Kirsty Gunn

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.… (mehr)

In 2012 the author Kirsty Gunn returned to her birthplace - Wellington, New Zealand - to spend time living in the Randell Cottage as a Randell Fellow. She focuses on Katherine Mansfield 'the writer to whom I have always felt most connected...'

Katherine Mansfield was born and lived in Thorndon, Wellington and the Randell Cottage is not far from her birthplace on Tinakori Road.

Kirsty Gunn's book is arranged around three of Mansfield's Wellington stories: The Voyage, The Doll's House and Sun and Moon. Into this structure she writes of her experience in the house as Randell Fellow, her re-familiarisation with Thorndon and inserts pieces of her own fiction which she writes in response to her experience.

In many ways it is a very philosophical book; the author's long sentences don't always help the reader to understand her thoughts.

Her interpretation of The Voyage was new to me, perhaps a reflection of having read it as a younger person. Overall I found this book aimed at women and understandably it was about women and their response to place. Neither Kirsty Gunn nor Katherine Mansfield seemed to have room for any male figures. Yet Katherine Mansfield's father Harold Beauchamp played a huge part in the family's life in Thorndon. There is no feeling that he or any other male existed.

This is a book to be re-read. It is another in the Bridget Williams series of short books by New Zealand authors.… (mehr)

A book that's hard to review without either giving things away or being so vague as to be uninformative. This debut from ex-patriate New Zealand author Kirsty Gunn is a novella really, coming in at under 100 pages. And written in a beautiful, quite elliptical style, reminiscent of Murray Bail's href="http://www.librarything.com/work/17879" rel="nofollow" target="_top">Eucalyptus – the same dreamy quality to the prose.

It's written from the point of view of a young girl, living with her parents and baby brother in what seems like an eternal summer by a lake. It's touching and sad, and there are two big episodes that occur quite late in the story but which you know must be going to happen from very early on. The impressive thing is the way that Gunn handles these events – offstage. She doesn't linger on them, or give us details. We just see them coming, and then find ourselves on the other side of them. It's a lovely bit of technique, and something that could have failed to convince in the hands of a less assured writer, but here they work. The whole novella is told in the voice of the girl, many years later. Again, this sort of “and I remember that summer by the lake” device could have been clunky – it's hard to balance the thoughts of an adult, looking back on her childhood, with the perceptions and actions of the child she was, but Gunn manages it.

Not a book that you're going to run out into the streets shouting about, but one that will make you nod, and think about for quite a while afterwards. A sad story, told with precision and some amazing craft. I'll certainly be looking out for her next books. Recommended.… (mehr)