Morvern Callar

By Alan Warner

Book Overview

An utterly unforgettable novel that portrays a vast internal emptiness by using the cool, haunting voice of a young woman in Scotland lost in the profound anomie of her generation--from "one of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099449943
• ISBN13: 9780099449942
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

read it!

I absolutely loved this book, probably because I come from the town it is set in, Oban, and recognise quite a few of the characters. But apart from that it really is a good book as Alan Warner totally lets you into the mind of this character, we see everything exactly as she does. It does get confusing sometimes when you're reading it, but do stick with it!

Whoa....

This book opened up SOOOOO many new doors for me. If I had never read this, I would not be a die-hard Alan Warner fan, nor would I have started reading again. I have been reading so much since this because I found out that interesting, and invigorating literature does exist.

It's about language, music, escape, and life being handed on

It seems that readers (see above reviews) saw the depressing table setting here and looked no further. Actually, the book is exhilarating. Morvern's tongue is a potent cocktail of Scots, slang, and autodidactic poetry, and it's more erotic in and of itself than anything since the motels sequence of Lolita. Her character, far from blank or emotionless, is wanton, savage, but with great depths of wisdom--she's a changeling, and her story is almost mythic, beginning with its premise. This book has a pulse you can nearly dance to, but, like some great undiscovered piece of trance dub, it has symphonic undercurrents, with a strange and terrible beauty.

You've missed the point!

Everyone sees Morvern Callar as a singular tale of hedonism and the drug culture, but that's not quite it. I may be predjudiced by living in the town that the book is supposed to be set in but I see it being so much more. The book has as much to do with the place as with the people - unless you've lived on the west coast of scotland all your life like I have maybe you don't get the point - Warner is trying to create the image of 'running away' that everyone likes to do up here. The book deals with Morvern's will to escape from her own mixed up, impersonal life there to the spanish costa's and the rave culture , a sterile but individualistic, contrast to the closely knit community she was brought up in. (A lot of the book mirrors warner's life - leaving home, living it up in the spanish raves for a few years and then back to the UK where he worked on the railways for a while) So when you read it - look for the little things, the town, the people, the battle between the sterility but excitment of the 'outside world' and the friendly but mentally stifling small town. Because I find it special that way the only score I could ever give it would be a 1