But between Richard and his object of desire stands his omnipresent nemesis, the lubricious Bell, doyen of late night radio shows, provider of drugs and gossip, and ringmaster of the Sealink Club. Erudite and witty as ever, this hilarious novella is vintage Self at his acerbic, incisive best, brilliantly illustrated by Martin Rowson's sharp, dark, satirical pen.
Read more Read less. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. But although it doesn't stretch Self's considerable talents, it is still a wonderfully poisonous entertainment. In The Sweet Smell first published in England in , Self turns his acerbic, satiric wit on London's venal media cliques. See all Product description. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a product review. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon.
Self and Rowson make a pungent pair - both left wing, media London establishment jesters as writer and cartoonist respectively, they team up in this short novella to paint a verbal and visual zeitgeist crusher of a book. The story is a simple one, not a bit of it cannot be found in some other tale or parable somewhere: Richard, our hero, finds himself drowning in a sea of drugs and superficiality.
His nemesis, Bell, is a modern media baron - a promiscuous womaniser and hairsuite sex god. Mixing excessive substance abuse with paranoid affection for Ursula Bentley - a sort of twenties decadent siren reconstructed afloat on the pillow of narcotics in 90s central London, Richard finds his crush on the flighty Ursula growing with his cocaine fuelled paranoia about seeing Bell's face everywhere he goes.
Richard has the nub of goodness within him, bless him. His wish is to make a genuine connection with Ursula, lift her and her tedious sex column out of this ephemeral dirge of media London to a married life of meaning and permanence. Ursula merely ruffles his hair and calls him 'sweet'.
The twin poles, and scents of Ursula's perfume 'Jicki' and Richard's psychosis - entwine and grow as the novella roars to a swift and surreal denoument. So the story is basically a bog standard modern parable of values being important than drugs, beautiful people and glamour blah blah.
But the style - Self's amphetiminic and thesauras powered prose and Rowson's Hogarthian grotesque cartoons is to be savoured. But, perhaps just because I'm not British, there did not seem to be anything presslike about the characters; instead it seemed just a vicious, but worthwhile, savaging of the sort of amoral, ambisexual, drug-addled, sensation-chasers who are all too common in every walk of life and line of work these days.
Richard Hermes is an entirely minor features writer who has become caught up in the vortex of young journalists who revolve around Bell, a constant media presence known for bedding any man or woman he sets his eye on, sort of Larry King crossed with a satyr.
Richard recognizes the emptiness of the lives the group leads, and still has a sufficient remnant of decency to be repelled by the acts of needless cruelty that they thrive on, however, he's fallen in lust with Ursula Bently, an icy blonde beauty, who hangs with this crowd, but whom he compares to "a diamond found in a gutter behind a Chinese takeaway.
He harbors the improbable hope that Ursula is redeemable and that the two of them can break out of Bell's gravitational pull to live happily ever after. But in the end, even as he plans to get away from the City and Bell, to return home for the Christmas holiday, Richard finally gets his chance to bed down Ursula, though the experience proves less than heavenly. If the book is intended to say something specific about the press, it escaped me entirely.
No one actually seems to perform any kind of work in the book, it's all clubbing, drugging, drinking, and scrumping. But taken simply as a cautionary tale, a warning that by being with these people you become one of them and sink into the abyss, it worked well enough.
The author's command of and taste for the English language will keep me reading his books. Self's descriptive prose dead-on captures the complex psychology and the argot of his London Dead End Kids -- the jaded dope-addled, self-loathing predators that inhabit so much of his work. And Self does good chapters and stories but here, as evinced in his other novels -- longer formats tangle his feet and warp his sense of proportion.
This novella, which was really too short to publish alone even with the lurid unclear cartoons as filler -- presents the main characters in wonderful detail up front and then drops all these potentially fecund interrelationships in favor of the hero's inexplicable quest to seduce the story's love interest. So I Am Glad. Waking Up in Toytown. My Family and Other Disasters. Bitter Experience Has Taught Me. What to Look for in Winter.
My First Colouring Book.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Never Trust A Rabbit. The Complete Smoking Diaries. The Smoking Diaries Volume 1. The Art of Failing. The Passages of Joy.
Zo schrijf je een goede recensie Doen Vertellen wat je het leukst en het minst leuk vond De stijl van de auteur omschrijven Uitleggen waarom je deze beoordeling hebt gegeven Niet doen Grove en onfatsoenlijke taal gebruiken Persoonlijke gegevens toevoegen De uitkomst verklappen of de prijs van het boek vermelden Het plot samenvatten. In fact, much of the pleasure that The Sweet Smell of Psychosis has to offer comes not from the story of Richard's inevitable fall, but from Self's deft and playful way with words. A representative dose of queasy verbal pyrotechnics from the morose sesquipedalian, this time animated by a loathing of the London media scene. The Art of Failing. Retrieved from " https: Meer titels ter overweging. Richard, our hero, finds himself drowning in a sea of drugs and superficiality.
In My Own Time. Finding a Leg to Stand On. The Laughter of Mothers.
And Other Yorkshire Fables. The Smoking Diaries Volume 2. Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. The Smoking Diaries Volume 3. A Twist in Time. Ecstatic from One Lie. Grillers in the mist. How the Dead Live. My Idea of Fun. The Book of Dave. Will Self's Collected Fiction.
The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe. Zo schrijf je een goede recensie. De recensie moet ten minste 50 tekens bevatten. Je schermnaam moet ten minste 2 tekens bevatten. Bij Kobo proberen we ervoor te zorgen dat gepubliceerde recensies geen grof of onfatsoenlijk taalgebruik bevatten, de uitkomst van het boek niet verklappen en dat er geen persoonlijke informatie van de recensent in wordt gegeven. Je hebt de volgende beoordeling en recensie ingeleverd.