Ridiculous Idealism

Spotting Trains

It took me a month but yesterday I finally finished Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.

And I have to say that though I've read some fairly disturbing books in my life, this one takes the cake!

It has graphic details of druggies and junkies, with the underlying sense of desperation which outlines most of our lives. It's entirely and completely gross, especially that famous scene where the Rent Boy digs through his own feces for the opium suppositories he has deposited in his rectum, and when Kelly squeezes her menstrual blood from a tampon into the soup of a disgusting lecherous prick and at times I would squeeze my eyes shut and vow not to go any further but barely half an hour would pass before I would return fanatically to it, some sort of self-defeating, uncontrollable need governing my desire to read the book in its entirety.

And it was worth it. Because, we, like the characters in the book, are all really searching and searching for some sort of identity, some sort of reason for which we would actually want to live for. Some reason, besides the everyday humdrum, why we should continue to live until the end of our lives, instead of taking it into our own hands and ending it then and there. And even as Rents flounders through his life, picking at it desultarily, bringing about his own doom, I felt compassion for him, pride as he finally cleaned up, and disappointment when he succumbs again. And life is like that. We flounder through it unhappily, watching as we bring about our own self-destruction and we realize it and 'clean-up' but that's only for some time before we relapse into the morally depraved world we've built for ourselves.

Is everything really worth it?

posted by Books inc @ 7:20 AM