Immerse In The Papers Of Tony Veitch Narrated By William McIlvanney Offered As Printed Matter

mi ha entusiasmato. Scritto con un ritmo piuttosto veloce ma che confonde molto, Il protagonista è il solito detective stropicciato ossessionato dalla risoluzione del caso, i comprimari piuttosto evanescenti e una trama abbastanza deludente.
L'unica cosa davvero piacevole sono le ultime pagine: ammorbidiscono un po' l'amaro per un romanzo certo non indimenticabile, I think WM maybe one of the very best Englishlanguage crime writers alive, . . That said, I had a bit of a problem following the plot here, And I'm willing to take resp, for that It wasn't superclear to me why the papers of Tony Veitch were impt, and I have to say, keeping the rival Glasgow gangs, and their complicated allegiances, straight, was a challenge for me.
Cdn't they have worn, like, pinneys, or something An alcoholic tramp is found dying, nothing unusual in Glasgow, but his final words and who they are whispered to sparks an investigation into corruption.
The man who hears the dying words D, I. Jack Laidlaw and he wont stop until justice is served, no matter what the price,

The second in the Laidlaw trilogy and its another great story, The gritty image of Glasgow shines through and Laidlaw stands out as someone who will leave no stone unturned.
The dying words of an alcoholic tramp set Jack Laidlaw onto the trail of a certain Tony Veitch, a young Glasgow student who he discovers has been missing for several days.
This book is the sequel to Laidlaw and was the winner of the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award.
Jack Laidlaw is called to the death bed of vagrant Eck Adamsom, His enigmatic last words to Jack lead him once again into the darker side ofs Glasgow,
McIlvanney presents us with much more than the stereotypical detective novel, but retains enough of the tropes to appeal to crime fiction fans.

His use of language and philosophical commentary raise McIlvanneys writing above that of other writers in this genre, giving it style equalling content.

Not a word is wasted in vividly drawing the characters and setting, Glasgow is as much a character in these novel as any of the other protagonists, Readers are transported to the Glaswegian underworld as they follow Laidlaw, a detective much in love with his city, even as he fights against it.

Admittedly, there is a wide cast of characters and I did need to turn back on a couple of occasions to check which character was which, earlier on in the novel, but once I was into the flow of the story, the characters and places all fell into place.
A love letter to a city

Tony Veitch has disappeared and it seems like half the city is looking for him.
Laidlaws one of the searchers, He knows why hes looking for Tony his names come up in connection with Eck Adamson, a drunk and downandout, now dead and it seems Laidlaws the only man who cares.
But Laidlaw doesnt know why some of Glasgows hardest men seem to be wanting to find Veitch too, and the question is wholl find him first

After being stunned by the first in the trilogy, sitelinkLaidlaw, I approached this with some caution, for fear it couldnt match up.
But

it does. Were back in Laidlaws world a good man trying to make sense of the hard and violent world he inhabits, trying to find justice for the people left on the margins.
Hes not a loner, exactly, but he stands a little apart from the world an observer with a compassionate eye, a philosopher.
Hes not a team player how could anyone live up to the exacting standards he sets Even he continually fails to be the man hed like to be, and his selfawareness wont let him hide from that.


One was young and pretty, made up as colourfully as a butterfly, The other was older. She had been pretty. Now she was better than that, She looked mid to late thirties and as if she hadnt wasted the time, She had eyes that suggested you might find Ali Babas cave behind them, if you knew the password, and had managed to arrive before the Forty Thieves.


The language is wonderful, It slips in and out of dialect seamlessly and the dialogue catches the tone and patterns of Glaswegian speech in a way Ive never come across before.
I can hear these people speak hear the humour and the bravado and the aggression, He shows beautifully the odd mix of the Glaswegian character, with its kindness that must always be kept carefully hidden for fear of seeming soft.
His villains are frighteningly hard without ever tipping over into caricature, and the everpresent threat of violence is chillingly believable.


“Coulda made something o himself, But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man, The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic, ” The unintentional humour of her remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself, Harkness couldnt stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldnt shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave.


The plotting is complex and takes a different direction than the reader is at first led to expect.
Tony is from a privileged background, in the financial sense, though not perhaps in terms of love, But somehow hes got himself mixed up with the underworld of gangs and hardmen and now his life seems to be in danger.
As Laidlaw hunts for him, the reader gradually gets to see different aspects of Glaswegian society, from Tonys rich, successful but cold father to the gangsters dispensing their own form of justice towards anyone they feel has betrayed them.


From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city, He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him, What is this place he thought,

A small and great city, his mind answered, A city with its face against the wind, That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard Sometimes it felt so hardIt was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground.
And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty, No wonder he loved it, It danced among its own debris, When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day,

But oddly, what this story is most about is love, The love of a sister for the brother who has fallen through lifes cracks into alcoholism and vagrancy, The love of a son which leads him to try to protect his parents from learning the truth about his brother.
The love for a woman, which can lead a man to destroy his life, And most of all, the love of a city the clearsighted, complicated yet profound love that Laidlaw has for this place of contradictions where kindness and cruelty meet headon.
Glasgow, as the sum of its people good and bad, is the character that is at the heart of the book and McIlvanney makes us weep and rejoice for it in equal measure.
A love letter from a man who sees the violence and darkness of the city, but also sees it as a place of courage and heart and humour and ultimately integrity.
A great book that gets my highest recommendation,

sitelinkwww. fictionfanblog. wordpress. com Having thoroughly enjoyed sitelinkLaidlawby sitelinkWilliam McIlvanney, the first of the Laidlaw trilogy, I was keen to continue with the series.
sitelinkThe Papers of Tony Veitchis the second book and is arguably even better than sitelinkLaidlaw,

Many of the same characters reappear and we get more insights into the complex world of Laidlaw.
Once again it's essentially a love letter to Glasgow complete with more remarkably accomplished set pieces, Some of the more metaphysical aspects reminded me of David Peace, The writing is sublime even as it describes a harsh and brutal world with its beautiful, haunting and poetic language.
In short, its another crime writing masterclass from William McIlvanney, I eagerly await sitelinkStrange Loyalties, the third instalment,

/



The dying words of an alcoholic tramp set Jack Laidlaw onto the trail of a certain Tony Veitch, a young Glasgow student who he discovers has been missing for several days.
This book is the sequel to Laidlaw I have heard many times that sentence of being more fun a funeral in Glasgow than a wedding in Edinburgh, and I could not be certain about what was first, if Glasgow as a myth of a city of violence, gangs and humour, summarized in that comparison between the two rival cities, or Laidlaw and McIlvanney's novels it looks to me as hard to split one of the other as it is to separate Scotland from Scott.

As I really love Glasgow, this is a novel I also must love, Violent, and very hard to read for a nonGlaswegian speaker I wonder what would happen to a reader that had no contact whatsoever with that city and its language.

But, hey, do not take too seriously that violence, physical, linguistic, economic, as this is fake too, As one of the Book Club members, Barbara, said this morning, that "eerie faerie" philosophy of a policeman is irritating, but only if we consider it true.
This is not just fiction, but a series of genre motifs, like the policemanphilosopher, the loving woman, the Marxist student, and that city of violence and humour.


I am very glad for having read it, The foundations of the Tartan Noir lay on this novel on its trilogy, apparently, and I cannot be surprised: as the pages go you feel the myth creating before yourself.
The death of Eck Adamson, Laidlaw's erstwhile tout, provides a clue to the murder of both a student and a gangland thug, proving that murder makes no distinctions when it comes to class.


McIlvanney's moody policeman seems to embody the spirit of Glasgow and the mystery dwells on the darkness of the streets as much as that which dwells within the human heart.
Thin. The uninteresting crime story in this the badger game Really is just an excuse for McIlvanney to extoll the uniqueness of Glasgow just once Id like a story about Glasgow, NYC or wherever NOT to say its residents are the salt of the earth! and use Laidlaw as the mouthpiece for a series of lectures on morality and life including several on the tiresome “academics are phonies” theme to people i.
e. everyone who dont live up to his standards despite his supposedly hard boiled character Laidlaw basically is a self satisfied prig.
Laidlaw'ın ikinci kitabı, karakteri seviyorum, yazarın okura anlatmaya çalıştığı bir derdinin olmasını seviyorum, Ancak cümleler kopuk kopuk, birbiriyle alakasız kelimeler topluluğu gibi, kitabın genelinde bir dağınıklık var.
Sanki üzerinden fil sürüsü geçmiş, Puanlara bakınca, kitabı orijinal dilinde okuyanlar gayet yüksek puanlar vermiş, bu ve bir sürü başka şey bana o fil sürüsünün çeviri olduğunu düşündürüyor.
Ca'nım kitap, ruhu gitmiş, zombiye dönmüş, Başladım madem üçüncü kitabı da okuyacağım, umarım çevirmen biraz ustalaşmıştır, Creo que como novela negra es muy buena, a mí me gustó más la primera entrega, esta me pilló en un momento que no era el apropiado para este tipo de historias y me he liado más que la pata de un romano con tantas bandas, mafiosos, delincuentes, policías, muertos.
Y sobre todo con la cantidad de personajes que no llegué a ubicar bien,
Laidlaw es un personaje fantástico, honesto, un verso suelto y sobre todo integro, de lejos es el mejor personaje de toda la historia.

Una pena que no llegase a conectar con la historia ya que la primera entrega recuerdo que me gustó mucho, espero que cuando publiquen la tercera me pille en mejor momento y pueda disfrutarla como merece.

Laidlaw was very, very good, this isn't better but it continues the best of Laidlaw, the philosophy the selfquestioning and the twists of plot, the random bleaknesses of life.
I wonder how this feels so fresh and uptothe minute for something published inwhen other books, less than half a dozen years ago, feel alreadyaged.
So, so satisfying.

And having reread Laidlaw, I have to continue with the others, I never remember how the plot works out, no more than I do the many many clever and spoton observations.
Laidlaw himself perhaps a little more philosophical all to the good and satisfying as ever, This second in the trilogy was disappointing after my rave reviews for the first one, I had trouble keeping all the bad guys apartand there seemed to be a lot of themand the plot was obscure.
I never did figure out why the papers were so important or what had been done to Lyndsey, It all failed to make sense to me, There was a lot of Glaswegian dialect, too much perhaps, Laidlaw continued to be opaque and his life seemed to be spinning out of control, On the good side, the writing was terrific, with a wonderful phrase on just about every page, I can forgive a writer a lot who says things likeher glance was like a sealed envelope, waiting to be opened later.
.Every bit as good as sitelinkLaidlaw, book one in the series which I gave five only I'm not sure these benefit from being read quite so close together.
They were written six years apart, after all, The earlier The Papers of Tony Veitch's greatest strength was its existential depth, whilst here the plot is sharper and more taut, This isn't the first crime series in which I've noticed an author reusing a theme or structure so it felt as if they were, on some level, rewriting and improving on aspects of an earlier book: as in Laidlaw, there's a thriller structure in which both police and gangland thugs are looking for a young chap who got himself mixed up in a criminal world he's not quite part of.


The events of Tony Veitch take place a year on from Laidlaw there are a few references, but nothing that would impair the enjoyment of this book as a standalone.
It nearly always gels, but occasionally, aesthetics are unmistakablys: She was wearing a shockingpink blouse with one shoulder and sleeve missing and leopardskin trousers that would have fitted a gnat.
And as in the previous book, there's stuff made of raffia to me an impossiblys ands material.
. . I sometimes wonder it if ceased to exist here before,

A couple of students are significant characters one upwardly mobile, the brother of a gangster, one downwardly, a sort of class tourist too sincere to be fully desrving of that epithet.
McIlvanney gives them more dignity than students tend to have in British litfic, yet they're not without callow earnestness.
These characters give further scope for philosophical and political discussions in a natural way, and outside Laidlaw's own head.
To create a character like the constantlywriting Tony Veitch may be a reflex for an author, but all his papers and scraps and paragraphs and long letters and essay fragments, a drive to write it down and attempt to communicate, lots of philosophising but nothing synthesised into a whole work, was something that struck a chord with me, far more than any story of a novelist does.


This, from the thoughts of another more blatantly classtourist character her accent had got lost in the post articulated some things I'd never even put into words in my own head before.

She saw these young people dancing, bodies throwing themselves about, so careless, like casual conversation, They were a message that fascinated her because she could never quite understand it or imitate its tones, that unselfconscious declaration of self before departing into the dark.
She imagined what boring jobs they must go back to, if they had jobs, that girl with a face tallow in the strobe lights, that boy who looked like a seedy angel and sneered at himself.
They explained her flat to her, She had rejected her own taste and just bought kitsch because she felt that where she lived no longer mattered much, should be as anonymous as a railway station.
Tony had taught her that, He had said, Houses are ways of hiding from a more complicated reality, I think, They should have porous walls, The less theyre you, the nearer they are to communal places, Like the best workingclass houses, These dancers reminded her of that, were all open doors,
Yes, like cheap furniture from Argos, for example, bought at a time when I could have got better or for that matter, better quality second hand used to make me feel more connected to something more universal and important.


He stood looking at the wall, Like a stag at bay, he was who he was, he was what he was, and nothing else, He saw no hope of proving what he suspected, He had half a vision and nobody else would begin to admit the possibility of the other half, He knew they were lying, It was all he knew, For the moment, it was all he cared about,
I felt occasionally that Jack Laidlaw's epicherodetective character skirted parodic tropeishness, not because he's not a wonderful example of his type, but because these days, after thirty more years, culture can't help having more irony a showdown in a public place brought to mind sitelinkBen Aaronovitch's Peter Grant novels in which the protagonist is constantly being reprimanded and laughed at for similar.
Mcilvanney is a master of metaphors and I'd been struggling to think of a way, a fraction as good as one of his, to describe this quality in Laidlaw, perhaps a squarejawed lone gunfighter in silhouette, his hair ruffled by the wind, forever the most righteous man on screen.
. . Near the end it was evident he perceived something of this himself, saying of another character, the feeling he had had so often as a boy learning to drink in Glasgow pubs, of taking part in your own western.
McIlvanney always has a better way of saying it, simultaneously grittier and more elegant, .