Will Self's Blog, page 55

Dream 18

That William Empson should be there was, perhaps, less surprising than his demeanour, which was courtly yet randy, frayed but impressive. He sat in the dugout held fast in the earth’s shivery embrace, his hands fidgeting with pen, paper, cigarette, small fetish items – a signet ring, a netsuke.

He wore wire-framed spectacles that I thought I recalled from old photographs – but I could’ve been wrong about this, and besides that that there should be a certain penumbra of ambiguity surrounding h...

Real meals: Garfunkel’s

When, back in the mid-1990s, I was asked to write restaurant reviews for theObserver, I told my then editor that I wanted to broaden out the chomping field and give due weight to the sort of places where people actually ate. This premature stab at the idea of Real Meals was greeted with some scepticism – Britain was about to be submerged beneath a cresting wave of extra-virgin olive oil and the consensus on the edible was that thi-ings can only get bett-er! But before the axe fell on the panc...

Dream 17

The young man in the artisanal bread shop said I had met his wife yesterday and talked with her at length – of this I remembered nothing. He was an earnest soul, oval faced, blond, with slightly pointed ears – he wore a blouson jacket with a round collar.

As he went on and on about the conversation I had had with his wife I not only found myself unable to recall any details of it or her, but the entire milieu in which we were operating was indistinct and vague – was this an artisanal bakery or...

Today programme interview

Listen to a longer interview with Will Self on the Today programme on the BBC website here, talking about encephalitis lethargica, the subject of his latest novel, Umbrella.

Dream 16

Up they come the man and the boys – up they come. Up they come, the man and the boys – stepping lightly, the cuffs of their trousers flicking at bracken and thistles: twill against barbs and fronds. No contest.

Up they come, the man clearly the father, his sandy hair and carefully arranged features would in themselves indicate a certain sureness – in class, its privileges, in breeding – but this is compounded by the boys: versions of himself at 10 and 14, the unformed versions of his face only...

Umbrella reviews

Financial Times:’An ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed novel in the high modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf …Its scope is dazzling …The switches between perspective and chronology are demanding (there are no chapters), but Self handles them with bravura skill, setting up imagery and phrases that echo suggestively between different episodes …Umbrellais an immense achievement.’ (Full reviewhere.)

The Guardian:’Though hard work is certainly demanded from the reader,...

Umbrella events schedule

(Also look out for interviews with Will on the Today programme, in Time Out, the Spectator, and on the Robert Elms Show. More to follow.)

August 24: 4pm,Happy Days, Belmore Street, Enniskillen, Will Self in Conversation.

August 25: 9.30pm, Edinburgh book festival,In discussion with Stuart Kelly.

August 26: 8.30pm, Edinburgh book festival, in discussion with “deep topographer” and author of Scarp, Nick Papadimitriou.

September 13: South Bank, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Will Self launches his new novel,...

Dream 15

The matter of my relationship with Max’s widow has to be addressed, so, although I have never met her I arrange to spend a couple of months in the Central European town where I know she lives.

It is a cold and fusty place: a network of dirty snow-choked alleys and partitioned rooms in which oil stoves distort and dirty the atmosphere of ersatz coffee, useless sedition and antisemitism poorly understood by those who espouse it – as they’ve never met a Jew. I do not reveal myself, when we meet,...

London

‘“All right, big man,” said the pirate DVD seller outside Sainsbury’s Nine Elms, “I got ’em all.” He fanned out his merchandise in one hand – lurid movie posters, shrunken and photocopied – while casting furtive glances around the crowded car park. As a rule I take a hard line on any copyright infringements whatsoever; after all, my livelihood depends on its enforcement just as much as – and probably more than – those of News Corp’s shareholders, whose subsidiary, 20th Century Fox, made Prome...

Dream 14

The Buckminster Fuller reverie needs must be recounted – it is so full of the sweetness of life, an ineffable sweetness compounded from lost love of all fathers, brothers, kind paternalists who might once have sheltered me from the truth: life breaks off your penis at the haft.

My oldest brother – not the eldest – and I go to see Buckminster Fuller who’s living in a house that synthesises Arts and Crafts with Frank Lloyd Wright: wide eaves, a series of grassy terraces declining to an overgrown...