Sophia Waugh

Thursday

14 Mar 2019

Thursday

26 Nov 2015

Thursday

17 Sep 2015

Thursday

12 Mar 2015

Thursday

1 Jan 2015
Sophia Waugh

Stories about storytelling: Kirsty Gunn’s preoccupation with words is utterly entrancing

Although entitled Infidelities this collection of short stories could as well be called Choices, because that is what really preoccupies Kirsty Gunn’s characters. Divided into three sections, ‘Going Out’, ‘Staying Out’ and ‘Never Coming Home’, the stories are more linked by style and writing than by any theme. Gunn’s style is clear, unaffected and poetic without being pretentious; her descriptions of nature — for instance the sky at the beginning of ‘The Wolf on the Road’ — are at times almost painfully beautiful. One stylistic technique she favours is not always as successful as her descriptive writing; often in a story she will slip from a narrative voice to an authorial one, from the past to the present. So in ‘The Father’, a Highland story seen from the point of view of children, we have ‘he’d show them how to do it, he’d show them the way’ and then ‘Cassie remembers to this day him saying…’ This intervention of a current voice, a teller of the story, becomes irritating, and reaches its climax in the title tale ‘Infidelity’, in which the character becomes a writer who is writing a short story about her own experience; but how much of it is her experience and how much of it is just story? Had it stood on its own, it might have been an interesting story about writing, but we have seen so much of this method in the stories coming before, that it has become more mannered than effective.

Stories about storytelling: Kirsty Gunn’s preoccupation with words is utterly entrancing

Thursday

20 Nov 2014

Friday

3 Jan 2014

Thursday

7 Nov 2013

Thursday

19 Sep 2013

Thursday

1 Nov 2012

Saturday

16 Jun 2012

Thursday

3 May 2012

Saturday

31 Mar 2012

Saturday

10 Dec 2011

Saturday

8 Oct 2011

Friday

7 Oct 2011

Saturday

23 Jun 2007