The Good Times - Softcover

Kelman, James

3.62

86 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846970555 ISBN 13: 9781846970559

Publisher: Birlinn, 2009

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The Good Times was James Kelman's first work after winning the Booker Prize for his novel How Late It Was, How Late. The twenty first-person narratives portray ordinary people - men and boys facing uncomfortable truths, encountering betrayal or struggling to understand women and work. Tender and lyrical, The Good Times is a dazzling collection from one of the world's masters of the short-story form.

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About the Author:

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. After leaving school at 15 he worked in the printing industry and as a bus driver. In 1971 he attended creative writing night classes and in 1973 an American company published his first collection of short stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel. Greyhound for Breakfast won the 1987 Cheltenham Prize; A Disaffection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; How Late It Was, How Late won the 1994 Booker Prize amidst a storm of controversy. He has also written many plays for stage and radio. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and family.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The edgy, eerily precise worldview reflected in Kelman's Booker Prizewinning How late it was, how late, and other work, most recently Busted Scotch (1997), remains grim and brilliantly undimmed in this group of 20 tales. Kelman's stories feature the Scottish working class, in which miscues are common and evidence of real understandingof oneself or of othersis rare. In the opening situation, ``Joe laughed,'' a young daredevil, roof climber, and soccer player without peer ruminates on a friend's recent betrayal while hanging with his arms hooked on a window in a crumbling dockland building, overlooking a particularly dangerous roof pitch. The theme of existential disconnect continues in stories such as ``pulped sandwiches,'' where idle lunchtime conversation between construction workers touches on the topic of death and triggers in one a blind rage. In ``I was asking a question too,'' a man fond of copying words of wisdom from books he reads, sticking them up all over his apartment walls, considers his inability to talk with his single neighbor or anyone else. ``Every fucking time'' takes place in a pub, where a middle-aged man waits to rendezvous with his wife, with barely enough money to buy himself a drink, while engaging in a conversation he despises with two brothers he's known almost all his life; his wife never shows, leaving him to act alone. ``Comic cuts,'' the longest story, offers some hope that not all communication is misdirected: two men conspire to bamboozle a third with abstract discourse after a hard night, while they wait in the wee hours of a winter morning for some soup to heat and their mate to wake from his slumber on the kitchen floorbut the soup never appears. The brief title piece, based on a nightmare, serves as a fitting finale. Bleak, almost surreal stuff, sure enough, but every fragmented encounter or stark monologue here contains a nugget of hard-earned, bitter truth. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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