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Too Beautiful For You
An addled journalist seeks comfort from his wife after losing his girlfriend, who really, was too beautiful for him – just one of the stories about the interweaving lives of a group of Londoners, which are sometimes bizarre but always charged with emotional reality.From the Trade Paperback edition.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
276 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 7, 2016
Cannot believe I once read a book by this awful prick.
December 6, 2008
Rod Liddle, Too Beautiful for You: Tales of Improper Behavior (Doubleday, 2003)
Twelve generally interrelated tales of everything from Keystone Kops-style slapstick to almost Kafkaesque magic realism. The majority focus on some sort of sexual misconduct or other (the major exception, oddly, being the book's first tale, which is nothing more than a shaggy dog joke that is, to be fair, exceptionally well set up). Liddle has good comic timing and knows how to pull an idea out to its logically absurd conclusion (the book's best story, “The Long, Long Road to Uttoxeter”, is a perfect example of this, with a man trying frantically to come up with an excuse for an infidelitous jaunt when he becomes involved in a nasty rail accident and loses his right arm on the way home). There did seem to be a few times when an editor might have been able to snap stories into better shape, but what's here is certainly worth reading if you like your humor with a dash of the perverse and a jaundiced eye towards twentysomethings. *** ½
Twelve generally interrelated tales of everything from Keystone Kops-style slapstick to almost Kafkaesque magic realism. The majority focus on some sort of sexual misconduct or other (the major exception, oddly, being the book's first tale, which is nothing more than a shaggy dog joke that is, to be fair, exceptionally well set up). Liddle has good comic timing and knows how to pull an idea out to its logically absurd conclusion (the book's best story, “The Long, Long Road to Uttoxeter”, is a perfect example of this, with a man trying frantically to come up with an excuse for an infidelitous jaunt when he becomes involved in a nasty rail accident and loses his right arm on the way home). There did seem to be a few times when an editor might have been able to snap stories into better shape, but what's here is certainly worth reading if you like your humor with a dash of the perverse and a jaundiced eye towards twentysomethings. *** ½
May 19, 2007
it's not a novel. it's a collection of stories. as i recall, the first few are good and then they start to suck. i don't know why it says novel above.
August 20, 2007
Have a suspicion that Will Self ghostwrote this for his fellow Grumpy Old Man.
March 18, 2014
Not that great of a book. A couple of the stories in this book were good, but overall I really wasn't interested in it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews