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Author: Alasdair Gray
£10.99 Original price was: £10.99.£8.99Current price is: £8.99.
1982, Janine follows Jock McLeish, a middle-aged security consultant alone in a hotel room, whose whisky-fuelled fantasies give way to painful memories of failed relationships, political disillusionment and personal regret. For readers of challenging literary fiction exploring masculinity, power, sexuality and self-deception through an experimental narrative voice.
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Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine is a difficult, filthy and unexpectedly devastating novel. Jock McLeish lies alone in a Scottish hotel room, drinking whisky and constructing elaborate sexual fantasies to avoid…
Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine is a difficult, filthy and unexpectedly devastating novel. Jock McLeish lies alone in a Scottish hotel room, drinking whisky and constructing elaborate sexual fantasies to avoid thinking about the failures, betrayals and lost relationships that brought him there.
At first, I found his mind exhausting and deeply unpleasant, but Gray gradually reveals the loneliness and self-hatred beneath everything Jock imagines. His memories of Helen, Denny, his parents and the life he repeatedly rejected give the novel a painful emotional weight, while his anger at Scotland’s powerlessness mirrors his inability to control his own life.
The typography fractures as Jock begins to collapse, turning the page itself into part of his breakdown. Explicit, politically furious and formally daring, this is not an easy read, but it is an extraordinary portrait of masculinity, shame and a man finally confronting what he has become.
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Alone in a hotel room, Jock McLeish drinks whisky, fantasises about sex, and contemplates suicide. A failed husband, lover and businessman, he tries to pull away from reality, but his loneliness keeps breaking through.
As the hours drag on, his alcohol fuelled reveries are interrupted by a flood of memories, each one returning him to what he would rather avoid. The past will not stay quiet. It arrives in fragments, reminders of his own shortcomings, and of the ways he has tried to blame the world for what he cannot face in himself.
1982, Janine is deeply experimental in form, and charged with dark humour. It becomes a portrait of male need and inadequacy, moving through politics, religion, powerlessness and pornography, and refusing the comfort of distance. The room stays closed around him, and the voice keeps circling, looking for a way out that may not exist.
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£9.95Original price was: £9.95.£7.95Current price is: £7.95.