Summary à PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ´ Will Self

Dorian An Imitation Summary ´ 100 Which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize He has written five collections of shorter fiction and three novellas The uantity Theory of Insanity; Grey Area; License to Hug; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo; Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys; Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe and Liver A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes Self has also compiled a number of nonfiction works including The Undivided Self Selected Stories; Junk Mail; Perfidious Man; Sore Sites; Feeding Frenzy; Psychogeography; Psycho Too and The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracke. I learned that I should probably read the original as well This one is interesting because it is written with accents and isn t apologeticat all my first instinct is todefinetly not like it but that is only because it is hard to find a character to sympathize with when all the guys gay in the book hate women but I think I need to look deeper

Dorian An Imitation Summary ´ 100 Dorian Will Self's brilliant 'imitation' of Oscar Wilde's original tainted love story'Brutal savage infinitely readable' Observer'Chilling hysterical tasteless and haunting A Gothic thriller complementing and enriching its original' Independent on SundayIn the summer of 1981 aristocratic drug addicted Henry Wooten and Warhol acolyte Baz Hallward meet Dorian Gray Dorian is a golden adonis perfect pure and so far deliciously uncorrupted The subject of Baz's video installation Cathode Narcissus and the object of Henry's attentions Dorian is launched on a hedonistic binge that spans the '80s and '90s But as Baz. Self s title here works two ways His Dorian is an imitation of Wilde s Picture of Dorian Gray and Self s Dorian Gray which is to say his hero is an imitation of whatever he needs to be given the situation at hand Numerous times the narrator refers to this man as a chameleon and indeed there s something far sinister about this Dorian than Wilde sSelf has updated the story to AIDS era Britain Instead of a picture Dorian is reproduced as Cathode Narcissus a nine monitor video installation of Dorian s nude body seen voyeuristically at all angles at once It s this video that Dorian wishes would age while he stays young and indeed this is what happens But Self pushes the central magic further Dorian s video self also bears AIDS s ravages of the body while the live Dorian is able to live with and spread the virus without any personal threatWhat s great about this novel is how it sits right at that line between anti gay and anti gay which is to say borderline homophobic but really in the end just smartly critical of all the failures of post Stonewall gay culture Self attacks the whole notion of gay identity and identification most explicitly in the dialogue of his heroin shooting novelist stand in character Devenish It s been the misfortune of people who prefer sex with their own gender to be forced to regard this as some essential part of themselves After all homosexuality was only defined as a pathology in response to the alleged healthiness of heterosexuality It s the great mistake of you erm you gays to mistake a mere attribute for an essence 212 And the same character attacks gayour culture s youth obsession If Gray were able to stay young and have this video installation age in his stead he d be the icon of an era in which everyone seeks to hang on to their childhood until they re pressing furry fucking teddy bears against wrinkled cheeks You homosexuals are only the vanguard of a mutton army dressed as denim lambs 220Will Self is straight or well straight or whatever which complicates all this in stupid ways What I mean is if it were say Foucault saying this which he did essentially regarding the first uote or Roy Cohn in Angels in America who said something similar to the second uote regarding clout and anti discrimination laws I d be fine with it The community or whatever would be fine with it but as Self doesn t identify as gay nor could he I don t think his writing could be seen as homophobicIt s not I for one am glad for Self s book I d much rather read something critical and thought provoking than the easy bromides of rah rah Good for us gay fiction Even if the former isn t accurate the latter feels like a lie

Summary à PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ´ Will Self

Dorian An Imitation Summary ´ 100 And Henry succumb to the disease du jour how is it that Dorian despite all his sexual and narcotic debauchery remains so unsullied so vibrantly alive'A book that filled its first reviewers with the odour of moral and spiritual putrefaction just got smellier darker and funnier' Observer Dorian will be adored by fans of Will Self and Martin Amis and is an essential read for those who enjoyed The Picture of Dorian GrayWill Self is the author of nine novels including Cock and Bull; My Idea of Fun; Great Apes; How the Dead Live; Dorian an Imitation; The Book of Dave; The Butt; Walking to Hollywood and Umbrella. Oscar Wilde foppish aesthete Limp wristed intelligence with prepared wit language so ethereal that it s like being smothered in a bed of marshmallow clouds Famous book Picture of Dorian Gray about a man who sells his soul to stay forever young and debauchWill Self took that and has written a novel inspired by Picture of Dorian Gray about drug use gay sex and well actually I never got to the point where the plot starts By page 50 I was still struggling my way through hard jagged language and in your face amoral and immoral unpleasantness It feels wrong to say this like I m some tut tutting septuagenarian who thought they were getting a Victorian novel but it s not the drug use and gay sex that I object to no problem with that in other stories It s the fact that that everything is deliberately unpleasant in your face sharp and ugly not to be liked You can t like the characters you can t like what they do nor why they do it and you probably won t even like the vacuous upper crust meets low drug culture worlds they flit throughLife s too short to be yelled at And that s what this feels like like Self has you pigeonholed at the bar and is reading you the poem he wrote after an unpleasant divorce the one that starts fuck you with a spade you dog faced bitch and goes downhill from thereBack to the library it goes with no remorse