Customer Reviews

The Quantity Theory of Insanity

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The sheer volume of fantastic ideas contained in this collection of short fiction sets one's neural bulb a-boggle.

The story on the theory of waiting alone, will have you pondering your very existence, to such a degree of mind-numbing scrutiny that a painstaker will think you're persnickty.

Admittedly there are quite a few tangential stories that take you so far off the beaten path that you soon begin to wonder what exactly it is that your reading other than a random series of words, broken by sharp wit, and cunning humor.

But, many stories throughout, will a- and be-muse you.

Keep a dictionary close at hand.

Will Self's 'The Quantity Theory of Insanity' overflows with (unsurprisingly) dark humor mixed with academic flair. The stories often seem to lack a clear and definitive finishing point, as if one is reading a manuscript of a story half-written. This, of course, may be a purposeful attempt; that by not offering conclusion, Will Self is in essense prodding the reader into personal deliberation over the concepts presented. Unfortunately, if this be the case, these same concepts have seen so much activity in modern psychology that for the author to not thoroughly conclude his own insights leads one not into pondering personal beliefs in the matter, but what the author might have been trying to convey. A fruitless task as Self, undoubtedly, tries to be as enigmatic as possible.

Luckily Self's mastery of language and metaphor, even during points where one might feel unsatisfied with the content, makes this book hard to put down. He easily achieves the daunting task of having a work sopping with verbose floridity while still being both easily readable and completely coherent. The development of his characters and concepts is quite clear and clean, an intimidating feat while having to develop both observations as well as descent into 'madness' on the same pages. Self is able to portray lunacy with impecable flair, often times the feeling of madness transposing itself from prose to reader with every turn of the page.

'The Quantity Theory of Insanity' should be read for it's unequaled portrayals of the subject matter as well as the interesting, albeit fragmentary, social commentary. Positions and answers however, should not be sought here.

Though in no terms a work on par with the quality of Will Self's later efforts (re: Grey Area) Quantity Theory is a thoroughly engrossing anthology. From the outrageous Ur-Bororo to the insanity that was the development and application of the Quantity Theory to the subtle oddities of the North London Book of the Dead, Self's pen delves into deeper realms of consciousness and brings to light certain outlandish traits of humanity.

Will Self is a brilliant writer with a vocabulary which would make any dictionary less than the complete OED worthless and an intellect to match. His works illustrate a biting social commentary that may stem from his far superior intelligence or simply an uneasiness with the world (which very well may be the case; many of his stories centered on drugs or mental health).

The Quanitity Theory is a very good example of his work and a perfect entry into the writings of this strange but brilliant English author.

Back in college in the late 60's I remember talking with
a philosophy professor about Roman Polanski's early film
"Repulsion." He said that it helped him to understand that
when some of the mad and troubled people he worked with
(no, not his philosophy students) said that they saw monsters
outside, hiding behind the trees, they really did see monsters.
Will Self's book of short stories provides such revelations.
Epiphanies of the absurd. Each page turns over a rock under
which mental illness is spawning--slowly and quietly and inexorably. The title story is as slow a descent into societal
madness as I've ever taken. You get infected somewhere along
the way but you're not sure where. Like touching a doorknob
that's been contaminated with lunacy. The next thing you
know, you sneeze, and when you look up you see a monster
peering at you from behind a tree.

Will Self is an accomplished stylist with a following of
both avid fans and vocal detractors. Read "The Quantity Theory of
Insanity" and you'll be one or the other.

Will Self takes a handful of half-cocked insights - the type that flit through your head while brushing your teeth in the morning - and actually develops them into a collection of oddly believable urban myths. Self's sense of humour will pull you along as you jump into his cesspool of strange situations, eccentric associates and theories too bizarre to be dismissed. Frighteningly clever.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity is a fabulous debut collection of stories by the genius English writer Will Self, who has written so much since then that this first collection is in danger of being buried underneath the mountains of prose - both fiction and journalism, Self has emitted since then.

The stories are dark, satirical, and wickedly funny and heartless. They are the product of Self's youth - middle class, intellegensia, hence the parodies of academia that run through the stories, but also with a dark, unstable and addictive mental life.

The stories are awash with brilliant ideas - a dead mother living in suburban Crouch end, the notion put by an academic that there is a finite amount of sanity in the world, and increasing levels in one area results in a decrease elsewhere (told by a narrator blissfully unaware just how insane he is himself). There are some stories here that pitch right into the banal, routine of modern urban life - Waiting unfurls as a stream of consciousness traffic jam monologue; and the Ur Bororo are a tribe of remote South American peoples who, it is obliquely revealed, have rather a lot in common with some sectors of middle England society.

Heartless, misanthropic, but never without lightness and humour. These are black satires in the vein of J.G. Ballard, but in Self's own unique voice. The only downside is that the drug infused writing gets a little wild and uncontrolled sometimes. I personally think Will Self's writing revved up a gear once he cleaned up.

Will Self is That Guy from high school. You know, the one who drove backwards on the LA Freeway at 100 miles an hour to catch an exit he'd missed. He's the one who inspired you to leap from the car (when it finally slowed down), screaming "Are you *&%$ing NUTS??!!??" Yes, he was, and he still is. But, now he has a vocabulary, and an even more twisted sense of reality.

The stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity will sometimes make you want to jump out of the car, but you won't. You'll be laughing too hard. Each one of the stories revolves around the central premise--expressed in hilariously pretentious academese--that there is a limited quantity of sanity in the world. Self demonstrates this fetching and entirely plausible, proposition in stories about people who "aren't waiting for the Apocalypse", whose dead mothers reside in Crouch End, and who leave endowments for anthropology students to study the most boring people on earth (and who somehow bear an uncanny resemblance to Self's own countrymen).

The writing is sheer manic joy! Once again the British remind us that they invented English, and aren't afraid to use it. A dictionary will do you no good. Will Self's lopsided jaunts into the English language require an altered state of consciousness to fully appreciate.

Will Self's book 'The Quantity Theory of insanity' is a frightening leap into the bizarre. He takes mundane, ordinary situations from suburban life and in his uniquely pleonastic way subverts them. Quantity Theory is less mature than some of his later books, and some of the short stories come across as overly contrived. He also suffers from a journalistic pedigree, he is more interested with style and form, than plot; and his content tends to be intellectual puzzles and mind-games, which though frequently amusing, are often insubstantial.

Will Self constructs a highly believable, yet completely ludicrous set of situations and then welds them together to form one composite cache of imaginative and insightful thought

Will Self is perhaps the most cruel, heartless writer of contemporary British fiction today. He has an immense encyclopedic intellect, but cares little for his characters, subjecting them to merciless metaphorical beatings (witness the one he gives Janner, an anthropologist, in the opening paragraph of "Understanding the Ur-Bororo," the third story in Quantity Theory). Character development and plot for Self becomes secondary to his obsessively overcrafted Johnsonese prose, which owes more to writers such as Max Beerbohm and William F Buckley, than to his friend Martin Amis or his surrealist hero James Ballard. Thus his fiction lacks tragedy, and even meaning, relying instead on gimmicky plots and a hybrid of quirky Woody Allen-esque humor and clever-clever sarcasm (often out of place). Without either, Self would accurately fit Utah Senator Reed Smoot's description of D.H. Lawrence after reading Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover--a man with a soul so black that he would even obscure the darkness of hell.