I struggled through this one. In fact, I struggled with the book for 4 weeks before finally finishing it. I like the idea of the experiences and perspectives of a "furnir" as he analyses both his experience of living in America (as a Red Card class III immigrant, aspiring to Green Card status) and what he finds to be his failures as a partner, father and son. Why the struggle, you might ask? Well, for starters, every time I dipped into the book, I had to reacquaint myself with chosen words written in a phonetically accented Scottish tongue, with "huis"="house"; "Skarrisch"="Scottish"; "Uhmerka"="America"; "mair"= "more"; etc, etc.

It also didn't help that our narrator has the attention span of a bunny rabbit, with a habit of embellishing his stories, only to make retractions later. Irvine Welsh, the author of [Trainspotting] found this to be a "brave and provocative" that will delight Kelman loyalists and should win him many converts among Americans..." is probably deserving praise, but as I have never read Welsh's works, there is a good change that I am not the target audience of their works. Even if this one is "A beautiful embodiment of moral, social and political outrage portrayed on the most human level", it was a darn challenge to find any quote-worthy phrases that did not contain profanities or other derogatory expletives. Below are the two rare exceptions worthy of mentioning here:

"Naw, I said, sometimes life can be beautiful. But sometimes things are the opposite of that, if there is an opposite of that: being honest I don't think there is; just there can be bad times, we get these bad times. You says ugly there Rita, odious stiff like that; but I'm no sure if they are opposites. To me beautiful is out there on its ayn lilke if it's there in yer life, if beautiful's there in yer life. Nothing can touch that. There isnay nothing else."

"Ye know what like it is when ye hear something greeting be it a dumb animal or a child, it breaks yer heart. That is if ye are a genuine person. A lot of bodies arenay genuine persona aarh jack lad they be persons by proxy, they have trained themselved no to be genuine persons, their morality becomes a politics and the actual argument has to do with whether or no morality exists or whether or no an individual has an obligation to be moral."

Overall, a struggle of a read for me. While the story contains some wonderful literary references and some fantastically insightful moral and social commentary, the whole airport "persian bet" aspect of the story just left me baffled. ( )

Hilariously funny about a peculiar Scotsman in a USA that is slightly changed. Incredible much swearing though, the f-word on nearly every page throughout the book so it got a bit exhaustive at the end. ( )