My thoughts on... Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

⭐⭐⭐⭐(4/5)

"Trainspotting tells us the story about a group of friends in their twenties who grew up in Leith, Edinburgh, who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are implicitly portrayed as addictions that serve the same function as heroin addiction." 

The opinions this book produced to the pubblic were diverse: "Welsh’s novel received as many good reviews as ones swathed in disgust and outrage" This is one line from the author's biography in his website: irvinewelsh.net/biography/ and this is exactly how I feel about this novel. To say it in a few words, I liked to read the main characters' stories and anecdotes but I was disgusted so many times that it didn't make the reading all the time enjoyable. And their crazy stories got me laughing quite a lot of times too. 

Through the novel there are many dark situations, their stories about drugs get so crazy and unrreal sometiems that to me it felt like it was pure fiction. But we can't forget that even though this novel tells us the adventures and missadventures (spoiler alert: some of them die) of Mark, Simon, Spud or Tommy, they are just a reflection from the real lives of so many people during the 80s who struggled with heroin addiction, Aids, an economical crisis and the loss of a dear one from overdose. 

I have to say too that even though they were just some troublemakers, addicts, racists and misogynyst kids, at the end, weirdly enough, I got affectionate to them.

To conclude I have to say that the only way I could read this book was in a translation in one of my native languages because the book is written in either Scots, Scottish English or British English and I do not understand Scots or Scottish English. And if you don't want to read the book you can just watch the movie.