Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
This collection of 35 short stories—most of them being published in this country for the first time—has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work.
The stories of Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and England—the pubs, betting shops, tenements, bedrooms, snooker parlors, and decaying industrial workplaces. They range widely in length from a few paragraphs to twenty-plus pages, in style from the deceptively offhand to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from the casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language.
Synopsis
This collection of 35 short stories - most of them being published in this country for the first time - has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work. The stories of Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and England - the pubs, betting shops, tenements, bedrooms, snooker parlors, and decaying industrial workplaces. They range widely in length from a few paragraphs to twenty-plus pages, in style from the deceptively offhand to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from the casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language.
Publishers Weekly
The title of this collection of 35 highly original stories by the Booker Prize-winning author of How late it was, how late comes from a one-page vignette about an unnamed Scot in a cabaret who blows his week's wages on one hand of blackjackand he's one of the sunnier of his countrymen on display here. From the pool-hall habitus of "Remember Young Cecil" to the hallucinating alcoholic of "O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs," to the emotionally crippled young father of "By the Burn," Kelman's protagonists are desperate, angry people who live in industrialized settings that afford them no breathing space or peace of mind. Despite fancying himself a "natural born beggar," the narrator of "Not Not While the Giro" finds himself so hard up for a smoke that he sucks his thumb to taste the nicotine residue there. Even his dreams are feeble: he longs to become an enigmatic figure who, with his feet, traces the coastline of Scotland while living off the good graces of the townsfolk he meets. Kelman is a brilliant aural portraitistwith the rhythm of his countrymen's speech apparently ingrained on his psycheand a writer utterly unfazed by risk. (One story trails off mid-rant, another transforms a man's pushing his son into a vat of acid into an act of love.) Thirteen of these stories have appeared previously in the States (10 in Greyhound for Breakfast), but even these are worth re-reading. All told, this collection provides a tasty sampling of Kelman's finest fancies. (May) FYI: Kelman will take part in a five-city Great Scots Reading Tour, along with Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The title of this collection of 35 highly original stories by the Booker Prize-winning author of How late it was, how late comes from a one-page vignette about an unnamed Scot in a cabaret who blows his week's wages on one hand of blackjackand he's one of the sunnier of his countrymen on display here. From the pool-hall habitus of "Remember Young Cecil" to the hallucinating alcoholic of "O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs," to the emotionally crippled young father of "By the Burn," Kelman's protagonists are desperate, angry people who live in industrialized settings that afford them no breathing space or peace of mind. Despite fancying himself a "natural born beggar," the narrator of "Not Not While the Giro" finds himself so hard up for a smoke that he sucks his thumb to taste the nicotine residue there. Even his dreams are feeble: he longs to become an enigmatic figure who, with his feet, traces the coastline of Scotland while living off the good graces of the townsfolk he meets. Kelman is a brilliant aural portraitistwith the rhythm of his countrymen's speech apparently ingrained on his psycheand a writer utterly unfazed by risk. (One story trails off mid-rant, another transforms a man's pushing his son into a vat of acid into an act of love.) Thirteen of these stories have appeared previously in the States (10 in Greyhound for Breakfast), but even these are worth re-reading. All told, this collection provides a tasty sampling of Kelman's finest fancies. (May) FYI: Kelman will take part in a five-city Great Scots Reading Tour, along with Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean.Library Journal
The Scotsmen in these stories and fragments (some no more than a paragraph or two) by Booker Prize winner Kelman live in squats, caravans, and tenements, on the dole and on the edge. They would be working-class if they worked, but they're layabouts and idlers who prefer to sponge off their mates and neighbors. The narrator of "Not While the Giro" considers himself a late starter, but, by most standards, he's a nonstarter. He worries that he's losing his mind, but his very self-awareness convinces himself otherwise as he muses, "Often I sit by my window in order to sort myself out--a group therapy within." In "A Situation," a boarding house tenant is asked down to the room of an elderly invalid who confesses to an old crime of industrial sabotage while the younger man is haunted by his own secret, an infidelity with his girlfriend's sister. The reader may not wish to know these characters well but will be grateful for the opportunity of this brief meeting. Recommended for literary collections.Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., OntarioKirkus Reviews
Capitalizing on his 1995 Booker novel, How late it was, how late, Kelman offers this compendium of 35 stories—10 culled from his only other collection to have appeared here (Greyhound for Breakfast, 1988)—portraying the down-and-out of Scottish society.The focus of these pieces (some of them a few paragraphs long), rendered in the frank, ferocious style for which Kelman has been rightly acclaimed, never shifts far from the working poor or the unemployed in Glasgow. Young or old, male or female, all of Kelman's characters are scarred both by poverty and by the inner frailties that poverty and violence give rise to. These wounds are often only incompletely perceived by the protagonists. "No Long the Warehouseman" describes a man who has ended up on the dole for reasons he can't explain to himself, let alone to his wife. In "By the Burn," a father finds that memories of his daughter's violent death make it impossible for him to go on with his life. "A Situation" gives an extended view of a young salesman rendered all but immobile by feelings of inadequacy in his job and by guilt at having had sex with his fiancée's sister. These frailties also drive some characters to escape in fantasy, as in "O Jesus, Here Come the Dwarfs," in which a potato-picker finds himself befriending, then defending, a group of little people; it's likely, we come to realize, that the whole incident occurred entirely in the man's frantic imagination. Common to these portraits of the downtrodden and the self-defeated are a dark hilarity and a lyricism that underscores each bleak encounter, slashing through with razor-sharp emphasis.
Giving a crisp measure of the author's vision, these are tales that further demonstrate Kelman's angry, distinctive voice and his unsettling vision of modern life.