Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

How Late It Was, How Late

Name: How Late It Was, How Late
Author: James Kelman
ISBN: 9780393327991

by James Kelman

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. In his hangover haze, he starts a fight with a pair of plainclothes policemen and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and completely blind. And things get worse: his girlfriend disappears, the authorities question him for a crime they won't name, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare bureaucracy. Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish working class, this is a dark and subtly political parable of struggle and survival, rich with irony and black humor.

Winner of the 1994 Booker Prize

Synopsis

Winner of the Booker Prize: "A work of marvelous vibrance and richness of character."—New York Times Book Review

Richard Bausch

"How Late It Was, How Late" is a book constructed out of the vernacular speech of a time and place, exactly as, once, Chaucer's tales were. And because it is a good book it has all the authority of the so-called King's English. It is a work of marvelous vibrance and richness of character. . . . Mr. Kelman's Glasgow is vivid and powerfully alive, and his prose is, too. . . . "How Late It Was, How Late" deserves every accolade it gets. -- New York Times

About the Author, James Kelman

James Kelman is the author of novels, plays, and essays, including Busted Scotch and You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Richard Bausch

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kelman is a Scottish novelist and essayist scarcely known in the U.S., though the present book caused a stir in Britain when it won the prestigious Booker Prize (apparently as a compromise choice) and was roundly abused by one of the judges as ``inaccessible.'' It isnay that bad. Once past that artily inappropriate title, it's the harsh, gritty story of Samuels, a Glaswegian drifter and petty crook who has been in and out of jail. As the book opens, he awakens on a Sunday morning in an alley after a two-day binge of which he has little memory. He gets in a scrap with the police, and when he next comes to, he's in jail-and has lost his eyesight. The book is an overextended stream-of-consciousness in which Sammy tries to come to terms with his blindness, get some sort of medical assistance, find out where his girlfriend disappeared to and fend off the police, who believe he is close to a buddy they suspect of political terrorism. Most of Sammy's thoughts, numbingly obscene and repetitious as they are, seem authentic (though there are a few unlikely choices of words for one so determinedly unliterary). He has a combination of dour courage and suspicion that rings true, and some of the dialogue in scenes with various state authorities, cops and later his teenage son, are finely wrought, tense and darkly funny. But it seems unlikely many American readers would want to struggle with the alien idiom for these rather meager rewards. (Dec.)

From Barnes & Noble

A raw, uncompromising vision of one man's struggle against the impersonal forces of the state, told in the uncensored language of the Scottish lower classes. Winner of the prestigious 1994 Booker Prize for Fiction.