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20th out of 101 books
—
31 voters
Great Apes
by
Will Self
Fans of Will Self's satirical fiction and stunning prose will not be disappointed in the latest from the author who brought readers through the bizarre war between the sexes in Cock & Bull and into the costly world of high-stakes business in My Idea of Fun. With Great Apes, Self takes readers into a sort of "Planet of the Apes" with a twist.
Simon Dykes is a London pai
...morePaperback, 416 pages
Published
August 11th 1998
by Grove Press
(first published 1997)
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Bought a second copy from the bargain bin at Hasting's. My first reading was courtesy of a girlfriend with a library card - I strongly advise that, whenever possible, hook up with somebody who has a valid library card.
The first copy I owned, cash-in-hand, was from a bookstore that also had the 12" single of R.E.M.'s "Wendell Gee". But somebody had drawn on the cover with a crayon.
There wasn’t even time to sign/Goodbye to Wendell Gee/
So HoooRAHAaaH'ooo as the wind blows/H'ooHOOOraHAHA as the wi...more
The first copy I owned, cash-in-hand, was from a bookstore that also had the 12" single of R.E.M.'s "Wendell Gee". But somebody had drawn on the cover with a crayon.
There wasn’t even time to sign/Goodbye to Wendell Gee/
So HoooRAHAaaH'ooo as the wind blows/H'ooHOOOraHAHA as the wi...more
I read this book mainly because of that awful picture on the cover, which was also strangely intriguing, and because I'd heard good things about Will Self. I found myself frustrated not twenty pages in, however, by both the language (which was ridiculously over-written) and the gimmicky nature of the plot (a bunch of apes act like people, basically), both of which stood in for any meaningful plot.
I'm giving this book one star, then, because it didn't make me feel anything at all. Yes, I underst...more
I'm giving this book one star, then, because it didn't make me feel anything at all. Yes, I underst...more
Okay, this one gets a point for concept and one for some nice prose, when the author isn't trying to beat you over the head with how clever he is and introduce you to a new twenty dollar word with each paragraph. However, the ape dialogue, which is a mixture of English with simian grunts and barks, is just plain annoying. There's only so many "Wraaf"s and "Hoo'Graaa"s I can stand. Incest and genitalia-displaying may well be an important part of chimpanzee culture, but I just can't get on board w...more
Read the STOP SMILING interview with author Will Self.
ABUSE OF SELF
The Stop Smiling Interview with Will Self
By Sally Vincent
(This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Photography Issue)
The first time I laid eyes on Will Self, he was monologuing about flying buttresses to a startled and ever-increasing audience of slack-jawed strangers, seemingly dumbstruck by his magniloquence. It was as though he couldn’t help himself. As though all this passion about architecture had been buildin...more
ABUSE OF SELF
The Stop Smiling Interview with Will Self
By Sally Vincent
(This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Photography Issue)
The first time I laid eyes on Will Self, he was monologuing about flying buttresses to a startled and ever-increasing audience of slack-jawed strangers, seemingly dumbstruck by his magniloquence. It was as though he couldn’t help himself. As though all this passion about architecture had been buildin...more
Instead of the thud of a simple inversion where a world of chimps occupy the place of humans (and this is acknowledged with the wink of the simian preface with references to the trite and banal series of movies "Planet of the Humans"), Self retains almost all the attributes of chimps - rigid physical hierarchy, sign languge (figures of speech are carefully changed from "that is to say" to "that is to sign), grooming habits, polygamous coupling, etc - while the near-extinct humans retain theirs,...more
I started this book thinking it was going to be an interesting read, but had to stop reading it about 150 pages in before I threw it through my wall. He kept talking about apes "displaying" themselves to eachother, it was so repetitive and it really started to grate on me after a while. I think the 150 pages I gave it was a decent attempt so I feel I can give it it's 1 star. Wow I think this is the first bad review I have done!
I've never read Will Self before, though I've seen him on television and remember him being thrown off the Tory battlebus in John Major's day for shooting up heroin. Great Apes is very satirical, but I'm not completely sure what was being satirised other than the Arts, Academia and the Human Race, though, thinking about it, perhaps that's enough.
There are some very funny things in it, a personal favourite being an argument with a philosopher which is won by literally beating him into submission,...more
There are some very funny things in it, a personal favourite being an argument with a philosopher which is won by literally beating him into submission,...more
Will Self is catapulting his way to the top of my favorite authors list. There aren't many other writers doing things quite as original and subversive as he is, and even though Great Apes was written a decade ago, it's still head and shoulders above most other things I've read recently. A brief tracing of the plot (because the less you know about the book, the more fun it is to discover): Simon Dykes, a hedonistic artist, awakes after a night of partying to discover himself living in a world pop...more
This is my summary of this book: HooGrah, gru-nnn, huu, hu-huu, wraa!!
This book took me aaages to finish.
Will Self always comes up with the most bizarre scenarios for his books, and is an accomplished writer (although, there were some words in this book that I didn't know and didn't find in the dictionary..?), but his novels tend to be too drawn out. I though there were too many unnecessary scenes, not to mention dozens of descriptive mating scenes..which were kind of disturbing actually.
But I...more
This book took me aaages to finish.
Will Self always comes up with the most bizarre scenarios for his books, and is an accomplished writer (although, there were some words in this book that I didn't know and didn't find in the dictionary..?), but his novels tend to be too drawn out. I though there were too many unnecessary scenes, not to mention dozens of descriptive mating scenes..which were kind of disturbing actually.
But I...more
I almost quite reading it... it took me quite some time to get into the novel. It occurred at roughly the same time we arrive into a fully realized world where chimps rule and humans are the lab tested animals.
Simon Dykes is renown artist and after a alcohol, drug and sex fueled night he wakes up in a where humanity is no longer -- rather, it's a chimpunity. Chimps drive the Volvo's and drugs are tested on human.; lil' chimps visit humans in the zoo and wear human masks at halloween. When I firs...more
Simon Dykes is renown artist and after a alcohol, drug and sex fueled night he wakes up in a where humanity is no longer -- rather, it's a chimpunity. Chimps drive the Volvo's and drugs are tested on human.; lil' chimps visit humans in the zoo and wear human masks at halloween. When I firs...more
Hmm. Obviously this book as very clever. Comes with the Will Self territory. I can't say I enjoyed it a huge amount, although I guess it was intriguing. I guess I just found it a bit gross, which is kind of the whole point given that the whole thing is a massive satire of social norms in our modern day society. Simon is an artist who wakes up after a massive binge to find that chimpanzees have out evolved humans and run the world. He's a chimp too these days, but is obsessed with his past humani...more
#7/2012: This book is sort of hard to classify. I finally settled on satirical alternate history. instead of humans being the evolutionarily dominant species, chimpanzees won out. The main character is a human who wakes up one day as a chimp. Only it turns out everyone else is a chimp too...so was he really a human before, or was his humanity just a dream? The parallels between our world vs the chimps running the world are hilarious! However, the story gets bogged down in excessive descriptions...more
one line joke in 404 pages. The reader may get a minor positive feeling when the figure out some of the made-up words 'chimpunity' = humanity. There are major or minor levels of shock and disgust depending on your personal threshold for grossness when the 'apes' do the things you may have seen monkeys do at the zoo as part of acceptable everyday culture. And then there is the redundancy of having these two tricks expended and repeated to pad out the story. I am not sure why I forced myself to co...more
This book was so gimmicky! I feel a lot of the vocabulary took away from what could have been a more interesting story. I spent the first part somewhat confused by the interjections and the last half just waiting to see if he would get better and accept his "chimpunity" or if this was all just some bad drug trip. There too many details of chimpanzee life, which instead of being interesting or shocking was just repetitive and frustrating to re-read after the first section in chimp-world. And a mi...more
Sep 10, 2012
Riona
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
crazies,
drugs-are-bad-mkay,
mental-illness,
mindfuck,
smut,
so-unique-it-hurts,
made-me-lol,
dark-humor
I've been putting off reviewing this for a while, so I'm just going to bite the bullet and get it over with. This may be a quickie.
I fully expected to love Great Apes . It's completely absurd, filled with drugs, violence, and wild monkey sex (as in, literally involving monkeys). There are some hysterical, laugh-out-loud funny bits and some perverse, cringe-worthy sections. Unfortunately, there are also some fucking boring parts. After a while, I thought the metaphor and satire became strained, a...more
I fully expected to love Great Apes . It's completely absurd, filled with drugs, violence, and wild monkey sex (as in, literally involving monkeys). There are some hysterical, laugh-out-loud funny bits and some perverse, cringe-worthy sections. Unfortunately, there are also some fucking boring parts. After a while, I thought the metaphor and satire became strained, a...more
We asked three pupils in Class 2B at Roswell High what they would do if they woke up as an ape:
Daniel sez:
“I wish I was an ape in the evenings. If I was an ape in the evenings I would hang around the school gates spooking the teachers. I would knuckle-walk up to that sandal-wearing nonce Mr Almott and slap him so hard around the gums he’d need a new set of teeth to learn basic Esperanto. In the evenings I would sip tea on a tyre suspended from a tree and go “Hoo-haa!” while masturbating so hard...more
Daniel sez:
“I wish I was an ape in the evenings. If I was an ape in the evenings I would hang around the school gates spooking the teachers. I would knuckle-walk up to that sandal-wearing nonce Mr Almott and slap him so hard around the gums he’d need a new set of teeth to learn basic Esperanto. In the evenings I would sip tea on a tyre suspended from a tree and go “Hoo-haa!” while masturbating so hard...more
I absolutely loved Will Self's _How the Dead Live_ so when I saw this book during a scouring of a used bookstore for something to read on the upcoming airplane ride, I grabbed it.
I'm glad I read the book, but I can't say I love it. I liked what Self was doing with the whole upside down world, but it felt too long (even though that was necessary) and there was just a lot of gratuitous (human) sex.
The novel tells how a talented artist named Simon wakes up one morning after a night of debauchery to...more
I'm glad I read the book, but I can't say I love it. I liked what Self was doing with the whole upside down world, but it felt too long (even though that was necessary) and there was just a lot of gratuitous (human) sex.
The novel tells how a talented artist named Simon wakes up one morning after a night of debauchery to...more
May 10, 2008
tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
readers of Stewart Home's bks
Shelves:
literature
I 1st read mention of Will Self in a text by Stewart Home. Home insulted Self as being something along the lines of a rich Oxford junkie who doesn't deserve his reputation as an underground writer. Since I'd never heard of Self before, he had no reputation w/ me at all. Knowing Stewart's tendency to publically degrade anyone who he perceives as competition, I didn't take the negativity as representative of any substantial critical take. After all, it seems that Home's usual intention is to disco...more
This is a Will Self book. His vocabulary is incredible, but more striking is the way he uses it: his writing will evoke a visceral response. In addition to the provocative metaphorical associations one expects in a "clever" author, everything in Will Self's work has a texture and a smell.
If you are squeamish, this book is not for you. It is a book where all the characters are chimpanzees. Their society and form of communication involves sign language and hooting vocalizations, but also things ch...more
If you are squeamish, this book is not for you. It is a book where all the characters are chimpanzees. Their society and form of communication involves sign language and hooting vocalizations, but also things ch...more
Hoooo'Graa!
I have to admit, I thought this was the weakest of all the Self books I've read. It would've made a funny and shocking short story but at 400+ pages, the joke FAR outstays its welcome and I found myself very bored long before the half way point.
The repetition certainly works at drumming the various linguistic tropes into your head (I'm not the only one who put it down and couldn't stop thinking in pant-hoots and Hoooo'Graas, "huu"?) and there are some nice "h'hee'hee" one-liners, yet...more
I have to admit, I thought this was the weakest of all the Self books I've read. It would've made a funny and shocking short story but at 400+ pages, the joke FAR outstays its welcome and I found myself very bored long before the half way point.
The repetition certainly works at drumming the various linguistic tropes into your head (I'm not the only one who put it down and couldn't stop thinking in pant-hoots and Hoooo'Graas, "huu"?) and there are some nice "h'hee'hee" one-liners, yet...more
Looking at the reviews of this, people either seem to give it a five or a one. I'm in the latter camp. A not-terribly original idea which might have served well for a short story, stretched to five hundred pages. The best bit was Will Self's writing style which is witty, clever, and very assured. The worst was the lack of any plot and his self-indulgent repetition of certain devices (ie how the chimps greet each other) over and over again. Loved the image of a tooth as big as a dentist.
I didn't finish this book because it was far too much hard work. Even with an Oxbridge degree (though not in literature), I pretty much found myself opening a dictionary every couple of pages. And the new words used didn't really enrich or enliven the story - or my own vocab. I very much get the impression that the author is very much Self by name... This novel makes me think he writes for self-agrandisement rather than for creativity and the enjoyment of others.
to be honest I still have not finished this book yet.
When I started to read it my person life went tits up...things evened out and I picked up the book again and my personal life went tits up, I stopped reading it, things got better, started again and things went tits up!
The book is cursed. I mentioned my problems with The Great Apes to a friend of mine, Paul Lee, and the exact same patten happened with him!!
When I started to read it my person life went tits up...things evened out and I picked up the book again and my personal life went tits up, I stopped reading it, things got better, started again and things went tits up!
The book is cursed. I mentioned my problems with The Great Apes to a friend of mine, Paul Lee, and the exact same patten happened with him!!
Nov 18, 2012
Alistair
added it
Surprised to give it three stars. Typically unreadable from self, swinging between pretentious and unpleasant, but always cleverly, originally, memorably written.
But, eventually, I found the anthropomorphic ( simiamorphic?) descriptions and actions amusing and clever, and was interested enough to discover what happened to the main character.
Glad to have read it; gladder to have finished it.
But, eventually, I found the anthropomorphic ( simiamorphic?) descriptions and actions amusing and clever, and was interested enough to discover what happened to the main character.
Glad to have read it; gladder to have finished it.
I love when you're in a book shop with no particular agenda, just looking for something new. I bought this just because of the cover and hadn't read Will Self before. I loved it from the start. A real and specific portrayal of London and an amazingly imaginative switch into a world where apes are in charge with their own version of evolution. It's engaging and humourous and thought-provoking.
This was a fun read. Without planning, I read it concurrently with Sex at Dawn, which made it more interesting I'm sure. I found Self's wordplay, for example his aggressively alliterative prose, to be a little bit much at times. You'll want a dictionary handy too. I also thought that his treatment of race throughout the book was far too casually orchestrated, although maybe that's asking too much from a book which is focused on inter*species* psychodrama. All that being said, it truly did transp...more
One of my favourite books because of the convincing manner in which Self recreates a reality.
Basically, the main character is transformed into a chimp - but the whole of society is also transformed in the same way. Simon then tries to explain the situation but the other apes think he is insane. He is then treated by a chimp psychologist who tries to work out why he thinks he is human.
It's really clever, really convincing and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Basically, the main character is transformed into a chimp - but the whole of society is also transformed in the same way. Simon then tries to explain the situation but the other apes think he is insane. He is then treated by a chimp psychologist who tries to work out why he thinks he is human.
It's really clever, really convincing and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
wraaa. magnificently researched, effulgently executed "what if"... my favorite kind of science fiction. takes a stab at the art world as well for good measure. helpful if you struggle with the alienness and absurdity of the human world you see around you... in the words, quoted by Self, of Charleton Heston in "Planet of the Humans": "accept it. You'll sleep better."
Very funny satire. The protagonist Simon Dykes, wakes up to find himself a chimp, so far so Kafkaesque (Metamorphosis). Like a good PG Tips Advert, chimps are dressed up in human costumes and their Volvos have a few more gears...very well observed Chimp behaviour. Recommended to anyone who wants to read something funny and different.
Will Self is the literary equivalent of Ken Russell: pretentious, overrated and a producer of artifacts that can be described as anti-culture: they seem to actively degrade my understanding of the universe. With this book it manifested itself in an overwhelming urge to hurl it into a rubbish bin with as much force as possible.
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| What's The Name o...: Artist faints and wakes up as a bonobo. [s] | 3 | 32 | Aug 18, 2011 06:48pm |
William Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He is married to journalist Deborah Orr.
Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.
More about Will Self...
Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.
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“Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.
How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?”
—
4 people liked it
How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?”
“As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the cafe at couple after couple, eaching confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.
Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.”
—
2 people liked it
More quotes…
Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.”
Jun 09, 2011 10:09pm
Aug 07, 2012 08:03am
- Hi! Do you come often here? Do you work or study? Do you have a valid library ca...more
Aug 20, 2012 01:31pm