The Cutting Room (Canons)

Product Information

So squalid in places you half-expect the pages themselves to squelch, there nevertheless remains a winningly sardonic tone throughout. To read more about the site or if you want a graphic to link to us, see the about page for more details. He works with Rose, femme fatale, and we are introduced to a few other characters who made an appearance in the second book. It was a while since we'd had a whole town house and the tight schedule meant we'd need extra hands - the usual unemployed sons, brothers, cousins, dragged away from their beds and daytime soaps for cash in hand.

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh – Canongate Books

At one point in The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh describes a bison's head, steeped in arsenic and mounted in a Glasgow saloon bar. He is given the job on the condition that the auction be completed in a week's time and that he clear out the contents of an attic office personally. The Guardian described it as a "gleefully black, knowing first novel", also noting that it "effortlessly glides [from a detective novel] into literary fiction". The protagonist ("hero" is not quite the word) is Rilke, a promiscuously gay auction dealer working for a struggling Glasgow firm.

There’s a strong whiff of pretension attached to Cutting, with epigraphs adorning almost every chapter (you don’t get a gold star for invoking every poem you’ve ever read, Welsh), and truly awful naming choices.

More tease, less strip | Books | The Guardian More tease, less strip | Books | The Guardian

They were the perfect couple, a rare balance of fat and thin which weighed together would equal two right-sized men. This isn't a horrible book, in fact there were pages and dialogues I enjoyed, but overall I found this really clumsy and, worst of all, rather boring for the most part.The water is rising swiftly, and Rilke’s thrashing about only seems to drive him deeper under the water.

Louise Welsh - The Scotsman Book review: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh - The Scotsman

When Miss McKindless tells Rilke to burn the books in the attic, he crosses his fingers and assures her that he will do the deed. As a result, her success asks the question, why can't there be more gay narrators and protagonists in the crime genre?I’ve been in a situation where they haven’t even thrown dirt on the man’s grave and the widow is demanding that I haul away her husband’s book collection. But sometimes - not often mind, just now and again - you'll go to the pokiest wee hole, a council estate, high-rise even, and you'll find a treasure. If you can't do it in a week tell me now - I've chosen you, Mr Rilke, but there are others that could do the job as well.

The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh - Google Books

To the extent that Post-Modernist works contain a story at all, the reader must do their own work to reconstruct the story out of the fragments. I'm pretty sure that, if you didn't know that Welsh was female, you'd be convinced the author was a man. While Rilke sorts out and packs up the house of the dead, his enemies and allies are trannies comparing manicures and chignons, bibliophiles who hoard musty paper, pornographers who hide their true business behind layers of obfuscation. Some of the individuals that Rilke encounters are respected members of society he would never have associated with this form of lifestyle.THE CUTTING ROOM is about an auctioneer named Rilke, a man of gray morals who solicits sex by night and often frequents gay bars, when he's not dabbling in objects of dubious provenance.