A book with a single internal organ as its unifying theme? Excellent. I double-dog dare you to find a likable character in this collection of stories; I sure couldn't do it. The book, on the other hand, I liked- a lot. Will Self makes painfully clear how he feels about the human condition. We are gluttons, slowly poisoning ourselves with various toxins . . . er, intoxicants, and we are not terribly kind to those around us, and most notably to those closest to us. Each story has its own unique twists and turns. The first story puts us in a seedy bar in London, the smell of which nearly rises from the page. We are introduced to a sorry lot of lifelong (until death) patrons, each on his own leg of the journey to death by alcohol. The second story is about a woman dying of cancer who is suddenly cured just as she has chosen to end her own life. How will she treat this gift? Mad Men meets mythology in modern day London in "Prometheus." The final story reminds us that alcohol and cancer are not the only things that destroy the human liver. Here we meet addicts swirling down their own chosen drain. Will there be redemption? What do you think?

Self is obviously a bright man, and I'm certain that I missed a number of references and metaphors in Liver, still, I think this one is a keeper. ( )

Liver is a collection of two novellas and two short stories that all focus on the liver, or specifically, different things that can go wrong with your liver. Alcoholism, cancer, hepatitis, and birds slicing your side open and eating your liver are addressed. Each of the pieces is loosely tied to the others, via reoccuring supporting characters and/or locations.

Will Self interests me for many reasons, but in this book the offset of fantastical with realistic stories was very engaging: you do not know what to expect from story to story, and Self throws several curve balls.

The weakest of the pieces is Leberknodel, which is unfortunate since it is the longest. The strongest was the opening novella, Foie Humain, where Self successfully evokes the stale and mind-numbing atmosphere of a private bar in Soho and examines the cyclical nature of alcoholism and addiction. ( )

Self is an interesting writer. I think he's honestly interested in the existential questions this collection centers on, but there's a lot missing. For one thing, Self, while capable of some really good writing, is typically a poor craftsman. He just seems to lose interest in his stories, characters and, especially, his conceits.

Self has said in the past that he's really a novelist of ideas, but he's not willing to carry through with serious effort on those, either, as far as I can see. It would seem to me that he thinks himself a satirist, but wants to be celebrated by precisely the people he wants to satirize. So he always more or less pulls his punches, giving everyone in the book the excuse of our general existential plight, and trying to recoup his edginess through graphic descriptions of bodily functions & dysfunctions.

It just doesn't fly: the decay of our bodies we have to live with; mindlessness, fecklessness and cruelty we can do something about. But seriously taking the satiric lash to those would mean attacking his own shallow celebrants. Too bad, really, that he hasn't the courage to do that. ( )

My review has a surface anatomy of four lobes.

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/liver-a-fictional-organ-with... ( )

When I was a child, liver was widely promoted as an essential food for growing bodies, full of iron and other nutrients. My mother, wanting the best for her family, dutifully served us liver at least monthly. This was in the "clean your plate or else" era, and some nights I would be left sitting at the dinner table for an hour after the rest of the family had departed, facing a plateful of cold liver.
Needless to say, I never developed a taste for liver, but I have acquired a strong liking for Will Self's new book, Liver: A fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. The four lobes in this case are four exquisitely crafted stories, loosely connected to one another through the Plantation Club, a seedy bar in London's Soho district.
In the first story, Foie Humain, we meet the bar's regulars: Val Carmichael, the filthy-mouthed proprietor, who uses a four-letter synonym for female genitalia like an accent mark over almost every other word he utters, and who bestows upon his regulars the nicknames by which we get to know them; Pete Stenning, "Martian," a printer known for his greenish hair; Dan Gillespie, "the Poof;" Neil Bolton, "the Extra," an actor once admired on the West End and in Hollywood; Philip McCluskey, "His Nibs," a tabloid columnist with a choirboy face, "celebrated on Fleet Street for the McCluskey Manoeuvre, which consisted of putting his drunken hand up a young woman's skirt, then falling unconscious with it clamped, vice-like, around her knickers;" Trouget, "the Tosher," a world-famous painter who had become cult figure; and Hillary Edmonds, the bar boy whose duties include serving as Val's companion outside of working hours.
Foie Humain is itself a painting, a wonderful captured-in-motion portrait of the down-and-outers who would have to rise by several degrees to reach the status of underbelly of society. Toward the end, though, it becomes an homage to a famous Damon Knight short story from 1950, which in turn became perhaps the best-known Twilight Zone episode ever.
Leberknődel, the second story, tells of a woman dying from liver cancer who hopes to accelerate the process and end her suffering by visiting a doctor in Zurich who provides his patients with a box of chocolate truffles and a glass of something poisonous. As the doctor hands her the class with the words, "I must tell you that if you drink this you will die," she has a change of heart. Instead she embarks on a new life, suddenly symptom-free, and finds new pleasures in her life. But even as her new-found strength propels her into unexpected avenues and relationships, her connection to her daughter - an habitué of the Plantation Club and friend of Hillary Edmonds - disintegrates.
In Prometheus, we meet a modern-day advertising Titan whose silver tongue and sales ability is fueled by his connection with a griffon vulture that fulfills the role his ancestor did with the adman's mythological namesake, leaving his principal client, Zeus, and his lover, Athene, more than a little baffled. Prometheus' partner, Epimetheus, taking after his Platonic namesake's lack of foresight, provides the tenuous link to the Plantation.
Finally, in Birdy Num Num, a pathogen describes the fading lives of a pathetic group of addicts waiting for their Tuesday afternoon fix - "because, let's face it, it's always Tuesday afternoon" - while a hanger-on reenacts Peter Sellers' role as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party.
Self's prose is soaring and dense with images. His plot turns keep the reader hanging on as stories careen in unforeseen directions, and his insights are pointed and delivered with a snap that stings even after he has moved to the next paragraph. With writing this good, it's almost impossible not to like Liver. ( )