Dr. Mukti and other tales of woe

by Will Self

Book by Self, Will

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, 21st Century, British Literature, Collections

257 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

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 was married to the late journalist Deborah Orr.

Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

The titular tale is another peep into the grim auguries of Dr. Zack Busner, here embroiled in a vicious tête-à-tête with the Hindu upstart Dr. Mukti, a chronically fed-up psychiatrist seeking to score points against the conceited and maniacal Busner. Bartering in increasingly unstable nuisance patients, the two unscrupulous head quacks exchange clinical politesse while scheming ways to make dents in their mutual career prestige, with murderous results. The antisemitic Mukti and the Hinduphobic Busner share misleading envies about each other’s equally dour home lives, in an involving and blackly comic look into a world in which sanity and the opposite have become harder to separate. ‘161’ is a story about the neglected underclass in London’s moribund towerblocks, with a young miscreant on the run hiding in the closet of an infirm pensioner, each moving in a strange rhythm within their own straitened circs. ‘The Five-swing Walk’ is a mournful portrait of a weekend papa trailing four sprogs around a series of swing-parks, another monochrome mumble around the modern male psyche familiar to Self readers. ‘Conversations with Ord’ strikes a lighter note, pitting two pals against each other in competition for the ice-maiden Sharon Crowd, their woes refracted through an imaginary future overlord named Ord. And the tremendous collection concludes with a coda to Great Apes, Self’s simian dystopian novel from 1997, in ‘Return to the Planet of the Humans’ with the artist Simon Dykes restored to human skin and left to rot in sheltered housing in an unsplendid and uncaring London. The most mordant and bleak of Self’s story collections, Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe is also one of the more splendid and consistent.

[Baba · Rating 2 out of 5]

Features Self's short stories: 'Dr Mukti' - very good as two psychiatrist wage war against one another using their patients; '161' - a chav on the run invades an elderly man's home, leading to a disquieting and strangely pleasing tale; there's dark look at modern families in 'The Five Swing Walk'; there's the rather banal 'Conversations With Ord'; and a footnote to Will Self's novel 'Great Apes' called 'Return To The Planet Of The Humans'. 4 out of 12.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story collection (which I'm only part way through) is strange and disturbing, as I suppose you'd gather from the title. But Self creates an engaging world and characters tweaked but believable.
Very descriptive language, which is a nice change from the largely spare short-story writing I've been reading lately.

[Velvetink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borrowed this from the library sometime ago. Just remembered now I'd read it after looking at someone else's shelves. This writer really excited me...love how he writes. I haven't seen another book by him anywhere. Must remember to track more of his work down.

[L. Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Self is one of those authors I just can't make my mind up about, but inexplicably continue reading. I definitely feel like I am entering Self's world upon picking up his work, and it is unequivocally a painful, disturbing place. The thought keeps coming back to me that his work is clever, very clever, but do I like it?

[Prakash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corybantic, heliocentric, ramified, ebullition, catatonic, confute, coprolites, transom, atavistic, febrile, atemporal, sentience, echt, fervid, conurbation... Will Self-help for the vocab challenged!

[Michael Palkowski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I propose a literary drinking game whereby every single time you spot the word "oblong" used in Will Self's oeuvre (and especially the story "161" in this collection), take a shot of vodka. This might have the simultaneous bonus of distracting you as a reader from the blandness of the stories told here and making you so drunk, that you can no longer see the words anyways.

161 loses steam fast, nascent as a contemporary tell tale heart which disappointingly becomes beguiling and rushed. The characters are archetypes and the impulsive change to the story structure and character intention is really poor. The old man has no reason to behave in the way he does. His actions are plot convenience, his frenetic defense of a stranger sutured with his lackadaisical blase attitude to someone invading and occupying his home, with no questions asked, only exists in the world of poorly developed storytelling vistas. The protagonists evasion of his previous life (urban gang shtick) alongside the sturdy but vulnerable femme fatale, is cringe worthy and its dimension can't be sieved out adequately to evoke the desired emotional relevance.

The title story, "Dr Mukti" has good ideas, especially the idea of having two sparring psychiatrists, who are themselves probably schizophrenic, send each other patients to offer their expert opinions on. The attempt of course is a gradual undermining, the result of subtle professionalized cage fighting. The issue comes down to the sisyphean sentences and the bizarre ending. The blockiness of the text sucks the good ideas away. This book is a great example as to why style and substance have to work together in order to produce good pieces of fiction.

The ending story seems to be an extension of his Great Apes novel. The idea has no space to move and it's purpose is supplementary, almost like a junk add on. The descriptions are superfluous and the imagery is static cliche. It serves no point at all.

[Gamestheory · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a dreadful book, symptomatic of everything that is bad about a bad, self-regarding, narcissistic writer - to say nothing of the undeserved applause he gets from insufficiently critical readers. Not only are Self's ideas weak, so is the expression of them. He writes without listening to what he's writing, and doesn't seem to hear when his thought has got lost in its own clumsy decoration. His asks his sentences to perform tasks that are too complex for him to pull off capably. Irrespective of how much he has published, and how well liked he is, he really isn't a writer - merely a product of his own bullying self-assertion.

[Jo Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of darkly amusing tales with a twist of the absurd for added bite. From the dangerous consequences bred from a rivalry between GPs, to the building of an unlikely bond between generations, these stories are oddly heart-warming due to Self's ability to draw his readers into the characters' lives. A good mix of humour, suspense and page-turning drama.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I said in connection with "How The Dead Live", I count myself a born-again Will Self fan (a Selfie ?) and I love his mordant, poetically- surprising style. That said, this collection of short stories is uneven in the quality of its imagination and execution. The opening piece, "Dr Mukti", which occupies two- thirds of it, is a tour de force exposition of psychiatry shading into psychosis, and stands with any of Self's best work. It alone is what gets the book its 4 stars. Everything else is pretty pale by comparison, even hackneyed. And I'd be fascinated to know if WS was aware while he was writing it that the plot of "161" is a pretty straightforward lift from that of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell's film "Performance", transposed from a Notting Hill hippy townhouse to a sink estate Liverpool flat, even down to an identical final scene. Ali Smith's "The Accidental" did something very similar with Pasolini's "Theorem" (see review passim): is it some kind of ironic writerly fashion, or did they both see these movies at an impressionable age and unconsciously internalise them for future use ? Just wondering.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well its as read as it'll ever be I finished Dr. Mukti (the novella) and 161, the first of the short stories. I really liked 161. Dr. Mukti good too, more in parts the the overall deal. It was interesting to encounter an older version of Zack Busner, wonder what brought him back to the character in Umbrella..

[Jennifer B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were weird, but I liked them. I also enjoyed the little set up for "Great Apes" at the end. His work is quite depressing, though, and makes me glad to live inside my own head, and not that of one of Self's character's, or worse yet, his own!

[Nik Maack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up midway through the story ORD because I was bored. I think I need to stop reading short stories. I hate them. Or at least I hate literary short stories, where nothing can happen for twenty pages and then something does happen, and that's the end.

Will Self is Very Clever and he really likes to show you how Very Clever he is. So it doesn't matter to him somehow if a street kid is using a vocabulary that doesn't make a lick of sense. It doesn't matter if a short story just kind of ends with a murder for no reason. It's great fun to describe a dad struggling with his kids for pages and pages when maybe a paragraph would suffice and just BLOODY GET ON WITH IT.

I actually enjoyed the Dr Mukti story -- battling psychiatrists is a fun concept -- until it seemingly crumbled in upon itself and ended in the dumbest way. There was a lot of "Look how Very Clever I am!" bits, but I could overlook them because they were fun. But after a while the stories just got to be a chore. And by the time I got to characters who like to play chess / go in their heads while walking around I was done.

Maybe short stories are boring to me because I want characters to grow and develop. A short story ends up being a lot of description of stuff and then a change happens and that's the end. The end should be the start of a novel, not the end of a story.

Anyway, this book is a mixed bag that I eventually threw up in and discarded.

[Madeleine · Rating 2 out of 5]

WILL WHAT ARE YOU DOING. This tale was set up for brilliance. The characters are impeccably awful, especially Dr Shiva. You can smell his jealousy as he sits stuffed away in a lightless corner of his dead-end career, the snubbed man, looking at the pompous and successful Dr. Busner (who is far more brilliant and unsettling in the other Will Self novels he populates). The whole set up has this John Fowles The Magus feel, of the all-knowing, malevolent superintendent to the protagonist. It's deliciously creepy watching the dynamic deteriorate, this vile little interplay between two medical minds twisting and toying with the brains of their fragile patients. The climax can only end in misery, you just hope with this being a Will Self book it'll be a clever one.

Alas! it was not to be. I felt as if Will gave up 2/3 of the way through and ended the whole thing with a violent tantrum. What a waste. Deeply disappointed.

[Owen Townend · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though Self's overbearing snide tone still bothers me, I nevertheless went into this collection with hopes for his creative intelligence to shine through.
Though at times I forgot the subtitle of Other Tales of Woe and felt bogged down by the resultant spirals of negativity, I did find reading these tales enjoyable in concept if not always in execution.
The titular novella was by far the best in the collection and I think that was due to the fact that Self had a bigger word count with which to indulge his vivid place descriptions and explore the pain and frustration that is common in his short fiction.

Notable Stories

• Dr Mukti - the duel between psychiatrists was compelling though the nightmare ending surprised me.
• 161 - I loved the unique living situation and the eventual swapping of places in society.
• Conversations with Ord - though I'm still not sure about that ending, I did like the odd comradeship and balloon.

[Miles Isham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried Will Self many years ago and unfortunately dismissed him as a Martin Amis wannabe. Now Marty has moved on I thought I’d give him another go. It’s a frustrating read for me because Self comes so close to being something I could enjoy and just misses. It’s almost amusing and then veers away at the last moment. The descriptive passages nearly work but manage to miss the mark. The ghost of Amis hangs over it all, he’s done it all, better. Of course you could always point to other writers that have similar styles but in this case it is a problem.

[mikosmik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too clever by half, but nonetheless engaging. And I like Self's warped sense of humour.

[Christopher Vowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sourcebook of Self-ish experiments.

[Ruby malik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories are a 4/5 but overall more of a 3.5 vjbe

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will is back to his brilliant Self after the questionable trilogy of Modernist Novels.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this Self book

[Missing Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disturbing and without comfort.

[Constance Fastré · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quel étrange petit roman. Après un début un peu difficile, j'ai eu du mal à lâcher ce bouquin. Un roman sur la folie qui mérite bien d'être lu!

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2021/0...

[Kahuna1234567890 · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first story is good if a little bit daft, the second was alright, then next two are self-indulgent wanky nonsense which Self thinks is genius and Self fanboys probably pretended to enjoy, the last one was average.

The fact is, Self is totally meh and not nearly as captivating as he thinks he is.

[Robby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Damn. This is an amazing collection. The stories unwind like the carving of a rotten apple...the writing is some of the best, and each story is like nothing you have ever read before - I promise!

And there is enough blasting humor to cut some of the intense degradation...

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the Mukti tale. The prose is dazzling yet convoluted, the stories are darkly funny and inventive so why not four stars, perhaps it's the tone that gets a little tiresome, there only seems to be one voice here but never mind that just relish in the width of those sentences.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as it's the first outing of the psychiatrist character from Self's new book Umbrella. It is a collection of short stories/ novellas, which passed the time, but I won't rush off for the new book just yet, I think I can wait for the paperback.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five short stories, 4 of which were very entertaining, with novel ideas expressed smartly. This is the first Will Self book I have finished and I may try another.

[Iain Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Self's career highlights. Read my review here: http://bookfacereturns.blogspot.ae/20...