Kirsty Gunn

This short book is a mixture of memoir and literary essay. Kirsty Gunn was born in New Zealand but has spent most of her adult life living and working in England and Scotland. In 2009 she returned to Thorndon, the suburb of Wellington, New Zealand where the short story writer Katherine Mansfield grew up at the end of the 19th century, to work on her "Katherine Mansfield project". Mansfield also spent most of her short adult life in London and in Europe, before dying of TB in 1923, aged 34, and wrote several collections of short stories. She also left behind journals and letters.

In this, she explores ideas and complicated feelings about home, about exile, whether this is a chosen escape for education, culture and travel, experience and freedom to write, or a political exile like that of the Palestinian writer Edward Said. She describes complex feelings of coming home yet never quite belonging for people who have made lives and homes on the other side of the world.

I was also really interested in Kirsty Gunn's account of reading Katherine Mansfield's stories as an experience across three generations of her family, from her mother reading the stories to her to Gunn now sharing the stories with her daughters, particularly including the stories set in New Zealand, like Prelude and The Dolls' House.

This is a beautiful and thought provoking book, published in the UK as a small hardback with good quality paper by Notting Hill Press.… (more)

2022 Advent, Day 21: he book was a metafiction, complete with introduction, further reading, and loads of footnotes. Now I'm quite a fan of footnotes, particularly as I use them myself and authors like Sir Terry Pratchett have used them to splendid effect. This book may have taken it a bit far though. I feel like the idea and the concept was there. Post modern, contemporary, meta! (I do enjoy metaanalysis and metadata as well and am currently writing tern papers incorporating the concepts) but I think a bit too much emphasis was placed on the method and e sort of lost The content. I don't even think this book has a plot and that's not a compliment (it is a compliment when I say that about books like Starless Sea, which is just a world that you inhabit and not so much a story you read, but this is not the point). I didn't like it and I feel like this book is destined to be the marmite of literature. I hate it but I am sure that some out there will absolutely adore it and be happy to spread it in their intellectual toast.… (more)

What we have here is a wonderful, ambitious idea for a novel, which unfortunately fails on almost every level.

Its subject is piobaireachd – pronounced, and usually spelled, pibroch – which, I need scarcely remind you, is the grand classical tradition of Highland bagpipe music. Piobaireachd is a complicated genre: it builds from a simple urlar, or ‘ground’-theme, and expands to take in a series of dazzlingly complex embellishments through a number of set interlinked movements, before gradually dying away again in a show of the player's virtuosity and skill. Kirsty Gunn's conceit here is to tell a story of piobaireachd which is also in itself a demonstration of the tradition: its form matches its content. A thematic, gentle introduction, a series of increasingly complex embellishments, and all coming back full circle to form a satisfying, ‘melodic’ whole.

This sounds amazing, right? The problem is that she forgot about the story. If you put this 450-page book through an industrial juicer, you'd probably squeeze enough narrative out of it for a brief piece of short fiction. Instead, what we have is a vast metafictional apparatus – dozens of footnotes, ‘found’ papers, maps, transcripts, interminable appendices – which totters around a narrative that's barely there. It's like seeing an enormous construction of scaffolding used to prop up a Wendy house.

Again and again Gunn repeats herself in the most tedious way. I, a lover of footnotes, came to loathe the very sight of the asterisk, by whose baleful redirections she insisted over and again that ‘Appendix 10a/ii and pp. 201-6 below may also be of interest here’, suggestions that recur with appalling frequency, sometimes three times on a single page. The appendices themselves resemble the kind of notes a writer might compile while preparing a novel and which Gunn has simply dumped on the reader wholesale; they go into ludicrous, unwanted detail on the setting of the book and its history, geography and geology (‘The Scottish Highlands are largely composed of ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian periods…’). Any subtlety in the formal experimentation is nullified by the brash way it's signposted in the text itself, so that more inevitable footnotes will tell you flat out that a particular phrase or word has recurred from earlier in the novel, giving the page number where appropriate, and explaining patiently how this repetition is supposed to mirror some technique of the master piper. Nothing is allowed to surprise you.

The very least you expect from a book like this is some evocative descriptions of the landscape, but it's really very little to get excited about. The mood seems to be modelled on Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn (no relation), but without reaching anything like the same level. Kirsty Gunn also sets herself up for a fall by continually reminding us that later movements of the piobaireachd, such as the crunluath, represent the peak of the player's virtuosity and technical skill: in fact, when we get there, we are only given a few more embedded quotations and historical notes. The actual writing style remains plodding and – to me, anyway – frankly boring.

It has been said that one definition of a gentleman is someone that can play the bagpipes and doesn't. Kirsty Gunn has written a most ungentlemanly novel.… (more)