Dan Richards wades into the deep dark prickly woods of Kirsty Gunn’s latest short story collection: a compulsive compilation of delicious, delicate, dreadful dwams.
Kirsty Gunn is a wonderful reader.
Have you ever heard her read?
The words on the page are marvellous – we can leave that there and move on; I’m not going to write so many hundred words about how good she is on the page. You should know. The story on this site the other day, the roll and creep and wynd of that, the wyrd uncanny nettle-rash of her prose and how it ebbs and flows and then thickens until, you’re in up to your waist, your neck, lost in the deep dark prickly woods…and you look up and the light is gone and you’ve been reading far longer than you thought. The room is dark.
Turn a lamp on.
It happens to everyone.
Her prose is great, isn’t it?
Did you read Caroline’s Bikini? Wasn’t that fun? Cheever meets Nabokov in West London. All the gin – the song of the gin names, the swirl of the mixer, clonk of the ice. The rizz and fizz of the words; a book of reflections and whirlpools and eddies that pull you in and whirl you round, and the siren voice is there again, and in you go to emerge befuddled, changed, charged, thrilled. How does she do that? She always does. But we don’t need to go into that.
Reviewing Infidelities a few years ago, the writer picked out a line about epiphany, pain, and shock – ‘the thing that springs out at you makes you swerve, be alert, turn the corner’ – this is what Gunn does page after page, we go on, baffled, delighted, hypnotised by the voice. But you know the voice. You know that voice, the one which guides you through and says ‘it happened like this’ before pulling the rug, before the flytrap shuts and the glass falls slowly – you watch it fall in slow motion, dispassionate, intrigued, you can’t look away can you. Can you? No.
And now Pretty Ugly has arrived as the next compulsive compilation of delicious, delicate, dreadful dwams.
The best short story collection you’ll read until her next one. Stories that begin:
A woman, a certain kind of woman, loves a red dress. She seizes upon it; she is not afraid. She selects the dress from rack upon rack of dresses, takes it up in her hands, in her arms, tries it on and keeps that dress for her own.
Stories that begin:
Their father had always let them handle the guns so they thought nothing of allowing me to touch them.
Stories that begin:
Funny how things leap out. You’re not thinking about them, or about that part of your life at all. You’re not dwelling. You’re just living, one day, another day and then—Bang. Some scene or other rises up like the crack of a rifle and there’s the rabbit killed.
I don’t need to convince you of anything here.
That voice, the inevitability, yes.
But Kirsty Gunn’s the best reader, that’s where I came in.
Have you ever heard her read?
If you haven’t, you must. Go and see her on tour; the most remarkable thing – the voice stays with you, the rhythm, the delicate pin-sharp wit of it – but you should know this. If you don’t…maybe I’m being unfair. What a wonder to discover it for the first time. Lucky you!
Do put it right as soon as you can because she’s the best in the business.
I hear her as we dart across the page, the joy of being told a story – just us two. ‘It happened like this’, it gets under your skin.
It begins:
There was something wrong with the garden. You couldn’t see it, nothing was obvious. There were no strange plants organised in certain shapes, or sinister looking growths and weeds; the paths were orderly, and the lawns. Roses grew, and pinks, in the places that had been set out for them, and in autumn, berries came out on the crab apple trees along the west side of the wall beside the vegetable plot. It was lovely, actually.
It isn’t, we know it isn’t.
It never is.
It’s much much better than that.
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‘Pretty Ugly’ is out now. Buy a copy here (£13.99).
Kirsty Gunn embarks on an autumn tour for the book this month, starting with a combined book event and terrarium workshop in London tonight. Find further details below.
