Jokes.) This is a disorienting story, and while I'm tempted to afford it some pat description -- ``a surrealistic romp'' -- that is inaccurate; it is precisely the contradiction between the realistic, drily factual tone in which Self records his story and the ludicrous content of that same story that makes reading it so disorienting. However, to judge from literary critics, when writing about Will Self, the plot must come second -- no review is complete without the obligatory mention of the prodigious size of his vocabulary. My copy of this book was apparently previously owned by someone who intended using it as a dictionary, because most of the multisyllabic words (and there are a lot, with Self) are underlined. This made it hard not to notice his often remarkable choices of words, but, in the passages where the underliner had not penetrated, I found that the language flowed smoothly and easily (even when the content was unpalatable). Though I pride myself on my vocabulary, there were a number of words that defeated me, but Self tends to place such words in sufficient context there's no real difficulty in figuring their meaning. The reviews on the back of my copy of the book (which looks different from the picture displayed here -- the front cover has a marvellous illustration of The Fat Controller (mind that capitalised article!) which made his occurrences in the book all the more sinister) declare, among other things, that there are ``more ideas per chapter'' in this novel than in any the reviewer had recently read, and, while there are certainly juicy musings to be had (chapter 8, I believe, opens with perhaps the best metaphorical description of time that I have ever read), this is by no means a novel of ideas. It is an engaging and disturbing story, but don't read it expecting to be enlightened -- just to be entertained, albeit capably and very intelligently.
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