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    Old Men in Love
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    Old Men in Love
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    Old Men in Love
    Ebook402 pages5 hours

    Old Men in Love

    By Alasdair Gray

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook


    'A great writer, perhaps the greatest living in Britain today' WILL SELF
    ____________________________
    A dazzlingly original and expansive tale about the possibilities of storytelling from the celebrated Scottish author of Poor Things and Lanark.

    Old Men in Love, like The Arabian Nights, is about a storyteller whose stories contain other stories. In his trademark way, Alasdair Gray playfully blends narrative styles and locations; Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset mingle with Britain under the New Labour Party, viewed from the West End of Glasgow. More than half is fact and the rest possible, but it must be read to be believed.
    ____________________________
    'A necessary genius' ALI SMITH

    'One of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times'     NICOLA STURGEON

    'The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott' ANTHONY BURGESS
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 11, 2014
    ISBN9781408856376
    Unavailable
    Old Men in Love
    Author

    Alasdair Gray

    ALASDAIR GRAY won the the Whitbread and Guardian Awards for Poor Things. He is also the author of The Book of Prefaces, the story-collection Ten Tales Tall and True, and the groundbreaking modern classic Lanark.

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    Reviews for Old Men in Love

    3.5/5

    26 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Who said If you can't make your novel great at least make it peculiar? I don't recall. Anyway, that appears to be the modus operandi in Alasdair Gray's Old Men In Love. John Tunnock, a retired Glaswegian school teacher, has been found murdered in his Glasgow home and the crime is unsolved when his nearest relative is tracked down in Beverly Hills, California, and bequeathed a modest legacy. It includes Tunnock's house and numerous miscellaneous writings. A fictional Alasdair Gray is consulted as to the proper disposition of the manuscripts and advises the legatee to publish them all in a single volume, despite the fact that they are a pastiche of many projects worked on by Tunnock over a many years. Is this a novel? I think that's the question Gray wishes to ask. Gray does make an attempt to piece it all together through his "editing." And it is readable. I did finish it despite one or two tedious stretches. There are some excellent pages. It's the structure I'm not crazy about.

      The book reads very much like what it is purported to be: a grab bag of miscellaneous writings. These focus on (1) Pericles and ancient Athens, (2) Fra Fillipo Lippi and Renaissance Florence, (3) the rise and gradual eclipse of Victorian-era religious fraud Henry James Prince, (4) extracts from the late Tunnock's diaries and (5) other bouncy bits. Gray as editor makes an occassional marginal comment in blue ink. The only part I had to fight through (a little) was the overlong section on Henry James Prince, a millenarian like many others but with his own peculiarly sleazoid take on the Second Coming. Like other books by Gray, including the masterwork Lanark, the novel gives one a glimpse of present-day Glasgow. The book itself is a nice production. I have the UK edition (Bloombury) which was printed in Italy (acid-free paper?) and bound with sewn signatures (who still does that?) in elaborately embossed faux-buckram boards. Recommended for those who love Gray. Not his best book despite some fine writing. Newcomers should start with Lanark.
    • 3/5
      Old Men in Love by Alasdair Gray (2009) 311 ppThis is one of the few books I've bought in a while that was not on my wishlist. I had heard of the author (who wrote Lanark which is on the 1001 list and is on my shelf), and what I began to read in the store grabbed me, so I bought it.The opening part I read in the store consists of a narrative by a long-lost cousin of retired school teacher John Tunnock. She has recently learned that she is the sole heir of Tunnock, who died under mysterious circumstances. She is now in Glasgow to settle his estate, which includes a large antique-filled mansion. She is also going through his papers to determine how they should be handled. The rest of the book consists of portions of these papers. The papers include excerpts from a number of unpublished novels by Tunnock. One is set in ancient Rome and is about Socrates, one is set in Renaissance Italy and is about some of the more important early masters, and one is set in 19th century England about James Prince, founder of the Agapements. In between excerpts of the novels, Tunnock relates the story of his life, from a childhood spent with his elderly spinster aunts to the bizarre events that led to his death.I generally enjoy meta-fiction and books in which the author plays games with the reader, but I didn't particularly care for this book. I never fully engaged with John Tunnock's "novels", and while parts of his life were interesting reading, overall this wasn't enough to make it a good book for me. I can't point to any specific examples of bad writing--the catch just didn't match the hook.
    • 3/5
      Alasdair Gray's books are unusual, as they present a total art work. Gray presents us with some more original features of so-called "postmodern literature", which includes adopting different "voices", illogical order of chapters, illustrations, mixing text types, and experimental layout. Old Men in Love. John Tunnock's posthumous papers has all these characteristics.I very much enjoyed reading the first part of the book, as the author addressed contemporary issues, but after the first 100 pages, the book started losing focus. All in all, I felt the book was more readable than other work I have read by Gray.