Happy Friday! This week our Cataloging & Acquisitions Librarian, Adam Pellman, delves into the novel that inspired one of his favorite movies: Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Irvine Welsh's cult novel Trainspotting is one that I've been wanting to read for a long time, and I finally came across a used copy in a bookstore last summer. It's the paperback edition that was published in the U.S. to coincide with the release of the book's acclaimed 1996 film adaptation, a pinnacle of 1990s British cinema that has long been a favorite of mine. The novel depicts the lives of a small group of Edinburgh junkies and their close circle of friends and acquaintances, and focuses primarily on heroin addict Mark Renton. The novel's structure is almost like a collection of short stories, jumping around in time and switching narrators from chapter to chapter, and its tone veers from grim to riotously funny without missing a beat.
The biggest challenge for me in reading this novel is a linguistic one. Much of the novel is written in Scots rather than British English, so that "didn't" becomes "didnae," "always" becomes "eywis," and slang terms like "ken" and "radge" are used in place of "know" and "crazy," respectively. The book comes with a handy glossary to help readers like me decipher the slang, but I find that if I read the text with a Scottish accent in my mind, the meanings of most of the Scots words are apparent without the need for the glossary. The language is one of many elements that lend the novel its authenticity, and it's a book that I've really enjoyed reading, despite its sometimes unrelentingly dark subject matter.
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