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"Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts."--The Times (London) "Our nearest contemporary equivalent to Blake, our sweetest-natured screwed-up visionary."--London Evening Standard Alasdair Gray's unique melding of humor and metafiction at once hearken back to Laurence Sterne and sit beside today's literary mash-ups with equal comfort. Old Men in Love is smart, down-to-earth, funny, bawdy, politically inspired, dark, multi-layered, and filled with the kind of intertextual play that Gray delights in. As with Gray's previous novel Poor Things, several partial narratives are presented together. Here the conceit is that they were all discovered in the papers of the late John Tunnock, a retired Glasgow teacher who started a number of novels in settings as varied as Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset, and Britain under New Labour. This is the first US edition (updated with the author's corrections from the UK edition) of a novel that British critics lauded as one of the best of Gray's long career. Beautifully printed in two colors throughout and featuring Gray's trademark strong design, Old Men in Love will stand out from everything else on the shelf. Fifty percent is fact and the rest is possible, but it must be read to be believed. Alasdair Gray is one of Scotland's most well-known and acclaimed artists. He is the author of nine novels, including Lanark, 1982 Janine, and the Whitbread and Guardian Prize-winning Poor Things, as well as four collections of stories, two collections of poetry, and three books of nonfiction, including The Book of Prefaces. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.… (more)
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I very much enjoyed reading the first part of the book, as the author addressed contemporary issues, but after the first 100 pages, the book started losing focus. All in all, I felt the book was more readable than other work I have read by Gray.
This is one of the few books I've bought in a while that was not on my wishlist. I had heard of the author (who wrote Lanark which is on the 1001 list and is on my shelf), and what I began to read in the store grabbed me, so I bought it.
The opening part
The papers include excerpts from a number of unpublished novels by Tunnock. One is set in ancient Rome and is about Socrates, one is set in Renaissance Italy and is about some of the more important early masters, and one is set in 19th century England about James Prince, founder of the Agapements. In between excerpts of the novels, Tunnock relates the story of his life, from a childhood spent with his elderly spinster aunts to the bizarre events that led to his death.
I generally enjoy meta-fiction and books in which the author plays games with the reader, but I didn't particularly care for this book. I never fully engaged with John Tunnock's "novels", and while parts of his life were interesting reading, overall this wasn't enough to make it a good book for me. I can't point to any specific examples of bad writing--the catch just didn't match the hook.
The book reads very much like what it is purported to be: a grab bag of miscellaneous writings. These focus on (1) Pericles and ancient Athens, (2) Fra Fillipo Lippi and Renaissance Florence, (3) the rise and gradual eclipse of Victorian-era religious fraud Henry James Prince, (4) extracts from the late Tunnock's diaries and (5) other bouncy bits. Gray as editor makes an occassional marginal comment in blue ink. The only part I had to fight through (a little) was the overlong section on Henry James Prince, a millenarian like many others but with his own peculiarly sleazoid take on the Second Coming. Like other books by Gray, including the masterwork Lanark, the novel gives one a glimpse of present-day Glasgow. The book itself is a nice production. I have the UK edition (Bloombury) which was printed in Italy (acid-free paper?) and bound with sewn signatures (who still does that?) in elaborately embossed faux-buckram boards. Recommended for those who love Gray. Not his best book despite some fine writing. Newcomers should start with Lanark.