Umbrella - by Will Self (Paperback)

About the Book

"First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, London."

Book Synopsis

"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."--James Joyce, Ulysses

1918
Audrey Death--feminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal--falls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death.

1971
Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital.

2010
Now retired, Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug.

Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century, in his latest and most ambitious novel, Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how it--and it alone--can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be.

Review Quotes

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

"A work of throwback modernism . . . an erudite yet barking mad novel about barking madness. . . . You give yourself over to Umbrella in flashes, as if it were a radio station you're unable to tune in that you suspect is playing the most beautiful song you will ever hear. . . this novel locks into moments of ungodly beauty and radiant moral sympathy. . . . a bitter critique of how society has viewed (and cared for) those with mental illnesses. It's about myriad other things too: class, the changing nature of British society, trench warfare in World War I, how technology can be counted on to upend everything. At heart it's a novel about seeing. . . . Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all."--The New York Times

"A savage and deeply humane novel. . . . . Umbrella is an old-fashioned modernist tale with retrofitted ambitions to boot. . . . Self has always been a fabulous writer. . . . The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self's sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing. . . . In its best moments, Umbrella compels a reader to the heights of vertigo Woolf excelled at creating.. . . . a triumph of form. With this magnificent novel Will Self reminds that he is Britain's reigning poet of the night."--Boston Globe

"A virtuosic performance . . . narrated in the allusive, sensory-overloaded style associated with Joyce's Ulysses. . . . A heady mixture of closely observed (and deeply researched) period details, colorful imagery, surrealistic juxtapositions, and italicized interjections . . . Self's wildly nonlinear narrative offers other delights: richly detailed settings that bring the Edwardian era and mental hospitals sensuously alive, kaleidoscopic patterns of symbolism (umbrellas assume all sorts of forms and functions), and loads of mordant satire."--The Washington Post

"Self's novel is an epic, but also a love story, and even a kind of fairytale. . . . it unfurls in anarchic flux, like an old-school experimental video. There are no chapters and few paragraph breaks. Scenes dissolve in midsentence. Phrases burst suddenly into italics. . . . it holds you fast with a weird charm."--The New York Times Book Review

"A brilliant, beautiful, hypnotic, and haunting novel. . . begins as hard-bitten satire but gradually achieves an even harder-won humane tenderness. . . . Self discovers a poetic vibrancy and an emotional conviction that far surpass anything in his previous work. . . . Umbrella is not just a revisiting of modernism--it is a reflection on the modern condition itself. . . . [it] shuffles past and present with such mesmerizing rhythm that the distinction between them ceases to matter. Memory acquires the force of reality. The world inside Audrey's head becomes immensely precious, restoring to her life the richness and dignity it had been so cruelly denied. Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion."--The New York Review of Books

"In these culturally straitened times few writers would have the artistic effrontery to offer us a novel as daring, exuberant and richly dense as Umbrella. Will Self has carried the Modernist challenge into the twenty-first century, and worked a wonder."--John Banville

"Umbrella is his best book yet. . . . It makes new for today the lessons taught by the morals of Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Tin Drum, also Garcíiacute;a Máaacute;rquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold."--Alasdair Gray

About the Author

Will Self is the author of six short-story collections, a book of novellas, eight novels, and six collections of journalism. His work has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.