Author : Will Self
What is it about : The book included a couple of stories loosely connected detailing the author's (in first person) encounters with various eccentric/insane characters in his life. The clever dude in his class who excelled in researching and investigating the esoteric minority jungle tribe who was best known for the tribe's complete dullness and ordinariness; his friend eventually married one of these dull tribeswoman and both settled in the middle of the London Home Counties; the author's other friend included Jim who was obsessed with the philosophy of "Waiting" or in actual fact "waiting too much" and Jim eventually was converted into a semi-Cult where the main practice was navigating the London streets in a complete trance while finding the quickest way (by driving at a furious speed) from start to finish; the author's own insanity also came under scrutiny by the readers as he met his dead mother who "moved" to "another part of London" after she died; they even had tea and cakes at her "new place" in East London to catch up with old times.
Some thoughts after having read the book : Amusing and at times thought-provoking in that the readers would quickly start assessing the meaning of sanity as the thin grey line which separated eccentricity and madness. In one story, the psycho-therapy in vogue was to swap roles between patients and doctors in a mad-house and the author was inadvertently drawn into the quagmire of turning himself from a visiting psycho-analyst into one of the patients.
Would I recommend this book to you : Witty, dark and at turns I found the stories rather frightening in how one's mind and psycho-well-being could so easily be affected by obsession, therapy-in-vogue and those around you whom you thought harmless or just a bit eccentric and it turned out that in fact, you''re the one going mental gradually under these influences. And by the way, the Quantity Theory Of Insanity revolved around the idea that the "Total Sanity" in a certain society/grouping remained constant depending on the composition of demography of race, age, family units, incomes and so on; sane theory or what ?
0 comments:
Post a Comment