3.5
Young Adam
ByPublisher Description
A compelling existential thriller by the Beat-era writer: “Everyone should read Young Adam” (The Times Literary Supplement).
Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder?
As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he’s telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L. Ulin.
This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for “prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry” and called “the most brilliant man I ever met” by Allen Ginsberg.
“Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world.” —The Bloomsbury Review
Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder?
As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he’s telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L. Ulin.
This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for “prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry” and called “the most brilliant man I ever met” by Allen Ginsberg.
“Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world.” —The Bloomsbury Review
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities5 Reviews
3.5
hannahclaire
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Sarah.rc
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Kayleigh O'Neill
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Jared Hamby
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Brent Hayward
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“Another Trocchi book I read not so long ago, Cain's Book, has haunted me to greater and greater degrees since. (And sometimes, because of that, I wonder if the book was more effective than I first thought.) This one, Young Adam (no idea what the title means), also set predominantly within the confines of a small boat (!), will do the same, I can tell already. An amoral drifter working on a coal scow in Scotland's waterways takes what he needs, though not happily, turns lives upside down, even ends at least one, and moves on. Young Adam is painterly, ugly and a brutal story. The protagonist (Adam? I don't think so) has no empathy. Lusts drive him and they are cold and transitory. Insights into meaninglessness and self in the book, as a straight guy tormented lifelong by testosterone, are startlingly resonant. The sex scenes-- and there are several-- describe pale, moist bodies, as if dead and underwater. (The opening and perhaps most revelatory scene of the book is a floating corpse.)
As an aside, I find it crazy that Trocchi also wrote several novels marketed as erotica before losing all interest in fiction to heroin: those books must be the least sexy porn out there.”
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