Keith WaterhouseReseñas

After two pages, I said to Jim, "Oh, he's OCD". Not the guts of the story, but a complicating factor. It's England in the hinterlands, in 1959, and Billy, 19, is struggling in a job he detests, a social life he can't cope with, a depressed economy and a depressing family, but he can't seem to get out. His every action and inaction lead to more complications, with his employer, with women, with family. Some of it is very funny (I'm sure it reads well on audio), but the cage is closing in on him and he knows it. How will he escape?

Very nicely written, with some terrific sentences and images:

the fat women rolling along on their bad feet like toy clowns in pudding basins

or Frowning women, their black, scratched handbags crammed with half-digested grievances..

or I was amazed and intrigued that they should all be content to be nobody but themselves.

In all, a vivid portrait of that part of England in that year between the war and the artistic explosion of the 60s, as well as that of a young man adrift.

Billy Fisher is a 19-year-old suffocating in a small fictional Yorkshire town and this book covers one day in his life. Billy works as an undertaker's clerk, is nagged by his mother and shouted at by his father, is engaged to two girls but is in love with a third and dreams of becoming a hit comedy writer. Feeling trapped by the monotony of his everyday life Billy frequently disappears into a world of daydreams and lies. Inevitably, Billy's compulsive lies begin to catch up with him.

'Billy Liar' became an instant hit following its first publication in 1959 and has been adapted into a play, a musical, a TV series and even a film.

I found this a quick, warm and pleasant read filled with a subtle British humour which although it didn't actually make me laugh out loud, I did read it with a smile. Billy is an interesting character, a lively storyteller with an unmistakably northern humour but like all the best comedy, the book's tragedy rings true with a much wider audience that still resonates today.½

This is a popular classic which I hadn't seen before. Unfortunately, I wasn't particularly impressed. Billy is a young man who dreams of a better life, with a fantasy world he escapes to at times. Unfortunately he has not learned to distinguish fact from fantasy, and tells stories not just to his parents but to his friends and colleagues. He's managed to get engaged to two different young women, and is in trouble for having forgotten to post a large number of calendars some months previously.

A few amusing moments, and it was interesting to see the film that - apparently - was the first one featuring a young Julie Christie. But on the whole I thought it silly rather than humorous, and rather a sad reflection of someone living such a boring life that he never grew up. Rather a discouraging ending, too.½

Well-acted bittersweet story of a young man with plenty of imagination but no gumption. No sane man wouldn't take the midnight train to London with Julie Christie, after all! Nice locations.½

This book was not as good as I just expected. I thought there would be more humor as I love British humor. I guess It just didn't have enough Brit humor for me. Billy sure was a glutton for punishment.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse has proved to be an influential book and has been adapted into a play, a musical, a film and a TV series. The main character, William Fisher is a working-class 19 year old living at home with his parents in a small town in Yorkshire. He is bored by his job as a clerk for an undertaking business, so he spends his time indulging in fantasies and dreams about life in the big city as a comedy writer. He has managed to get himself engaged to two girls all the while being in love with a third one and, no surprise here, he appears to be a compulsive liar.

The author captures that stifling small-town atmosphere as the story cycles through one day in Billy’s life. Between his multiple girlfriends, exasperated parents, annoying colleagues and some quite serious misconduct at work, Billy needs to be doing more than escaping into his fantasies. It quickly becomes apparent though that Billy has no desire to grow up.

While there were some stellar scenes in the book, I never really found myself much caring about the main character. Perhaps I should have read this book when I was younger and more sympathetic to rebellious youth, but at my current age, I had more in common with his parents and his Gran. Billy’s attempts to avoid responsibility and his lack of judgment simply seemed rather pointless to me.½

The story I heared, the book, gets 4 stars, I liked it. It was a funny book, for me as a bystander. But when I think of Billy, who wants to be different, to live somewhere else, to have a different life, then all of a sudden it isn't funny anymore.
To live an imaginary life & get yourself in trouble with lies, that's desperate.

The quality of the audio of my version was not so good.
Louder, more quiet, the music in the pauses was of bad quality, so bad it got false.
That's a shame.

This comprises scenes/extracts from various plays, including The hole by N.F.Simpson and Billy Liar by Waterhouse and Hall. There is an explanatory introduction before each scene. Simpson's The hole could be a prediction of Brexit - out of something seemingly casual and random comes hysteria and horror.

This collection has many gems and a few rocks. Definitely worth the read for the highs, though!

Title goes on: And How to Sing it."

A little too old-fashioned or British or both. A little too much Waterhouse, too. His 'ear' isn't quite the same as mine. Recommended by Lynn Truss of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." Recommended for grammar snobs and serious fans of Truss."

Most of these short pieces are pretty funny, even if many of the particularly British references go right over your head. I was able to figure out some of them, and thus learn some recent UK history. Some of the columns are rants about such things as inefficient city councilmen and bureaucrats who don't let teachers do their jobs.

Some are both funny and expressions of frustration, as in the 'Shar & Tray' columns. These are about a 'delectable duo,' usually hired by department stores, who are more interested in gossip than in serving the customers, and who have spent more effort studying beauty secrets than politics, history, science, or any school subject. But they're not necessarily dim, and they are curious. So seeing the UK of the 80s and early 90s through their eyes, so to speak, is amusing.

Another favorite topic is covering the meetings of the AAAA, the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe. The 'greengrocer's apostrophe' which shows up in offerings of 'potatoe's, apple's, and lettuce's' is just the tip of the iceberg as Waterhouse shares a few of the examples he too easily collects.

We don't really have a counterpart to KW in the US. Not Keillor or Dave Barry for sure. Maybe [a:Calvin Trillin|55201|Calvin Trillin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1252960739p2/55201.jpg] or [a:James Lileks|58556|James Lileks|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-4df4c878d4149c45fac159e88cb784ad.jpg], in some ways. Do you know anyone else I should check out?

Just finished Billy the Liar and starting on Billy Liar on the Moon. The story is about a young man who has an alternate universe he wanders into from time to time - Ambrosia - and his endless lying in his real world, dreary as it is. He's not your standard liar. No no. He is creative, funny, bizarre and honestly snort out loud funny. From tales of his father's (untrue) fake leg, to the situation of the calendars, he cheerfully lies himself along a path to his own perdition.
Of course the person he hurts the most is himself - he is naive, basically sweet, and totally beaten down by life. You can't help warm to him and wish him all success. Wherever it happens.
So well written, still current, still funny. Written in 1959, made into a play, a movie,a musical, a TV series, parts of several songs, etc etc. It obviously has spoken to many over the years... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Liar
Well worth a read. A much more creative take on the alienated young man than the more standard Catcher in the Rye. Less complaining, more action, three fiancees, funny accents, and an undertaker's office. What's not to love?

Versione italiana di Franca Cancogni: "Billy il bugiardo"

This is actually one of the few times when I preferred the movie to the book. Tom Courtenay brings such a fragility to the otherwise unlikeable character of Billy Fisher that I couldn't help but like him. But in the book he's just a self-sabotaging, solipsistic twit. There were a few laugh-out-loud moments in this book as Billy tries to avoid the giant web of lies he's created in all parts of his life. But these were subordinate to the character's essential loathsomeness.

I also think the music-hall patter--it's the main way that Billy communicates with other members of his generation--has not aged well. It's hard for a modern reader to see why such banter would be witty, funny, or subversive in any way. However, Waterhouse's evocative descriptions of a changing Britain are really interesting and spot-on (that is, if Dominic Sandbrook's monumental history of the era, Never Had It So Good, is accurate). Worth reading if not particularly memorable.

A day in the life of Billy Fisher, serial fantasist and all round loser. Engaged to two of the wrong girls, his workplace sins and emotional failures catch him up on a day that might have seen him escape to something different - but ends up with him back at home, doubtless doing his best next day to dodge the music again. Waterhouse writes of small town Yorkshire life before the Beatles first LP changed everything - an evocative world of dancehalls and narrow streets, that was quickly changing into something different.

If your recipient is chosen wisely, then this is the perfect gift - informative and funny, from a newspaper writer with true style. Ambles genially through language rather than laying out a set of commandments so it's hardly definitive, but well worth reading for any journalist.

I struggled with this constantly giving the author the benefit of the doubt.In the end I couldn't get to the end.

Nostalgic look at growing up in leeds in the north of england in the 40s and 50s. It had great reviews on the cover. It's well-written and interesting and detailed, and it's good if you are interested in social history or northern england or how one young man became a journalist and a writer. But it is not much more than that. I recommend instead 'There is a Happy Land' - the author's first novel - which is a wonderful book and which will resonate long after you have finished reading.

Keith Waterhouse has just died and with his passing there is a loss to the English language. Billy Liar made me laugh a lot when I first read it.

One of my favourite books, a hilarious day in the life of Billy Fisher as he tries to uproot himself from his Yorkshire life to go and work as a scriptwriter in London. Unfortunately his compulsive lying means there is a lot to untangle before he can go, and in this day it all comes back to haunt him - his 3 engagements, the calendars he never posted for work, the idle lies about his family he told a friends mum to fill a quiet moment etc. Seemingly unable to even be truthful to himself he spends his time daydreaming and talking in comic banter. My favourite scene is when he runs into Councillor Duxbury whilst out walking and keeps using invented Yorkshire dialect by mistake in his conversation with him, then has a dawning realisation that Councillor Duxbury is not as daft/senile as he had thought.

Every now and again, life delivers a clear portent. When I first took Billy Liar out of the University library--an act completely inspired by the Decemberists song of the same name--I was shocked to pick up a book that was printed and bound the same year it was published, 1959. The book fell apart as I breezily read its 150 pages--literally, crumbling. Many pages were missing substantial portions of sentences that I needed to guess to put together. All this should have suggested that Billy Liar was likely something to be wary of, and I turned out to be right.

Our intrepid hero, Billy Fisher, works (poorly) for a local mortuary, a job that allows him to stay away from his overbearing parents, balance his three engagements to local girls, and pine away at his potential future gig writing for a London comedian. Over the course of the day, he must settle up his affairs and depart for the big city, but it's not so simple a task for a man who lies more than he tells the truth. Hijinks, predictably, ensue.

I probably should have known what was going to transpire was going to be a disappointment when the cover proclaimed Billy to be as "zany" as Holden Caulfield. Perhaps the novel just hasn't aged well, but I really didn't find the humor all that zany or madcap, and while many have commented on how charming Billy is, much of his act comes off as substantially more mean-spirited than one might expect. As a character, he is conflicted and frustrating, but also lazy and self-destructive. It's rather hard to feel sorry for him.

In addition, most of the characters that surround him feel like little more than caricatures. His churlish, brash father and hyperprotective mother don't ever feel like humans, which makes a late plot twist regarding Billy's grandmother even less affecting. Billy's friends, too, don't feel like much more than sounding boards for his one-liners, and none of them seem to come through when he really needs it, which makes them pretty unlikable as well. As for the women, the only one we can really root for is Liz, but Billy predictably fouls that up as well. Leaving the reader, in the end, floundering for something to like and grasping at straws.

The final scene essentially encapsulates what I felt was wrong with the novel: Billy makes a brash decision that feels like it has almost no precedent. So too does the novel as a whole feel as if it's not sure of what it wants to accomplish and say, and when it does say it, it doesn't feel like it's the result of any significant change in Billy's character. Maybe I missed something in those missing page pieces, but Billy Liar didn't strike me as a terribly impressive novel, even if it was fairly short and easy to read.

Hard to find but worth the effort. Funny and sensible. An ode to lunch.½

Alternating laughter and wonder inspired by this little gem of a book. Stuffed full of things to amaze. However, my ability to retain this information deserted me, as I experienced interesting facts overload, and so really got my moneys worth, reading it several times over with the same level of enjoyment.

A quintessentially British tale of a smalltown dreamer who never plucks up the coverage to follow his vaultingly ambitious dreams, living in a fantasy world while he sabotages his normal life. In other words something I could really relate to. Billy's engaging, although his fine words (and the reader's sympathies) are undercut by his lies and other actions. Still relevant nearly fifty years on.½

Exquisitely funny. Great characters. Much better than Lucky Jim. But: LJ was 5 years earlier. LJ was written by a Prof.