Trainspotting

I don’t like weak people. I don’t like people who keep blaming their life, their family, their destiny, a divinity for their own mistakes. I don’t like hearing “this is what my mother/father did when I was a kid, so I cannot be otherwise.” Yes, you damn can. With great effort, and indeed with some side-effects, but you can. All of us can. Because after all, isn’t what all of us want, to be a better person, and to be happy in life?

I understand that life’s a bitch. Meaningless, pointless, and there are few chances that in the future things will be better (although, as humans, we keep on hoping). But as Cormac McCarthy has kept on saying, we, the few ones, must “carry on the fire”, in this bad, absurd, vicious world, despite knowing that things will always be the same, that we cannot change humanity, that God won’t appear from nowhere and say “I’m here, I’m back”, that the world will keep pushing us down and didn’t care for our own suffering.   

I read half of Trainspotting. If I had to vote for the worst book that I read this year I think this would be. I get its point, I see the struggle, the misery, the absurdity of life – but is it the only book of literature that does this? And it is simply not the book for me. 

People may be attracted to it because of its Scottish dialect, its overuse of words like “cunt” and “fuck”, of its easy, neat construction of episodes. But when it comes to style and technique, it is just a novel that depicts well the world of addicts, and that’s it. Moreover, when it comes to the construction of characters one can easily observe how empathy and remorse are absent: when friends are dying, when babies are found dead and everyone asks for another injection. You could read in this book how someone is stealing something or how a baby dies, the language to describe these events is the same. And on a psychological level, I can get the author’s point of view: for an addict, nothing matters, only the drug.

I guess that my problem with this book is on a personal level. I really know that life’s a bitch, and life for the unprivileged ones is harsh, I know that everybody wants a goal, a difference in this life, but in the end, we all wish for that house, that family, that car and that steady job, for personal happiness. But I simply cannot read about such weak characters, who use drugs to escape the cruel (or invented) reality. Where is their will to get up from that place, from that apathy, where is their character? And if you have read this novel (or at least some pages of it), please think of Jack Kerouac’s The Road or Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets.

Literature depicts Life (and Death), in all of its (their) aspects. I want to hear from it the struggle. The war within. The madness and the creation.