The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories

This little book is one of my favorite finds ever in the used book section at Schulers. I was expecting to find no Alasdair Gray. I was just looking to feel superior or deprived, I suppose, but instead I found two books! Now I know I've mentioned that the short story is not my favorite format, but I needed a short story collection for the book bingo challenge at work, and Alasdair Gray should certainly make it more interesting.

For the most part (excepting the last story), this is Gray separated from all his big speculative fiction concepts. There are no portals to other worlds here, no women reanimated from spare parts. Aside from that, they remain true to the themes of Gray's work -- tortured (but usually well-meaning) relationships show more between men and women, class and politics, art's place in the world...

It's a wonderful little book. Some of the stories are quite strange, yes, full of outsiders and holders of unpopular opinions. Although each story features someone at the end of their tether in some way, for the most part these are people struggling to make the best of whatever the situation they are in. Most of them find a kind of peace, even if it is a sad peace.


Finally, I love the object of the book itself. Its strange little illustrations and the non-standard blocking of the stories. You will not confuse this book for any other book. show less

Every Gray book is a visual delight. This is another of those beautifully produced Canongate editions of Gray’s works, as usual with wide margins and illustrations by the author, though here there are no footnotes nor marginal annotations. In the main these so-called sorry stories feature, as the book’s title suggests, put-upon protagonists and include more than a few tales of unsatisfactory or failed marriages. They vary in length from two or so to 44 pages.

Gray’s narrators tend to have an air of detachment about them and it is unsurprising that their relationships are dysfunctional. Some have especially unfortunate habits. Job’s Skin Game’s narrator is so fascinated by his own eczema he subject his scabs to almost Linnaean show more levels of classification.

Of the other stories that do not focus on marriage Aiblins features the suppression by an academic of a younger poet’s works and acts partly as a device to smuggle in some of Gray’s own (accomplished) poetry which he nevertheless deconstructs in typical Gray fashion. Wellbeing is about the necessity of not being sane in our crazy world and Big Pockets With Buttoned Flaps is an unusual erotic preference.

15 February 2003 is not so much a story as an account of an anti-Iraq war march. Here Gray mentions that the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956. He is confusing this with the invasion of Hungary in that year. The (crushed) Prague Spring was in 1968.

With its illustrations of disconnection mixed with the odd desultory polemic, as an introduction to Gray’s world view this collection couldn’t be bettered. show less