Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi

Advantages: Great short read
Disadvantages: Very little

Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi has been referred to so many times as a close cousin of Camus it is ridiculous, but you can rest assured that no such connection will be made here. It starts with a domestic scene of a kind. Joe is a worker on a barge somewhen in the middle of the last century, continuously conveying materials between Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s docks on the canal. He works for Leslie, the husband of the woman who owns the craft, Ella, ...
...the book is actually called Young Adam), and insists both Trocchi and Joe are to be considered outsiders. But in this day and age, while the book does not feel dated it certainly feels tamer than it must have appeared. So Joe is not a career man. So he is promiscuous, and not exactly a 21st century man when it comes to treating women. There is nothing here that can ever be called shocking, and nothing we cannot read about elsewhere. In actual fact ... Read review

Advantages: Honest, direct, well structured.
Disadvantages: sometimes life is fun.

...And so we meet young Young Adam, emerging from nowhere and pondering on the mirror image before him and the past it implies. The past and the image, we hear, are dislocated from his now, indeed so dislocated that he is unsure whether he is the image or the viewer, whether he is linked to the past or not. This then is a man adrift, lonely and without context suffering a solipsistic identity crisis. Adrift indeed he is also on a cargo barge on a canal, ...
...coal. Above board everything about his character is reiterated, his relationship with his employers is empty and cold, littered only with the social trapping of food, smoke and booze. There is nothing about this man that gives us a sense of belonging, rootless and alone he simply is. A body is then introduced, floating in the canal. Adam and his colleague fish her from the mire, both bewitched by the semi-nude, bloated but beautiful corpse. We then ... Read review