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Title: Busted Scotch: Selected Stories by James Kelman ISBN: 0-393-31777-3 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Poverty, cigarettes, booze and welfare
Comment: Flashes of genius but not always readable. Short stories that sometimes lapse into incoherent surrealistic stream of consciousness. The understandability is often further reduced by phonetic spelling of dialect. The phonetic spelling assumes that the reader normally speaks Southern British English (for example "game" spelled "gemm.") At times it is absolutely brilliant with dark humor describing the way the shiftless (often homeless and destitute) make ends meet by welfare and panhandling. Reminded me often of James Joyce, which is not altogether a compliment because I've never managed to finish Ulysses.

Rating: 4
Summary: On Reflection: Good
Comment: A wide range of stories of life in the slow lane of post industrial Scotland. I picked up this book in a store, tried to read it and pretty much immediately put it down for six months. I was put off by the written Scots dialect (in some (not all) of the stories), the seeming inconsequentality of some of the storylines, and the surreal nature of some others.

I'm glad I picked it up again. I tried reading "Nice to be Nice" (written in Scots) oot loud to mysel' an' it made a lot more sense, and became an affecting story of a man working (in a small way) against bureaucracy. Reading other stories it became clear that they ARE about everyday life, but they add a poetic quality to it, and really get you inside the head of the characters.

I would recommend this book.

Rating: 3
Summary: Well Written, but Unexciting
Comment: This is about as good a way to get to know Kelman's writings as any, since he's selected the 35 short stories in this volume from four or five of his previous collections. They range from a half-page to thirty pages or so, and tend to be rather unexciting interior monologues. There are a few nice stories, my favorite being "Remember Young Cecil," about a former pool champion. Nothing much to inspire one to seek out his other work, though.