If you have not had the luck to read any fiction by Kirsty Gunn, then Pretty Ugly — her recently published collection of fourteen stories — is a great introduction to her work. Her distinctive narrative voice, a love of the natural world and keen insights into human relationships gives her writing about the domestic and the familiar, the outcast and the wild, a unique edge. Her prose is both lush and disturbing, every word meticulously chosen, indicative of her fascination with and mastery of language. Born in New Zealand, the visually stunning varied landscapes of North and South Island clearly have a strong influence on her mindscape. Both writer and educator, Kirsty Gunn teaches creative writing and is a frequent speaker at literary festivals, and as a workshop host nurturing emerging writers.
The stories in Pretty Ugly invite us readers to look beneath the superficial layers of everyday life to consider what lies beneath. The title of the collection alludes to the duality of beauty and ugliness and subtly examines in myriad ways the complex relationship between the two.
The Garden of Eden
A perfect couple live such a perfect, calm, structured life – she a successful writer and mother of their four children and he working in the City – the image is almost too perfect to be true. The garden is their haven, a place where he obsessively digs and delves, uproots and plants after his retirement. It is “a safe place for the two of them with everything growing and flourishing there as it should,” but the “earth from which the garden was made held something secretive and so peculiar that it could spoil everything”. What does “being a wife” truly mean for her? How has she secretly asserted her personal autonomy over the years, redefining the maternal part of her inner world?
The Show Must Go On
A writer at the launch of a book about historic rose gardens in a private house in Mayfair persuades a friend to go with her to meet the subject of her next biography, and help her get “the book in the bag”. Her take is that Joan Collins’ carefully constructed persona — using make up, costumes, stage presence is not just an image but “the paradigm for a life performance”. By transforming from “starlet” to “actress”, by continuously reinventing themselves, it shows us how our lives can be seen as a series of performances where every role we play is part of a larger, living text.
Evil Under the Sun
A girl escapes from the stultifying judgment of her family and cousins, out on a family picnic in the fierce heat, by retreating into the bush. Shunned for being ugly and heavy in the eyes of the kids her age — “She’s like a Maori girl, ain’t ya?” — fleeing from her pursuers who come looking for her like a pack of dogs, and taking refuge in nature by running through spiky bushes to a river, is a transformative active of rebellion with mystical overtones.
A Dog’s Life
An aerobics and weights coach on a life writing course wakes up one morning having dreamed about being attacked by two labradors. Could this be the beginning of a story? There follows an assessment of Jane Eyre. When she comes across a gang of kids terrorizing a pit bull terrier in the park and she “sees red” (a cliché derided by her famous American tutor and creator of “prose artworks”) the story takes a surprising turn. And we discover she had ended up marrying him . . .
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A teenager living in a remote, small town is fascinated by her best friend’s father — a frightening man “with a long red scar from where a stallion had bitten him”. He teaches his three boys how to shoot and goes off on trips, without the girls. Except for one time, one exceptional summer, when he has all the kids with him. His truck is blocked on the dirt track by a group of men holding rifles who have targeted him as an outsider and have been “checking up on him [. . .] maiming his stock.” A story as much about the man’s inner landscape as it is about the consequences of his failure to fit into the prescribed role set by the physical and societal environment surrounding him and his family.
The Death of Innocence
“For how could non-English speakers come in and take up places that were supposed to be reserved? That was not what they were paying private school fees for, was it?” A seemingly normal mother with “good manners” loses all reason when her child wants to go on playdate with a little girl from Pakistan in her class. The way in which the “beautifully turned out” mother’s private, internal tensions swell and burst in public resulting in a deadly spree is a stark reminder that the most immaculate facades can conceal the deadliest of secrets.
The fourteen outstandingly well-crafted stories in Pretty Ugly are very readable and thought provoking. They encapsulate Kirsty Gunn’s ability to capture the nuances of both the beauty and the ugliness, the sickly sweetness and underlying rottenness of the world around us, largely stemming from humanity’s disregard for both the environment and one another. Buy the book and get stuck in!
Check out Kirsty Gunn’s website
The copyright to all the content of this site is held by the individual authors and creators. All rights reserved. Enquiries: please use the contact form
