gooneruk:

I finally got round to reading Niven Govinden’s Graffiti My Soul over the course of a business trip last week, after having had it recommended to me a while back.

It tells the tale of a Jewish-Tamil teenager in Surrey, trying to deal with the death of a very close female friend, which may or may not have been his fault. The chronology flicks back and forth between the events leading up to her death, and the aftermath. I can’t remember whether it changes every chapter or every few chapters, but it’s a rapid switch each time, which the author uses to good effect by springing a couple of surprises a few paragraphs into a new time period.

It reminds me a little of Trainspotting, and how it would take you a page or so to realise that the narrator had changed for that particular chapter. Here, it’s one constant voice all the way through, but the tone is very different pre- and post-death. Even so, it can take a minute or so before you realise that the timeframe has switched.

Govinden also has a particularly good ear for the modern vernacular amongst teenagers. The language is exactly what you hear on the street every day, and (if you’re young enough) what you remember using yourself. The narrator himself notes that he slips into a combination of gangsta-rap/Caribbean patois, despite being of Tamil descent, because it’s just what you do in leafy Surrey nowadays.

Whilst I liked the structure of the novel, and its realistic use of language and setting, I still found myself not enjoying it all that much. I think this is because I didn’t feel any connection to pretty much any of the characters at all, as very few of them had any redeeming features of merit.

Whether this was intentional or not, I’m not sure. I like a good anti-hero (Renton from Trainspotting, Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, Peter Crumb from the Seven Days of Peter Crumb, and even Alex from Clockwork Orange), but to some extent they all had something a little positive about them. Veerapen has nothing at all.

He happy-slaps, pines after a girl that he pushes away from himself, deliberately gets into fights, and is just a bit of an idiot in general. His mate Jason is even worse, and even the dead girl, Moon Suzuki, doesn’t particularly endear herself to anyone.

Whether it’s just me, in that I don’t appreciate the seemingly utter nihilism of being a teenager, or whether it’s a deliberate choice by the author to write unlikeable characters, I’m not sure. It wasn’t so long that I was in that age bracket, yet these kids are of a completely different breed and nature.

As I got further into the story, I found myself just wanting to get it over with. I didn’t really care what happened to any of them, and there was no lingering afterthoughts in my mind once I’d finished the book.

The sheer level of vitriol that spews from the mouth and mind of Veerapen isn’t something I got on well with, because it was directed at such formulaic targets: the girl who doesn’t love him back; the bully at school; his absent father.

At least Begbie’s rage was at anything and everything, which made him such an enjoyable sociopath. Veerapen doesn’t have that: he just has the usual growing pains which most people go through, and doesn’t deal with them in any manner that’s interesting or insightful.

The happy-slapping chapters are thoroughly unenjoyable, which sounds a little odd considering how I like the ultra-violence in Clockwork Orange and its ilk. Perhaps it’s because the happy-slapping comes with a huge dose of ego, of Veerapen and Jason wanting to feel bigger and better than their victims. Burgess was able to write about the ultra-violence as if it were something to fill the time, which made it all the more shocking. Here, it’s just kids trying to act tough and big, which isn’t at all worth reading.

This is not to say that it’s a bad book, because it’s very well written, and I like how Govinden plays with the chronology. But is that enough to compensate for such unlikeable characters? For me, it wasn’t, but maybe some others will enjoy that kind of detachment from the protagonists.

rainbowpuke:

1. there are a lot of numbers in this article

2. there are too many prime numbers

3. numbers are weird

vnakamaru89:

NO HA CAMBIADO NADA :D

loveyourchaos:

(by Funki Sock Munki)