Swing Hammer Swing!

by Jeff Torrington

Overview

Following Tam Clay around the Gorbals slums of 1960s Glasgow, Torrington combines lyrical verve with dark comedy in this modern odyssey of self-discovery. Direct, aggressive, with an eye for a witty pun and an ear for Glaswegian dialect, Torrington bends language to his uncompromising will. A riotous urban picaresque, Jeff Torrington's comic novel marked a milestone in Scottish literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784870126
Publisher:	Random House UK
Publication date:	05/01/2016
Series:	Vintage Classics Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	422
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jeff Torrington's (1935-2008) first novel Swing Hammer Swing! took 30 years to write and won the 1992 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Editorial Reviews

"The standard of Torrington's writing is so high that for once one is not ashamed to compare an unknown novelist to authors who are justly famous. That wag Joyce is the truest neighbor, though contemporaries Pynchon and Rushdie will do in a pinch: like all three, Torrington has a beautifully barbed wit and a fabulous ear for language, enough to send the sentences tumbling over one another in a symphony of belly laughs and brays or, where things are bleaker and more sarcastic, in a sort of muffled thudding like the dropping of shoes. . . . Writers this good, writing in the English language, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand."  —Booklist



"Here a new landscape stamps itself indelibly onto the literary map: the infamous Glasgow slum called the Gorbals, in whose ripe, decaying airs Torrington's intoxicated and intoxicating debut is steeped. . . . Torrington's writing is as voracious as it is vivid, encyclopedic in its reach."  —Publishers Weekly


"Swing Hammer Swing! is funny, clever, and bleak as hell. I wrote Torrington a fan letter, the only one I've ever written."  —Bob Odenkirk, actor and comedian

From the Publisher

Here a new landscape stamps itself indelibly onto the literary map: the infamous Glasgow slum called the Gorbals, in whose ripe, decaying airs Torrington's intoxicated and intoxicating debut is steeped, and through whose derelict streets his narrator and alter ego, Tam Clay, traces his past and parlous future in the last few frigid days before the wrecking crews move in. Tam's ruminative, often alcoholic and virtually plotless ramble intersects the paths of friends, enemies and eccentric strangers, some current, many remembered, most real, some imagined, and all fantasticated by the carnival whirl of Tam's fecund, boozy imagination, in equal measure ruminative and manic. But Tam's real foe isn't to be found among the in-laws, the pregnant wife, the jealous husbands or the debt collectors he dodges from tenement to taproom: his real enemy is time's ruthless march crushing his grimy, garrulous turf into the rubble of memory. His refuge is a rich scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor, with which he crams his vanishing world into chunks of wild imagery and pungent dialect, every phrase so grafted to time and place as virtually to defy quotation. Torrington's writing is as voracious as it is vivid, encyclopedic in its reach, eagerly setting down nuggets from Sartre and Nietzsche alongside reflections on the humiliations of the Scottish soccer team. Thirty years in the writing, this 1992 winner of the Whitbread Award is overstuffed, parochial, self-indulgent, sentimental, overambitious--and well worth every minute of reading time. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Whatever else it does, this 1992 Whitbread Award winner points up the disparity between what can make best sellers lists in the United Kingdom vs. the United States. Make no mistake--this is Literary Fiction (caps intended); the blurb-writers who compare Torrington to Joyce are entirely on the mark. Set in Glasgow in late 1969, the novel chronicles a week in the fateful life of soon-to-be father, would-be novelist, slum-dweller Tom Clay. The nearly 30 years of gestation that Torrington's book endured show through in the vivid characterizations of Glasgow and its denizens. What plot exists is subservient to vignette, but, in the tradition of Joyce, the language is rich and colorful. Not for the average U.S. fiction reader, especially with its heavy use of regionalisms, this work should still appeal to some with more eclectic tastes. Strongly recommended for fiction collections with enough funding to be venturesome.-- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.

Library Journal