SOURCE: “Fiction into Film, or Bringing Welsh to a Boyle,” in Literature-Film Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, July, 1997, pp. 158–62.

In the following review, Cardullo devotes more attention to the film than to the novel Trainspotting, but his close comparison of the exact words used in equivalent passages pinpoints differences. Cardullo compares the novel to The Catcher in the Rye and the film to a long list of predecessors, including the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night.

Like it or not, Scotland's Trainspotting [the film based on Irvine Welsh's novel] can be seen as a kind of existentially nihilistic travelogue for the rest of the world. Yes, it's true that Scotland is not so remote a place; still, the representation of this country in the cinema has more or less been limited over the last few decades—at least for those of us living outside the United Kingdom—to the charmingly...