Mo Said She Was Quirky
In Mo Said She Was Quirky James Kelman, the Booker prize-winning author of How Late it Was, How Late, tells the story of Helen - a sister, a mother, a daughter - a very ordinary young woman. Her boyfriend said she was quirky but it was more than that. Some things were important. You had to fight for them. Only Helen wasn't as strong as people thought. She tried to be but didn't always succeed. Nobody does, not all the time. Trust, love, relationships; parents, children, lovers; death, wealth and home. The ordinary stuff of life - but extraordinary too when you think about it. As Helen did, each waking hour, till that strangest of moments on the way home from work when this skinny down-at-heel guy crossed the road in front of her. Brian? Her long-lost brother? How could it be? But it was his shape, his very presence. Could it be? So begins Mo Said She Was Quirky - the inspired and absorbing story of twenty-four hours in the life of this ordinary young woman, as ordinary, as unique, as each and every one of us.
3.4 out of 5 based on 10 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
240 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
August 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0241144565 |
| Publisher |
Hamish Hamilton |
| |
In Mo Said She Was Quirky James Kelman, the Booker prize-winning author of How Late it Was, How Late, tells the story of Helen - a sister, a mother, a daughter - a very ordinary young woman. Her boyfriend said she was quirky but it was more than that. Some things were important. You had to fight for them. Only Helen wasn't as strong as people thought. She tried to be but didn't always succeed. Nobody does, not all the time. Trust, love, relationships; parents, children, lovers; death, wealth and home. The ordinary stuff of life - but extraordinary too when you think about it. As Helen did, each waking hour, till that strangest of moments on the way home from work when this skinny down-at-heel guy crossed the road in front of her. Brian? Her long-lost brother? How could it be? But it was his shape, his very presence. Could it be? So begins Mo Said She Was Quirky - the inspired and absorbing story of twenty-four hours in the life of this ordinary young woman, as ordinary, as unique, as each and every one of us.
If it is your life by James Kelman.
Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman.
Reviews
The Independent
Simon Kövesi
“This is a brilliant novel which portrays the multi-faceted ways in which a working woman and her daughter are susceptible to severe hardship, while also presenting the fraught social realities of being a child, an immigrant, an Asian, a Muslim, a mixed-race couple, a homeless person, or poor in the widest sense. The sort of threadbare life lived by Helen is so rarely given any unsentimental coverage in fiction that - in a time of massive state withdrawal, which is putting special pressure on poor women - Kelman might just have written his most important novel yet.”
28/07/2012
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The Spectator
James Walton
“Mo said she was quirky, then, probably won’t feature on many lists of perfect beach reads this summer. Like many of Kelman’s works, it inevitably brings to mind that Wodehouse one-liner about the lack of difficulty in distinguishing a Scotsman with a grievance from a ray of sunshine. And yet, there’s no denying that, in its almost perversely uncompromising way, this is a brilliant novel ... The result is a winningly humane, even compelling portrait of the kind of person who rarely shows up in literary fiction — unless of course it’s by James Kelman. The man clearly isn’t mellowing with age. ”
04/08/2012
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The Financial Times
Emily Stokes
“Like the child protagonist of Kelman’s 2008 Kieron Smith, boy , Helen is a character drawn with a rare empathy and patience … Kelman is also known for his polemics on subjects from colonialism to workers’ rights, and there are times when Helen seems not just a pawn in a capitalist world, controlling her punters’ fortunes with a casual spin of the roulette wheel, but the mouthpiece for her author’s politics. Such moments are forgivable, however, in a novel that manages to be as absorbing as it is uneventful. The story’s movement towards epiphany is both affecting and a confirmation of the author’s skilled accumulation of detail.”
03/08/2012
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The Times
Stuart Kelly
“His new novel is almost a dandyish slap to the pigeon-holing critics: Mo Said She Was Quirky is about Helen, a Glaswegian croupier in London with a child from a previous marriage. Mo is her Asian lover. In contrast with, to pick an example on purpose, Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, this “state of Britain” is not a day-glo horror comic but a tender, sad, exasperated book. And the Muslim lover, thank whichever gods you wish, is just a hard-working man whose only flaw is being upbeat. ”
21/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Martin
“It's both one of his most accessible books and one of his least interesting, with the advertised departures from its author’s supposed comfort zone (it has a female protagonist and a London setting) counting for surprisingly little against a voice and a structure that are even more attenuated than usual … The political virtues of the novel, in fact, are rather more convincing than the actual experience of reading it.”
23/08/2012
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The Daily Express
Matt Thorne
“Kelman struggles to make her voice interesting. This is a short novel but it still feels padded and might have worked better if Kelman had allowed us a little more distance from his creation. Such plot as there is comes from Helen wondering whether she saw her brother, who has been missing from home for several years, in the street during the night and mulling over the memories prompted by the sighting.”
12/08/2012
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The Guardian
Alex Clark
“Its stream-of-consciousness style presents us with a succession of fugitive, unreliable thoughts in which one must struggle to discern a pattern. It makes for a narrative that would be hard to describe as attractive, but is also hard to draw away from; it's more like trying to read through a thicket. Its least successful moments, funnily enough, come when it is at its most concrete. In these cases the book seems to be aiming for some real-world significance – in Helen's anxieties about her daughter's future as a woman ("Screaming was so important. Men could laugh but it was. It was men had to learn. Some did and some didnt") or in her preoccupation with the way people react to her relationship with Mo. Here, Kelman veers close to becoming didactic and sententious.”
01/08/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Anthony Cummins
“The trouble is, Helen’s tame voice offers little to relish. Classic Kelman protagonists fizz with fury and bewilderment at the world and themselves – and they’re funny. Where Helen bemoans “poor people in foreign countries, whatever they did for a measly pittance of a wage and catching all the cancers”, Pat Doyle spoke in A Disaffection (1989) of “places where they get the same job done by six-year-old weans with the added bonus of only having to pay them a flat rate of three lollipops every second century”. This is the first novel Kelman has written from a woman’s point of view. Helen isn’t implausible – not at all – but perhaps her creator has (for once) been too conservative to let her sing the way he knows best.”
16/08/2012
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
“The strangest authorial decision governing the book is the virtual abolition of detail. Perhaps the idea is to reach general applicability without passing through specifics, as poetry occasionally can, but the trick can't be worked in prose … Helen worked at a casino in Glasgow before the one in London, but there's no portrait of either establishment, no account of atmosphere, rituals or tricks of the trade. Only towards the end of the book is it possible to believe that the author has even visited such a place. It's as if abstention from detail is a piece of righteous self-denial, mortification of the writer's spirit, but mortifying your reader into the bargain can't be a good idea. ”
12/08/2012
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The Sunday Times
Adam Lively
“With its 24-hour time frame and strong presence of a female consciousness, there are obvious echoes here of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and especially Molly Bloom’s famous concluding “soliloquy”. The abrupt, brutal and indeterminate ending of Mo Said She Was Quirky, when Helen finally confronts “Brian”, underscores the book’s modernist roots. But there’s precious little Joycean exultation in Kelman’s novel. Some readers, perhaps for ideological reasons, will find something to admire in its parade of victimhood. The majority may find the following of Helen’s consciousness a grinding and not especially rewarding process.”
29/07/2012
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