Critiques en avant-premièreWill Self

Walkers, like lovers of literature, are driven by the urge to explore, and writers have blessed their fictional characters with itchy feet since the earliest of narratives. Milton’s Adam and Eve leaving Eden, Mrs Yeobright’s maternal anxiety spurring her across country in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, militant miners in Zola’s Germinal. Walks found in novels, short stories and even drama can have a multitude of meanings. Editor Duncan Minshull here forges a bold path through the greatest of the world’s literature, collecting extracts from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Proust and Poe, Kipling, Kafka and many more to show imaginations time and again set in motion by the simple act of walking.

British satirist Will Self spins four interconnected stories into a brilliantly insightful commentary on human foibles and resilience. Will Self’s remarkable new stories center on the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an ultraorderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. I n “Fois Humane,” set at the Plantation Club, it’s always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodkaspiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of “Leberknödel,” has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In “Prometheus” a young copywriter at London’s most cutting edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he’s always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in “Birdy Num Num,” where “career junky” Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement.