A Disaffection - Hardcover

Kelman, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374140243 ISBN 13: 9780374140243

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989

Synopsis

Patrick Doyle, a Glasgow schoolteacher drowning in despair, can no longer control his students or his life and retreats into the world of corrugated cardboard pipes--a musical sanctuary of his own invention

About this title

About the Author:

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. His books include Not not while the giro, The Busconductor Hines, A Chancer, Greyhound for breakfast, which won the 1987 Cheltenham Prize, and A Disaffection, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novel, How late it was, how late won the 1994 Booker Prize. James Kelman lives in Glasgow with his wife and two daughters.

From Library Journal:

Patrick Doyle, a 29-year-old Glasgow schoolteacher, feels hopelessly trapped in a life of compromise and hypocrisy. A closet revolutionary who believes that all teachers are Establishment lackeys, Doyle despises his colleagues but has no other social contacts. His life is an endless round of lunch-hour pints in working-class pubs, cheap take-out dinners, and lonely weekends in his dreary flat, where his only amusement is playing imaginary music on cardboard "pipes" that he salvaged from the trash. Like a Samuel Beckett character, Doyle swings from suicidal despair to grin-and-bear-it resignation with pendulum-like regularity. Only Kelman's linguistic virtuosity--especially his use of Scots dialect, which can make the most depressing statements sound hilariously funny--keeps the book from collapsing under its own weight. Expect a limited but enthusiastic audience for this one.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0374140243
• ISBN 13: 9780374140243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 337