In the prologue to Kirsty Gunn’s new collection, a writer sits in a low-lit bar with a former lover drinking tequila and discussing short stories. “Nobody buys short stories anyway,” the lover remarks, “nobody thinks there’s enough going on.”
This collection is a perfect, witty riposte to that casual dismissal, and a lesson in how much goes on beneath the surface of everyday life; through a series of interwoven narratives, Infidelities explores the unspoken betrayals of those who, either suddenly or over time, find themselves leading lives of dissatisfaction or quiet desperation from which they seem unable to break free.
Some are tales of the road: everyday journeys that briefly reveal a more fundamental direction of travel. Many feature encounters with the natural world: a mother driving to her lover meets a yellow-eyed wolf on the road, while a pregnant fiancee is watched by foxes as she walks home through a wood. Throughout, there persists a sense of the uncanny: of furtive emotions that linger like wild animals in the “shadowy place” where the well-tended garden meets the wood. Indeed, many characters do venture into the trees, only to emerge changed, or not at all.
Gunn traces these hidden emotional topographies with insight and attentiveness to form and language which marks her previous work: themes and motifs echo and repeat, and words acquire a tangible presence which can be savoured, like something which “you could hold in your mouth”.
“It’s not the big long things you choose that show you who you are”, one character reflects, but rather “the thing that springs out at you makes you swerve, be alert, turn the corner”. Gunn’s stories are themselves such “sightings”: delicate, unsettling and revelatory.
Infidelities is published by Faber (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £9.49
