Product Description

Sammy's had a bad week - his wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row with his girlfriend, but she seems to have disappeared. Things aren't looking too good for Sammy and his problems have hardly begun.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45075 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man." From the moment Sammy wakes slumped in a park corner, stiff and sore after a two-day drinking binge and wearing another man's shoes, James Kelman's Booker Prize-winning novel How Late it Was, How Late loosens a torrent of furious stream-of-consciousness prose that never lets up. Beaten savagely by Glasgow police, the shoplifting ex-con Sammy is hauled off to jail, where he wakes to a world gone black. For the rest of the novel he stumbles around the rainy streets of Glasgow, brandishing a sawed-off mop handle and trying in vain to make sense of the nightmare his life has become. Sammy's girlfriend disappears; the police question him for a crime they won't name; the doctor refuses to admit that he's blind; and his attempts to get disability compensation founder in Kafkaesque red tape. Gritty, profane, darkly comic and steeped in both American country music and working-class Scottish vernacular, Sammy's is a voice the reader won't soon forget. --Mary Park

About the Author
James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. His books include Not not while the giro, The Busconductor Hines, A Chancer, Greyhound for Breakfast, which won the 1987 Cheltenham Prize, and A Disaffection, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novel, How late it was, how late won the 1994 Booker Prize. James Kelman lives in Glasgow with his wife and two daughters.

Customer Reviews

How late it was, how late
This book is completely brilliant. It is a tour de force; an uncompromising and relentless exploration of the psyche of a particular type of marginalised person. It may be, I suppose, that you need to have had some considerable contact with hard-man disaffected indiduals for whom the world does not, and has never, worked, to realise how good this book is. I was totally captivated by the exporation of a particluar type of psyche, where the same maladaptive thought processes occur time after time after time despite their failure to achieve anything in other than terms of a personal logic/ethic. At one time I recommended it as a student text in psychology. If you drive an Audi (or even a Volvo),are in favour of goodness and against sin, you may not like it. I found it totally compelling and unlike some other reviewers, I couldn't put it down.

A scottish booker winner
This book has been slandered greatly, both by friends of mine and by "professional" critics. You must ignore them all. This book is utterly beautiful. Kelman takes the mind of a man and turns it into the printed word. You can't ask for much more than that.
In a few words: Virginia Woolf being dragged through a gutter by her hair.

Deceptively simple
This book may appear simply to be the blind ramblings of a working-class Scottish male ex-con, but in fact it's a lot more than that. Or maybe, that's exactly what it is and that is its strength. Kelman has written a novel of working-class Scottish pride. Sammy, who, as a poor Scottish male, is typically construed as "the other" by the world - particularly the English, middle-class, novel-reading intelligentsia whom Kelman knew would read this book - refuses to capitulate to this pressure. He speaks in Scottish dialect. This all relates to one of the novel's key themes - Scotland as a colonized country - colonized by England. Michael Foucault thought that if the colonized subject speaks in his own language, that he retains a certain power. If, however, he begins to speak in the language of the colonizer, he is stripped of all power. This book is Kelman reclaiming Scotland, Scottish language and "Scottishness" from the English. Sammy simply will not speak in standard English - except, interestingly, when he is faced with authority, in the doctor's or in the DSS.

Another key theme is that of the 20th century European philosophy of existentialism. This book has evolved out of a response to writers such as Beckett and Kafka, and the idea of the alienation and the "thrownness" of life found in Sartre is prevalent here. Sammy awakes at the start of the novel, having no idea what has happened to him or really what is going on, and instantly his nightmare begins. The strangely positive and almost life-affirming quality of the book is Kelman's response to existentialism, it doesn't have to be a miserable philosophy, it can be very positive.

Despite Sammy's social position and his constant swearing, we learn that he is actually a pretty clever and sassy guy. He refers constantly to novels that he has read, even novels from Russia and Eastern Europe. Kelman's point is that it is possible to deal with such high issues and intelligent themes ALL in a rough Scottish working-class vernacular, and that Sammy - and Kelman himself - doesn't have to give in to English middle-class language in order to be intelligent. There was some controversy when Kelman won the Booker prize for this novel, but he said: "This is where I come from, this is working-class Glaswegian and it has a right to be heard." Or something like that.

This is a dark, paranoid, rambling stream-of-consciousness style novel that is somehow very positive and deals with a lot of interesting themes.