Morvern Callar by Alan Warner Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Morvern Callar
Book Review: Gorgeous
Summary: 5 Stars
this first novel has been unjustly ignored, if life was fair it should have been a bestseller. but of course life is not any fairer for warner as it is for his character morvern, whose dull life in oban (i presume) is mind-numbingly repetative. that is until she wakes up to find her bloke has slit his throat in their flat. from this seemingly devastating beginning morvern goes on thru twists and turns, not to find herself (i think she knew herself pretty well before) but to live the life she has always deserved. she is not an emotionally incompetant bitch as has been suggested, she taps into something much more mythic and sensual. funny, sexy and ultimately uplifting, in an odd manner. warner cannot write a bad line.Book Review: Hero ? What Hero?
Summary: 1 Stars
Novels compose a literary category which is supposed to tell stories not untold them. If the main topic of the novel is focused in the character it fails badly get into her mind and explain its workings. We never know which are the causes or reasons for her behaviour. Such detached reaction to the suicide of a steady boyfriend at least needs some background. Now, if the main topics is how the plot evolves, the author also gets a big "F minus". The rave scene is barely depicted, nor what was the purpose of having the suicide boyfriend writing a novel to be posthumously plagiarized by her, or what about her bizarre friendships, just to name a few of the carelessly untied knots.Why the two stars then? Well at least to read a novel in which most of the written words are the names of music bands and their songs is original, but to my knowledge a multimedia novel is category that is not available here in Amazon.com nor anywhere. So unless you download the songs in your MP3 you also fails to see comprehend the forces that move Morvy.
Book Review: Holden Caufield Does "E"
Summary: 3 Stars
In an word, "eh."
*Morvern Callar* left me cold. Author Alan Warner writes the narrative as an extended monologue on his title character's part, which, because he steeps it in Gaelic-laced idiom and stream-of-consciousness phrasing, makes for difficult reading. Warner is clearly reaching for subtlety in doing this, and for the most part he succeeds. But what he wishes subtly to convey is a disappointingly conventional tale of anomie and alienation.
The novel's main defect is that Morvern much too closely resembles her obvious literary forebears -- Holden Caufield, Mersault, Gide's immoralist -- to make much of an impression in her own right. Simply take one of these forebears, outfit him with appropriate contemporary doo-dads (a Walkman, Ecstasy, mirror shades), change his sex, and you have Morvern Callar.
Morvern is certainly a victim of the postmodern condition. A foster child working a dead-end job in an economically depressed Scottish town, she endures an ongoing crisis of meaning that she tries to alleviate by resorting to the "small pleasures" to be had by binge drinking, pill popping and engaging in anonymous sex. This sort of desultory hedonism blights Morvern's moral outlook, as the reader discovers early in the novel.
Morvern does, however, undergo a transformation of a sort as she begins to understand the realities conditioning her disaffection, but the ethos she develops in the novel -- an improbable admixture of Dionysiac ecstasy, feeble piety and muted atavism -- aren't nearly as satisfying to the reader as they are to Morvern. Which is another way of saying that Alan Warner, working in the tradition of Salinger, Camus and Gide, doesn't break any new ground. *Morvern Callar* apparently remains content to observe the protocols of hipster posturing, perhaps because Warner wishes it to retain market appeal as a zeitgeist novel or as an exposé of the shocking lengths young people today go to fill an existential void within them. And, like most works of this sort, it trades on sensationalism made only more sensationalistic for being related in Morvern's deadpan manner. Warner refuses to show the reader a way beyond contemporary afflictions apart from some personal "truth" cobbled together from the cultural flotsam left in modernity's wake.
This way beyond I cannot claim to know; what it would look like I cannot say. But this is why we have art, and why we need great artists. Only they can offer us a glimpse of the path out of any current eudaimonic stalemate. *Morvern Callar* is, then, more conciliatory than visionary, more quietist than revolutionary, and thus cannot, in my opinion, be regarded as great
Book Review: It's about language, music, escape, and life being handed on
Summary: 5 Stars
It seems that readers (see above reviews) saw the depressing table setting here and looked no further. Actually, the book is exhilarating. Morvern's tongue is a potent cocktail of Scots, slang, and autodidactic poetry, and it's more erotic in and of itself than anything since the motels sequence of Lolita. Her character, far from blank or emotionless, is wanton, savage, but with great depths of wisdom--she's a changeling, and her story is almost mythic, beginning with its premise. This book has a pulse you can nearly dance to, but, like some great undiscovered piece of trance dub, it has symphonic undercurrents, with a strange and terrible beauty.Book Review: It's funny
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm only saying this because no-one else has mentioned it. This book is really quite funny. In a Scottish kind of way.