Col recalentada

by Irvine Welsh

Paperback, 2012

Status

Available

Call number

118

Description

En estas páginas puedes disfrutar de una cena de Navidad con Begbie (el temible Begbie de Trainspotting) y ver cómo reacciona ante el novio de su hermana y el anuncio de su compromiso. También descubrirás, en El incidente de Rosewell, que alienígenas adictos a los cigarrillos Embassy Regal tienen bajo vigilancia a toda la zona de Midlothian, y su plan es colocar a algunos de sus jóvenes como los nuevos gobernantes del planeta Tierra. Y no te sorprenderá que al protagonista de uno de estos relatos le preocupe más ver por la televisión el partido entre los Hibs y los Harts que la vida de su mujer, o que dos tíos que pelean por una chica guapa descubran -tras pensárselo mejor, y después de unas pocas pastillas y muchas jarras de cerveza- que la amistad entre ellos es en verdad más importante. Y te divertirá reencontrarte con «Juice» Terry Lawson, y presenciar lo que sucede cuando tropieza con su antiguo enemigo, el profesor -ahora retirado-Albert Black bajo las luces estroboscópicas de un club nocturno de Miami Beach.

La mayoría de los relatos de Col recalentada aparecieron por primera vez en los años 90 en revistas y antologías actualmente fuera de circulación. Ahora, editados por fin en un solo tomo, muestran en todo su esplendor la «marca de la casa» de lrvine Welsh, los rasgos distintivos de su literatura: imaginación desenfrenada, humor negro y escandaloso, un finísimo oído para el habla cotidiana y la habilidad para crear algunos de los personajes más memorables de la ficción contemporánea.

Description

Hilarious, shocking and hugely entertaining, Reheated Cabbage has all the classic Irvine Welsh ingredients In Reheated Cabbage you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie and discover how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance. You will meet a husband who values a televised Hibs v Hearts game more than his wife's life and see two guys fighting over a beautiful girl agree - after a few pills and pints of lager - that their friendship is actually more important. And you will be delighted to welcome back 'Juice' Terry Lawson, and to watch what happens when he meets his old nemesis under the strobe-lights of a Miami Beach nightclub. 'The stories combine sly humour with the tang of lived experience. It makes for a terrific collection, showcasing a writer who...has blossomed into one of the most distinctive, and distinguished, observers of British life' Sunday Telegraph… (more)

Tags

Collection

Publication

Editorial Anagrama S.A. (2012), Edition: 1, 288 pages

Physical description

288 p.; 8.66 x 1.02 inches

User reviews

LibraryThing member andrewa121
Irvine Welsh's uncanny ability to present deeply flawed, twisted characters in an honest and humorous way—without pulling punches or offering extranarrative psychological justifications of the characters' personality or actions—is on fine display in many of the gritty, dingy works in this
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collection. That said, it was difficult to retain interest in some stories (especially the longer ones), while one or two seemed very rough around the edges, even accounting for Welsh's trademark "raw" style. All in all, it's worth flipping through for some of the character studies, but it is a bit uneven throughout.
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LibraryThing member 4daisies
I have to say the title of this book is perfect. Reheated Cabbage stinks and so does this book. To be fair- the stories themselves though vulgar, were compelling and darkly humorous, but Welsh's insistence on writing in the dialect of his characters makes each story extremely difficult to read. His
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antagonist in each story is without any redeeming qualities and the reader is never given an opportunity to feel anything for the characters but loathing and disgust. If you are familiar with the vernacular of hardcore Scots English, you will have an easier time.
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LibraryThing member PghDragonMan
Reheated Cabbage is a collection of eight stories from Irvine Welsh. All eight stores have a Scottish connection and most of the dialog is written with a very heavy Scottish brogue and full of Scottish slang. While it may be difficult for many Americans to understand, I suggest you take the time to
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get the full meaning, even reread passages until you do understand them, because the payoff is worth it.

The stories all have a dark side, some with a twist, but all dark and steeped in drug use. I hope the people represented here are purely fictions and not representative of the Scottish people, because if these are real people, they men care more about drinking and football than their wives, the young roam about in drugged up gangs that can make Alex and his gang from Clockwork Orange seem tame.

Like many collections, the stories are uneven, not all are great. Three stand-outs for me were Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It), The Roswell Incident and I Am Miami. Catholic Guilt had a plot twist worthy of a twisted O. Henry storyline. Welsh gives us a new reason why you should be more tolerant of other people’s life style choices and a possible view of purgatory. As I said, a very twisted O. Henry story. The Roswell Incident takes place in another Roswell and shows that authority figures are the same all over, wherever in the galaxy you happen to be, and why you should not boast of being the toughest gang on Earth as that really does not mean much in some places. The last story, I Am Miami, was the deepest in scope and offered a change in venue, if not in theme. This story is set in Miami, Florida and tells of the struggle of a former school teacher coming to grips with his age, loss of his wife and the estrangement he feels from his family. While he feels he may have been a failure as a teacher back in Scotland, a chance meeting with some of his past students shows this is not the case at all. If I enjoyed Catholic Guilt because of the twists, I enjoyed I Am Miami because of the moral and resolution.

If you can get through the written dialect, this is a great collection. I highly suggest it to people who only know him through the film adaptation of his story Train Spotting. While it will not add any dimension to the world he writes about, it does indeed show that Irvine Welsh’s writing can stand on its own without any graphic help from Hollywood.
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LibraryThing member themockturtle
Thomas Hobbes famously described life without government and culture as "... solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Irvine Welsh in this collection of short stories portrays modern life as much the same. Slogging through page after page of dreary, joyless depictions and dialect rendered in
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Scots English, gray skylines against gray horizons punctuated by the red of senseless, random brutality -- I seriously pondered the value of writing that was so evocative as to be startling, but that left me feeling bleak until I felt very little. At the very end though, there was a revelation in the form of the story, "I am Miami".

"I am Miami" is the antithesis to all that came before it, and yet I feel as if the preceding stories were only building to that moment. The beauty of that tale of redemption could not be as fully appreciated by the reader who did not fight through the malaise and violence of the stories that came before: a necessary evil. The only question is, of course, whether the pay-off at the end is worth the time and effort getting there. I suspect, that many people will have put the book down long before they have the chance to find out.
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LibraryThing member erin1
This book sat on my bedside table for two weeks before I finally gathered up the willpower to read it and found myself reluctantly slogging through it.
To be honest, I don't know why I requested this book because I didn't like TRAINSPOTTING and thought it really only appealed to 17 year old boys
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who swore for the sake of swearing and thought poop was hilarious.
I found REHEATED CABBAGE was the same way. A collection of short stories, heavy on the Scottish brogue, with every other word “cunt” or “fuck”. Siiiiiigh. Characters were uninteresting and so were the plots.
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LibraryThing member nstearns
The other reviews covered this pretty well. Did you think that Trainspotting was ruined by the few moments of humanity? Have you wondered how many times you can use the c-word in a story? How do you feel about heroin? I liked Trainspotting reasonably well and then I tried something else of his--I
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can't remember--and was pretty underwhelmed. Welsh no doubt has his hard core fans and this is for them.
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LibraryThing member commodoremarie
Not a book I could realistically recommend to anyone. I opt to give it two stars because it had moments I enjoyed, but unfortunately they were few and far between.

I came at this collection of short stories having neither read any of his previous material nor seen any of the resultant film
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adaptations. I did not know what to expect, but was hopeful that I would enjoy this as something of a 'taste test' of Welsh's work. Alas, I took a bitter bite.

I was immediately hit with the thick Scottish brogue which made it excessively difficult to slog through even a few pages of the text. I have some background with Ireland's own interpretation of the English language, so I was hardly a remedial student, but even then I not-infrequently had to re-read a passage. And while that itself isn't necessarily a problem, I object to how frequently it occurred and to what little payoff. Oh, I see, the character is talking about the same things he was talking about for the previous six pages, hooray! It was a challenge each time I picked up this book to summon the will to finish.

Save the first and last stories, and a slight twist to one in the middle, the characters all came off as cookie-cutter druggie youth, with little attention to character development. The first story is quite funny, the last features decent plot without the plodding of the priors, but overall the pieces blur together with little payoff.

Not terribly important, but there were several apparent typos, though because I have a pre-release version of the book I assume these have been found and fixed.

In summation, I think this book may be enjoyed by existing fans of the author, but the rest of us should probably steer clear.
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LibraryThing member DevonAnn
I can't really classify this as a review as I've only finished the first story in the book. I want to get through it, I have a fair amount of experience both reading and listening to various English dialects, but this is hard to get through. It really is like reading in another language and I have
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to continually stop and process sentences. I haven't read any other Irvine Welsh, and I haven't seen Trainspotting in years (although I did like it). Once I finish this semester I will plow through this and write a real review!
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LibraryThing member Nessus
Sorry to be so long with this review; I am still not sure where to begin. I'd first recommend that the first story or two be read twice, in order to get a good feel for the dialect. Once you reach a suitable comfort level with the scottish dialect, you will probably also be accustomed to the
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ever-present profanity. (Not that I was particularly offended, but I rarely find this level of profanity in anything I've read, let alone anything worthwhile.) Throughout the book, the characters seem to come from the near-bottom of working class society, and are purposely drawn with few if any redeeming virtues. The stories are compelling, sometimes mesmerizing. They draw you in, and hold you, as if you were watching a train wreck, or a house fire. As suggested by the title, most stories here are reprints, and are bitter, jaundiced stories in which the protagonist rarely finds escape from his situation, or redemption either in the story or the reader's perceptions. The only exception to this is the last story,I Am Miami, the only previously unpublished offering included here. One gets the impression that having achieved some modicum of success, the author has become a bit less cynical and hence more sympathetic with his creations. I give the book three stars because I enjoyed parts of it, and elsewhere it compelled me to go on. It is not a book you could casually recommend to anyone whose tastes you were not familiar with, but I'm sure we all know someone (not your mother) who might enjoy it.
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LibraryThing member KevinRubin
“Reheated Cabbage” had some good stories and some lesser ones and one I just couldn’t get into enough to read the whole thing.

My favorite one was “I Am Miami,” bringing back some of my favorite Welsh characters, Carl “N-Sign” Ewart and Terry “Juice” Lawson. It’s told from the
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perspective of one of their old school teachers, who’s sort of unhappily living in Miami, long after his retirement and his wife’s passing. He just happens to bump into Carl and Terry, who are in Miami for a party…

Of course, any story or chapter of a story with Terry Lawson is going to be fun, he’s simply a hardcore, fun-loving guy.

“I Am Miami” was worth the price of the book alone.

The story, “State of the Party” was pretty good, too, with a couple of characters, Crooky and Calum, taking drugs in a bar and going to a party with some serious mishaps that get them kicked out of the party onto the street.

I also enjoyed “Victor Spoils” and “Elspeth’s Boyfriend” the latter of which starred Frank Begbie ruining his family’s Christmas dinner because he doesn’t like his sister, Elspeth’s new boyfriend.

“A Fault on the Line” was a completely shocking story about a man who doesn’t care about much of anything except drinking and football.

The remaining stories I didn’t enjoy all that much.

There was definitely some spice in the, uh, reheated cabbage to keep it from being bland and boring. I probably wouldn't recommend this to someone else as their first Welsh book (start with "Trainspotting" or "Glue"), but an absolute must read for Welsh fans.
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Call number

118

Language

Original language

Spanish

ISBN

8433978314 / 9788433978318
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