Status
Call number
Description
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)
Genres
Collection
Publication
Physical description
User reviews
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.
"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.
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
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.
I came at this collection of short stories having neither read any of his previous material nor seen any of the resultant film
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.
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
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.