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    Kieron Smith, Boy
    Unavailable
    Kieron Smith, Boy
    Unavailable
    Kieron Smith, Boy
    Ebook532 pages10 hours

    Kieron Smith, Boy

    By James Kelman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An award-winning novel of urban boyhood: “No other . . . comes as close as this to Catcher in the Rye.” —The Literary Review

    A Man Booker Prize–winning author brings us inside the head of a young boy in a novel that offers a “splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow” (The Washington Post).
     
    Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five to early adolescence amid the general trauma of everyday life—the death of a beloved grandparent, the move to a new home. A whole world is brilliantly realized: sectarian football matches; ferryboats on the river; the unfairness of being a younger brother; climbing drainpipes, trees, and roofs; dogs, cats, sex, and ghosts—all rendered in the unmistakable perspective of youth, offering “a vivid reminder that childhood is a foreign country” (Kirkus Reviews).
     
    “A book full of the wonder of growing up . . . A magnificent and important novel.” —Financial Times
     
    “Recalls the modernist experiments of Joyce and Woolf . . . Kelman is a writer of singular will and sincerity.” —The New York Times Book Review
     
    “As an urban coming-of-age, the novel also reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. . . . This funny, sad and deeply entrancing novel works as dreams do: by seduction, by raising strange spirits, and by delivering a world entire. It represents a triumph for Kelman, as hard and uproarious as a Glasgow Saturday night.” —The Washington Post
     
    “Kelman’s raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron’s loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 10, 2008
    ISBN9780547541174
    Unavailable
    Kieron Smith, Boy
    Author

    James Kelman

    James Kelman was born in Glasgow, June 1946, and left school in 1961. He began work in the printing trade then moved around, working in various jobs in various places. He was living in England when he started writing: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria. He committed to it and kept at it. In 1969 he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales. They settled in Glasgow and still live in the dump, not far from their kids and grandkids. He still plugs away at the ramblings, musings, politicking and so on, supported by the same lady.

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    Reviews for Kieron Smith, Boy

    3.5/5

    35 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Outstanding. One of the best through-the-eyes-of-a-child books I've ever read, right up there with Catcher in the Rye. For linguistic brilliance it can only be compared to those early chapters of Portrait of the Artist. There's not a lot of plot, but I just felt so attached to Kieron that I wanted to keep reading. It's moving and powerful and sweet and funny, and the narrative voice is pulled off almost flawlessly. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This novel without plot, without climax, presents a brilliant insight into adolescence--capturing the wild careening of emotions, the wonders and fears in a boy's day and rhythm of language. Despite the absence of plot, Kieron Smith, the central character, matures over the course of the novel and the reader comes to care for this brash, adventuresome, sometimes selfish, but also sympathetic boy.
    • 3/5
      Kieron Smith provides an account of his life as a young boy (pre teens) living in Glasgow. From a somewhat deprived family, with a narrow minded father and a mother who dreams of better for her sons earning her the label 'snob', and an older brother growing increasingly distant as he tries to study his way out of poverty, Kieron is very much his own person. He has his own standards of right and wrong which may not always coincide with what is acceptable, and the basis of his judgement of others often comes down to whether or not they are a good fighter and prove loyal to their pals.Kieron speaks with the voice of an intelligent but naive young boy, and he speaks not in standard English; his oft repeated expressions some will find quaint and endearing, others may find irritating. He has much to say yet in the end it amounts to very little, and he often repeats himself. He is preoccupied with his fighting abilities, his prowess as a climber and the unfairness of life as he sees it.The account has no real beginning or end, it simply is, and over the course of its many pages there are no significant happenings, it is just a coverage of the life of a young boy. After my first attempt at reading I put the book down after about 80 pages finding little to hold me, but picking it up again some months later I began to be drawn too Kieron Smith, the boy that is, and it was that along with the way he expresses himself that kept me going to the end, for there was enough there to care about; but there was little else other than the picture Kelman draws of life in the past in deprived areas of Glasgow.
    • 2/5
      I couldn't finish this book. Too much misery, child abuse and cruelty... it just didn't seem to end.
    • 1/5
      I don't know if it was because it was written in Scottish dialect or the endless run on sentences that kept repeating, or if it had more to do with the complete and utter lack of plot, but this was the most painful book I read in a long time.

      I get that it was the thoughts of a 12-13 yr old boy, and maybe I just can't relate, but WOW I really did not enjoy this book.
    • 2/5
      I admire what James Kelman was trying to do here with his novel "Kieron Smith, Boy" but ultimately I didn't feel it was successful. The story focuses on Kieron Smith and his inner thoughts as he wends his way through his preteen years, but I found his inner thoughts to be really dull. This was a real struggle to get through it.
    • 3/5
      Told through the thoughts and with the voice of one young Scottish lad, Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman is in fact, made very distinctive by the Glaswegian dialect that Kieron uses. For me, this made the book a little more difficult but also gave it an authenticity that drew me in. Unfortunately after 300 or so pages this ‘stream of consciousness’ style started to wear thin and I still had another 100 or so pages to go. While the boy’s voice was truly authentic it was also realistic enough that you soon realized that youngsters of this age don’t have much of interest to talk about. Kieron is growing up in one of Glasgow’s poorer neighbourhoods. His parents are difficult to get a handle on as in Kieron’s eyes, his dad is always behind the newspaper and his mother is always watching the television. His battles with his older brother did bring a smile to my face having been in Kieron’s position with an older sister who always thought she was in the right. The story flows with the day-to-day tedium of Kieron’s observations that carry him from about age 5 through to 13.A book that started out well but wasn’t able to keep from fading into boredom, Kieron Smith, Boy felt too long for a book where nothing really happens.
    • 5/5
      This is a fine book. Kieron Smith's voice is great. It carries you into a real, authentic world, profound but also uniquely individual. It's the sort of book you can read as much of or as little of at one sitting as you like, because it flows like real life, and is not over plotted