Word: lanark
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Lanark,” Alasdair Gray’s hefty first novel, is often called the “Scottish Ulysses.” The term is a reductive one, a kind of shorthand for any book that comes from the edges of the British Isles, documents the internal struggles of a young man, and experiments heavily with form. Granted, this may seem like a rather limited class of books; but no category, however specific, can hold this novel: though Gray—as much as any modern writer—owes a debt to Joyce, “Lanark?...
Interestingly, Gray chooses to enclose this achievement of realism within a frame narrative that is pure fantasy. The story of Lanark, a young amnesiac who inhabits a strange, dystopian world, neatly bookends Thaw’s. The two narratives never directly intersect: to Lanark, Thaw is only a character in a story told to him in a hospital (admittedly, a story that takes up two hundred pages...
...Lanark who seems the more unreal of the two. His life, in some ways, draws a hyperbolic counterpart to Thaw’s: where Thaw suffers from eczema, Lanark contracts a horrific illness known as dragonhide. Where Thaw’s Glasgow is a dreary, workaday city, Lanark’s surroundings are a dehumanized industrial nightmare. The tales of the two men stand well on their own; read together, however, each story illuminates the other, calling out to each other across the borders of narrative to create a single masterpiece...
...written word. Descriptions of dinner are laid out across a page as if the words were dishes upon a table; God (or is it the author?) speaks in the margins. Perhaps most notoriously, Gray often engages in bouts of metafiction throughout his novels: in “Lanark,” he arranges a meeting between character and author, compiles a list of largely nonsensical footnotes, and inserts an epilogue a good eighty pages before the end of the book...
...Lanark: A Life in Four Books By Alasdair Gray George Braziller In Stores...