Stump: A Novel (Paperback)

by Niall Griffiths (Author) "He came down into me garden again this mornin, the fox, thee ahl fox with the one eye..." (more)
Key Phrases: thee arse, tellin yeh, yeh doin, Peter Salt, Jesus Christ, Dock Road (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Griffiths is best when he captures those small moments that punctuate the boredom of intermittently savage lives." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Griffiths' characters come straight out of a British gangster film mixed with Irvine Welsh's druggy street squalor." -- Library Journal

"Griffiths' voice seamlessly enters to describe the dystopia-scape of suburban London and the breathtaking terrains of Wales." -- Minnesota Literature

"Like its protagonist, Stump is beautiful, flawed, rageful and lyrical... pulse-quickening, unique work." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

Product Description
“Stump makes you feel that you are reading on the edge of a life in a fierce gale, vulnerable, excited, alive.” —The Guardian (London)

Wet an spectacular wreckage leads to “powerful forgetting” which leads to “periodics” which lead to the “dry drunks” which go to “immersion” an “enabler” an “therapeutic alliance” an any alternative, any fuckin alternative atropine aversion therapy or Antabuse or ECT or acufuckinpuncture or snakepits or swimming with dolphins an all of that all of it comes completely back to this one pure irreducible phenomenon: a booming heart that burns to drink.

It has taken the loss of a limb and a death threat from the Mob to make one Liverpudlian dry out and move to a small seaside town in Wales. But his past life is a recurring nightmare—filth, desperation, and blackouts. And more trouble is only a hundred miles away. Darren and Alastair leave Liverpool, heading south in a rickety old car. They have been sent by their gang boss to wreak violent revenge, but they have only a rough idea of their quarry: a one-armed man.

Interspersed between the scabrous banter and a pitch-perfect street dialect, Niall Griffiths offers stunning descriptions of the Welsh landscape and a dark, knowing humor. Despite the ever present drugs, violence, and anger, he reveals a fragile humanity. Graywolf is proud to introduce this striking, distinctive voice to American readers.


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Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; 1st edition (January 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974155
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974152
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #934,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars High art in low places, August 17, 2005

By	John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As you can see from the SIP's gathered by Amazon's computers, this book abounds in a certain expletive. Yet Griffiths never stoops to shock. As graphic in their imagery, events, and language as his fictions have been, this Liverpool-born, Welsh residing writer means to scrape off the grime and get to the humanity--or its frequent lack--beneath the crustiness that coats many of his drug-addled protagonists and antagonists in nearly equal spoonfuls, bongloads, lager gulps, or needle pricks.

In my Amazon review of his previous novel, "Kelly+Victor," I wondered how long Griffiths could sustain his chosen milieu; the current Welsh-cum-Liverpudlian down-and-out, dole-and-drug addicted generation. Well, the epic with more than a handful of concurrent narrators, "Grits," introduced his realm, if rather too lengthy a look at its denizens, who threatened to blur into not a willing victims' worth of a lost weekend but seemingly half-a-decade's staggering drama of binges, withdrawals, and scams.

The comedown after the raves of unfortunately titled "Cool Cymru" followed in Sheepshagger, whose Ianto is now anonymously referred to as practically a rural (not urban?) legend by Darren and Alastair, the two young men who drive the plot and a car into Wales from Liverpool to intimidate an ex-Scouser as a "favor" for the two lads' drug kingpin. Griffiths whips back from Darren & Alastair to their target nimbly in alternating chapters, and the climactic moment paid off superbly, although the resolution of one of the two narrative strands seems so open-ended I'd have, if it was a movie, felt a sequel was necessary.

The only drawback of an otherwise compactly conveyed, linear, macabrely entertaining, and exciting narrative is that Griffiths keeps alluding to other incidents that you're not sure happened in "Grits" or "Sheepshagger," given the complexity and mass of detail in his previous novels covering literally, symbolically, and spiritually the same bleak landscapes.

He may intend his novels to play off one another tangentially, as did Faulkner in his fictional county, but it is difficult (in the cases of both authors) to follow at times. Dialect usages, like the Welsh, go generally unexplained, and as this is "natural" for the speakers, I applaud Griffiths for forcing us into his characters' reality. Yet it does make it more challenging, and the alienation we feel as a result transforms his panoramas into even more foreign locales.

Wonderfully if aggravatingly subversive, this novel, as with the previous two, shows Griffiths tightening his fictional control over his denizens, and he continues to improve as a writer by this compression of stark, raw, poetic Old-English and medievally-influenced language with equally raw observations in our beaten-down, insult-laden, vernacular. The diminishment of our modern dreams and capabilities Griffiths shows well by our decision to keep our verbal expression as minimal as our imagination, and the costs of this to such as Darren & Alastair.