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Title: The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh ISBN: 1-84195-383-0 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A good first book
Comment: When its main charismatic protagonist, the disaffected and dissolute Rilke comes upon a hidden collection of disturbing erotic photographs during a house clearance, he feels compelled to unearth more about the deceased owner who coverted them.
What results is an edgy, gritty, and, gutsy story that never lets up the drammatic tension. Yes - I absolutely loved the portrayal of Rilke as a flawed but moral person. Welsh has constructed a wonderfully ambivalent ani-hero; someone that I'm sure so many gay men can relate to.
This is an elegant, atmospheric and almost gothic book, and I just loved how the author so drammatically brings the underworld streets of Glasgow to life.
I'm going to wait anxiously for Welsh's next installment, as this novel definitely deserves a sequel.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wow!
Comment: As a Glaswegian abroad, I was delighted to read this book, which captures the feel of my home city so convincingly. The writing style, description and dialogue seem to draw heavily on the noir tradition, in literature but also I suspect in movies - I wasn't surprised to read that this is being made into a film in the UK. I loved the central character, Rilke. He was a true original, and for me, an old fashioned hero, flawed but deeply moral. This has been billed as a thriller, but I think that's missing much of the point of the book. Yes, the plot will keep you reading, but it's the vivid atmosphere and superb characters that will stay with you long after you put this book down.
Rating: 4
Summary: Nicely-done debut.
Comment: Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room (Canongate, 2002)
This is one of those books where the reader who isn't an insider is going to enjoy it, but the person who knows is going to get far more out of it. Another in the seemingly endless list of British mystery authors turning out stunning debut novels is Louise Welsh, who introduces us to homosexual auctioneer Rilke (no first name, at least not that I caught), whose auction house is offered a job clearing out the estate of a dead man, with one caveat: the person offering the job (the man's sister) wants the contents of the attic destroyed. He must agree not to sell them, not to keep the, but to burn them. Rilke discovers, in the attic, among other things, a series of pictures that look as if they are of the torture and murder of a woman almost half a century ago, and he sets out to track down the identity of the woman in the pictures, stirring up a hornets' nest on both sides of the law while doing so.
The mystery itself is a good thing, but you can read any superlatives I have to say about it in my reviews of the debut novels by Mark Billingham, China Mieville, Erin Hart, or a score of others I've penned over the past year. Welsh goes one further, adding slices of Rilke's sexual exploits into the mystery that are so realistic I wondered off and on throughout the novel whether "Louise Welsh" is actually a pseudonym for a gay man, and the picture on the back jacket is the wife of the guy Stephen King used for Richard Bachmann's back cover picture. The emotional tugging of loneliness while resisting the cruising spots just down the road, the nervous ecstasy of hurried sex in a public place, even the odd, paradoxical thrill of the roundup, all are handled with such stark realism, and the flavors herein are so germane to the cruising culture, that if Louise Welsh really is Louise Welsh (and not Louis), she possesses an amazing talent for assimilating character depth that portends a fantastic career ahead.
You want to read this one, but it might turn your stomach. You have been warned. *** ½
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Title: Bangkok 8 by John Burdett ISBN: 1400040442 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Winter Queen : A Novel by Boris Akunin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 1400060494 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy ISBN: 0743244354 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Fortress of Solitude : A Novel by Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0385500696 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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