Hello, HoL! Thanks, and it's very nice to see you're still around too. We seem to like the same writers. Blake was a big inspiration to Gray, and they really have a lot in common.
Hammer of Los wrote:The whole emotional armouring thing reminded me very much of Wilhelm Reich.
Yes, Gray explicitly acknowledged that debt too, in his 'Index of Plagiarisms' halfway through the book. Lanark's 'dragonhide' is a metaphorical heightening of the eczema (& asthma & neurotic imagination) that afflicts the boy Thaw in the 'realistic' half of
Lanark. And the other weird diseases rife in Unthank (mouths, softs, twittering rigour) also owe a lot to Reich's concept of 'emotional armouring' and especially his
Character Analysis. In fact, it was thanks to Gray that I first read Wilhelm Reich and found him to be a hell of a lot more brilliant and fascinating and insightful than any psychologist I had ever read, including Freud. (For years I've been meaning to do a big post about Reich here at RI, but he's very hard to do justice to.)
stefano wrote:Prompted by you, MacCruiskeen, I went and found out some more about Gray and have ordered Lanark for my summer holiday fiction reading.
Pleased to hear it, stefano. I hope I haven't over-sold it now! "Summer holiday fiction reading" - hmm, I find it hard to imagine reading
Lanark on a beach, or anywhere at all in the sunshine. It's always been a winter kind of a book for me. And it does take place in a cold wet dark northern city. And Unthank (the nightmare version of Glasgow) is a place where the sun literally never shines.
But at the very least it will take you to another world for a while. And I've been pleased over the years to meet Germans and Swedes who had read it and loved it in German or Swedish (or in English). I hear it's been translated into many other languages now, including Japanese, so I guess the book "travels" better (is more universal) than I imagined when I first read it and loved it in my dark rainy native city in 1981.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC