I've tried audible and scribd and even librivox and I can't find any. Any help? In particular looking for Poor Things/ 1982, Janine/something leather.
EDIT: would like Lanark too
Bit of a long shot here as I'm not sure how widely read Alasdair Gray is in his native Scotland, let alone elsewhere.
I was browsing the second hand shelves at my local bookshop and picked up Lanark (his best known novel) and Unlikely Stories, Mostly - which is a collection of increasingly weird short stories. Gray was an artist as well as a writer so they are beautiful books, with great cover designs and sketches in amongst the chapters. I've never read any of his stuff, but I have seen some of his artwork in galleries in Scotland, so I thought I'd give him a go
Lanark is pretty hefty, maybe 600 pages, so I thought I'd start off easy with the short stories first. A few stories in and I was absolutely loving it. I've seen Gray likened to Kafka, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges - all of whom I love, and I can see flavours of all of them in the stories. Some are funny, some are dark, but all of them are surreal.
10 stories in and I get to something called Logopandocy. It's not really a story, so much as Gray writing from the perspective of a Sir Thomas Urquhart about;
"a dialogue with the late Protector Cromwell's Latin secretary, which neatly unfolds a scheme to repair the divided nature of mam by rationally reintegering gods gift of tongues to Adam by a verboradically appliancing of Neper's logarythyms to the grammar of an Asiatick people, thought to be the lost tribe of Israel, whose language predates the Babylonic Cataclysm"
Now I find this difficult to follow already, but the thing is more than 60 pages, all written in this impenetrable style, with made up words and interspersed with lists of names that I don't understand the significance of. And it doesn't even flow from one page to the next normally; parts of it are broken into columns, and sometimes the columns cut diagonally across the page, and then don't continue onto the next page but skip forward a page...
Am I supposed to be able to read this like an actual story? Or is it an artwork made up of wacky typesetting and impenetrable prose?
In a way its kind of impressive that he managed to write so much in a way that is nearly impossible to read. But WHY?
Has anyone read this? If so what did you think about it? What is it supposed to mean?
Was going through Alasdair Gray's (fois dhut) catalog to add to my 2020 reading list and saw he wrote this with current Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins back in 2004.
Don't know much about Tomkins tbh. I see that he's listed in the book blurb as a "committed republican".
He died in hospital on Sunday with his family at his side.
from National Updates https://www.itv.com/news/2019-12-29/artist-and-author-alasdair-gray-dies-aged-85/
