Liver
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this collection of four linked stories, newly reissued by Grove, Will Self takes aim at the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an orderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects, whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. In “Foie Humaine,” set at the Plantation Club, it’s always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodka-spiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of “Leberknödel,” has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In “Prometheus,” a young copywriter at London’s most cutting-edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he’s always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in “Birdy Num Num,” where career junky Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites, and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most talented minds working today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reliably diabolical Self delivers four longish stories about decay, debauchery and deliverance, each at least tangentially related to London's Plantation Club. In "Foie Humain," the Plantation Club is revealed to be a Soho drunkard's institution forever "lost in the foggy forties" and frequented by a crew of brash boozehounds. Among them, Isobel, the daughter of the protagonist of "Leberkn del," Joyce Beddoes, who, stricken with "nausea, sickly-sour and putrid; a painfully swollen belly and a hot wire in her urethra," ventures with Isobel to Zurich for an assisted suicide. Self's wry humor takes Joyce on an unexpected adventure as her cancer-ridden liver leads her from Birmingham to Switzerland and into a mess of religious intrigue. The same wit, and a mess of the Plantation's peripheral characters, continues through two more tales, "Prometheus," about a London advertising executive whose liver is nibbled upon daily by a vulture in exchange for "bigger pitches with bigger spends," and "Birdy Num Num," the least exciting of the collection, which follows a gaggle of junkies. Despite the occasional hiccup, Self's parts function quite well together to produce a picture of putrid beauty.