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manderley's review
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.0
millennial_dandy's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
stefaniegiss's review against another edition
dark
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Racism, and Racial slurs
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