Trainspotting is a collection of short stories that take place around the late 1980s in Edinburgh, Leith, and London. Jumping from different perspectives-- sometimes first-person point-of-view, sometimes third-person point-of-view-- between junkies, psychopaths, British snobs, and even the Gothic teenage cousin of one junkie, we are given a neutral view on the relationship between heroin, its users, and the world around them, without demoralizing or moralizing any of these things. It's as if the author were giving us the chance to decide for ourselves whether we should sympathize or disagree with any of the characters. One of the recurring characters, possibly the main guy, is Mark Renton, a young University dropout and heroin cook who seesaws between getting on the wagon for his family's sake and off the wagon for his nihilism's sake; this conflict is notorious for its one scene where Renton goes through withdrawal symptoms, such as hallucinating the ghost of a baby crawling on the ceiling towards him. There's a lot of heavy dialect and slang in this book, but once you figure out what each word means (ex. "ken"="know", "bairn"="baby", "nowt"="nothing", etc.), you start to get the hang of it. There's also a lot of dropping of the four-lettered "c-word", more than any other swear word you can think of, so if you're not into that kind of language, watch out.
Nevertheless, off to see the movie now.
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