The second volume of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series contains some of the best and most realistic representations of drug use I have found in literature. The aristocratic Patrick Melrose, whose ancestors were on the winning side of the Battle of Hastings, flies to New York on the Concorde, sets himself up at the Pierre Hotel, and takes a cab down to Alphabet City to top off his heroin supply. It goes downhill from there.
If you are looking for an alternate view of the British aristocracy or if you consider the privileged class a haven for buggery and hard drugs, then Bad News is for you (but read the first volume, Never Mind, first).
For more on this compelling author and the complete Patrick Melrose series, see Edward St. Aubyn.
sorry, sir… but you just know i’m going to be so obvious and mention de quincey… whose minor biog you can find, sitated ont he wall, of the wetherspoons pub of manchester city center – as he was a frequenter of the center library etc etc etc born in manchester…. your thoughts on thomas de quincey would be welcome…
also; herman broch – i have accessed a few pages of his letters… as i do not find books of missives that interesting i was wondering if he is worth perusing r.e. books such as sleepwalkers etc?
regards
jonathan
I read de Quincy twice and it was more interesting for its literary merits than for a raw, realistic depiction of the experiences with a missed shot in the muscle or an extra potent speedball knocking our hero off his feet to sleep for hours on the bathroom floor in his own vomit.
Hermann Broch is an excellent contemporary German author that I really must read more. His prose, like Mann before him, is dense and cerebral, far different from the predictable popular fiction that packs the shelves at the local big-box-bookstore. I wish I could read German better for just such authors as Broch.
How about A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil?
i must say, i will certainly get into the swing r.e. broch… mann? i read certain of his short stories in a pub – they had decent literary pulp on the shelves, therein… and it beat just sitting there wondering at the women… there is that stain of the past that carries itself along with any writer of a certain period in german history… gross being another writer that has been tarnished… same goes with celine – who i refuse to hack to death (metaphorically speaking, of course) due to our incomprehension of his literary of cerebral motives… i really do think that anyone with the werewithal to string a sentence together can’t be all that bad – and we should really look at the motives of a reader of literature than the writer, to some degree… don’t you think?
i had the good fortune to spend sometime at th elocal oxfam charity store – and found a good many decent pieces of prose – the gargantua and pantagruel, the tin drum book, the wind in the willows, a beatles rarity etc etc etc…
thoughi fear expounding on all this will only fuel the thieving and peevish, voracious natures of those who have stolen too much from me already…
i.e. i am still trynna find the dolt who broke in my home and stole my celine book (cannon fodder) and the russian art postcards i bought in good faith and good nature….
regards
cerebrally deft
jonathan
p.s. you may aid in my fending off the avaricious natures of my neighbourhood blaggarts, if you wish, as i am at a loss with what to do with these retarded folk.