Indelible Acts

by A.L. Kennedy

From the acclaimed Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy, a brilliant short-story collection—her first to be published in this country—about adultery and sexual obsession.

The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing. A line outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a funeral exposes a love gone sour; a scene of sickness and despair in a foreign hotel room becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In "A Bad Son," a young boy from a damaged home searches for peace, risking his life on a snowy hill. In the title story, two lovers confront their lust amid the ruins of Rome.

Each piece in A. L. Kennedy's mesmerizing collection is an eloquent, excoriating revelation, saved from bleakness by the humanity and humor of the author's unrelenting wit and by her unwavering scrutiny of desire and loss. Her characters' lives are dashed, impassioned, each in his or her own way immolated by hope and by the unassuageable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Scotland, Literary Fiction

212 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. She occasionally contributes columns and reviews to UK and European newspapers including the fictional diary of her pet parrot named Charlie.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read much of Kennedy at all, but I don't think her style is like anyone else's: a combination of wit, reality, insight and sentence structure that is all her own. When I started reading this book, I was reminded of how much I previously admired, of all things, her use of colons! I don't think I've ever come across any writer who uses them so much and so well at the same time.

These are my favorite kind of stories: being inside the character's head, all inward looking out. And, in fact, the most complex story, "White House at Night" (which I'm still thinking about: including trying to figure out why she chose the title she did: perhaps the Van Gogh painting of the same name has something to do with it) starts off with the main character trying to explain how it literally feels to live inside your head.

Kudos to whomever selected the order of these stories, which couldn't have been more perfect. Each successive story lightly reflects and expands on the previous one: something that many short story collections just don't achieve.

Many stories have a perfect ending line, usually due to one perfectly chosen word that chillingly reflects back to something earlier that you didn't realize was so important, until it was.

[Carla Stafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will keep this brief. I very much enjoy Kennedy's dark and witty writing style. Found myself wanting more... Having only briefly canoodled with the modern short story genre, I have come to the conclusion that the cryptic nature of it is not so much for me. I have found few exceptions. While I very much like a bit of open endedness in a plotline, if I wanted to write my own ending, I would write my own short story. Again, I do not believe this to be a shortcoming of the short story authors that I have read, but with the current state of the short story. I pine for days of Poe, The Yellow Wall Paper, and The Story of an Hour...

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tangible and tactile. I can taste their drinks, I can smell their fires in the background, and feel their touch on my hands. Sexy. Magnetic. Heartbreaking. Magical.

[what I wrote in 2005: Really, really LOVED these stories. As with Kennedy's Paradise which I read earlier in the year and is still by far my #1 read of 2005, these stories were very alive to me. Tangible and tactile. I can taste their drinks, I can smell their fires in the background, and feel their touch on my hands. Sexy. Magnetic. Heartbreaking. Magical. The only thing that made this not as good as Paradise? That it's short stories where that's a novel. Each character I fell in love with ended too soon. Kennedy is a master. Takes my breath away every time. Can any books of hers be more highly recommended? (And to think, there are more I haven't read. Woot!]

[Alec]

#3
Howie stood, breathing inaudibly, moved his thumb a touch along his prick and then moved it back again, feeling foolish and observed. Salter. A good man, Salter. He looked as if he might be confided in with safety. If one ever had anything suitable to confide. The base of Howie's neck felt strange, it tickled a bit.

#5
Surprisingly gently, Jim built a rim of snow up around Ronald's head, patting it solid. Ronald listened to his ears being stopped with the grind of close movement and the gathering pace of his breath. Then the cold was pressed in at his cheeks, his chin, his mouth, and was closed down from his forehead.

#7
Because you're mine. It's a standard wording, fits any mouth. I would have liked to turn it back on him, set my voice kicking in his chest, arcing that customary charge of hopefulness between the stomach and the throat. I would have liked to make it clear that

#10
I was ill there, too: in a hotel room, a bathroom, the bathroom I have now: grubby white tiling walls, truncated tub, everything the same. Trying to sit up in the bath and the ice chips sinking underneath me, creaking when they shift, lifting my hands which are thick with cold crystals, brownish pink.

#11
And the room rolled to make me face her, hold her for balance, and again kiss. Elizabeth's hands caught behind me, low, at the small of my back, precisely where a heavy, silvery feeling had started to flower and seep, as soon as we closed ourselves in that first touch.

[Gundrada · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I'm conflicted about this collection of short stories. They are well written, with sporadic paragraphs that made me pause to appreciate their eloquence. Yet I didn't enjoy reading many of them.

I'm just not predisposed to sympathise with maudlin people, miserable about life or obsessing about its emptiness. They feel tediously self-indulgent. It feels small. The stories that centre sex somehow feel smallest of all. If you are miserable in your marriage, then leave - especially when there are no children involved - don't endlessly ponce about, revelling in your boredom, self-destructiveness or thoughtless disregard for others. Few of these people are likeable. And perhaps they're not meant to be, but I resented giving my evenings to them.

I enjoyed An Immaculate Man and A Bad Son because the protagonists were wrestling with genuine confines to their happiness - I was invested in and rooted for them. And How to Find Your Way in the Woods felt like an antidote, placed at the end of the collection, demonstrating that people can recover their mistakes and forge a hopeful path, instead of wallowing in the affected victimhood of those whose disappointing lives are of their own making.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasnt my favorite of AL Kennedy's work, but it was still pretty indicative of her style. The thing is, she has always been super adept at probing the uncomfortable inner bits of humanity. In this collection, most of those bits are the sexy bits. We have ex lovers who cannot abide by each other, or who are lost in the sadness of what was. We have affairs, painted big and beautiful and warmly proclaiming exactly what the partners involved are getting from their liaisons. Men and women sit with their longings and desires, ruminate on them, have them heal or harm, depending. Kennedy doesnt judge her characters. She supports them, or commiserates, or just is there to understand. That's really the beauty of it... the whole of Kennedy's writing tends to find the dark beauties of life, not always in places where society would prefer to see any beauty.

[Susie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a while to get through this book, even though it really isn't that long. I think that part of it was grappling with the author's particular writing style... there were stories that I loved, and others less so. I've never read any of AL Kennedy's work prior to this collection of stories, therefore had no point of comparison. That being said, though, there were some really beautiful (albeit dark) passages in this book - some of the more profound musings on loss and heartbreak that I've read.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing style isn’t my cup of tea. Descriptive yes but, of the narrators surroundings and inner thoughts. It feels chaotic and yet boring to me, lacking any depth in emotion.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Grubby" is not a word I get the opportunity to use as a metaphor very often but it was how I felt when I started reading this book. The blurb on the back describes the stories as "powerful, intimate and angry" and I wouldn't disagree, but, rather than "intimate" some of the stories felt intrusive; I imagine there is very little this author would shy away from.

Many of the characters are not especially likeable. The opening story is about a man who starts an affair in a cheese show. I only know of one cheese shop in Glasgow, not that she says the tale is set there (she actually hails from Dundee), but it gave the story a focus for me. Others are more abstract and a few are set overseas. My favourite though has to be the one about the ailing janitor who finds a kind of love a bit too late; it's hard not to feel for him.

The book was universally praised when it came out but it is uncomfortable reading. I don't suppose it really matters how eloquent the writing (and there is no doubt that Kennedy knows how to string a few words together) a woman being physically sick in a hotel room is still a woman being sick. I didn't want to be there but I still wanted to know what happened to her.

Bottom line: would I recommend the book? Yes, but not if you're looking for any happy endings. Probably deserves 4 stars but not to my tastes. I would still read anything else by her.

[Faust Arp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dawdled through this collection at first, entertaining the idea of putting it down at the end of each short story. Yet, I never did, and am vaguely glad at myself for doing so; I picked up my dragging feet and gradually arrived at its near-conclusion, made breathless by a lovely couple of lines.

"The best love is a little like light. It is unremitting, cannot fail to find you, to take the shortest, surest way, as if that were marked out as part of your nature, the line where you and love are made to meet. It is your law, the physics of your life. It will move from somewhere to nowhere and back again and it will make you lost. It is beautiful and terrible and blinding and you will never understand the trick of it."

Kennedy's truisms on longing, in all its various and convoluted forms, were honest and soothing: there are things we all crave, with a great deal of them being nonromantic and asexual in nature. We want to understand, to be accepted, to feel okay, and we want all of this very badly, more badly than we can stand.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up on the recommendation of a travel guide book, as an example of good writing by a Scottish author. The writing is very good, but the Scottish nature of these stories is near to non-existent. What connects these stories together is their theme of adultery, a theme that is fairly common to mainstream literature these days (I've an aunt-in-law who used to complain that it was a criteria for Oprah's Book Club), but one that I had heretofore avoided in my own reading diet. Unfortunately, the saliciousness of these short stories was fairly mild, and while I found Kennedy's writing quite admirably, at the end of each story I found myself saying, "So what," a common complaint I have with modern short stories, which tend to be heavy in style and character and light in plot or substance. I did end up reading every story, so that's something of a recommendation, in the sense that if plot isn't necessary for you, you might find this book quite worthwhile.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty hot and sultry in parts. Eloquently written across the board. Each story left a definite impression. I find with a lot of books of this nature -- though each story follows the same general theme such as love and relationships, a different character and perspective is used -- many writers give each story the same voice. Things begin to run together and you forget who you're reading about or what makes their experience with the particular theme so gosh darn interesting. But Kennedy keeps each story fresh. Each perspective is different and the voices ring clear. Not a book I'd recommend to many because of some of the more graphic portions, but one a discerning reader should not miss.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of A. L. Kennedy before, and this collection came out of nowhere and really dug into me. Her writing style is shamelessly poetic and dense, albeit sometimes too obtuse. She has a deep understanding of the contradictions in romance and relationships, and draws the pain, disappointment, and humor out of her characters in a way that makes us understand them most when they're silent, or even after when they've left the scene. It's almost too much smart writing at times, but it ends up sticking with you like the scent of a absent lover (a favorite detail of hers). Highlights for me included "A Bad Son," "Touch Positive," and "A Little Like Light."

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book in my Scottish Fiction course at the University of St. Andrews and then chose to write my comps on the collection. I was mesmerized by her use of language which was concise yet very effective in creating vivid images and ideas. I loved the brutal beauty and reality in her observations of how all kinds of people interact within the many different spheres of personal relationships.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kennedy is adept at refusing to allow her prose to steamroller her content. Yet the lapidary constraints of the short story sometimes put the steamroller far ahead of the newly flattened little people she creates.

This can be frustrating: in fact, many of these stories read like first chapters of attempted novels. You hunger for more, and wonder why she's giving us such a brief dreary glimpse into these dire life-slices.

Still: memorable, and often funny.

[Abby Peck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read many collections of short stories and to say one didn't impress me because I couldn't conjure up the book cover (or the stories by the book cover) isn't fair ... I read this collection a couple years ago and a couple of the stories have stuck with me ever since. I was happy to revisit them.

[Catherine Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm halfway through this book, and it's wonderful. Each short story (and some are very short) holds a great deal of emotional meaning, without lurching into overstatement or cliche. I find I can't read many more than two stories at a time, or I start to lose the concentration this writing deserves.

[Katie M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never say this about writers, because it is ever-shifting and changes from book to book and always feels like only part of the truth - but I think A.L. Kennedy might be one of my all-time favorite writers. This book was probably my least favorite of the four I've read. Which is saying something.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an excellent observer/re-creator of human behaviour A L Kennedy is - such an inventive variety of people and situations, all of which make an excellent case for the short story. Just the one in this collection which failed to utterly delight.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak, beautifully constructed (and beautifully told) stories of stolen love, stolen confidences, hurt and hunger.

[Barbi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

[Germaine Hypher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read the first two stories so far as I enjoyed them so much that I want to save the rest rather than gulp them down!

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not finished with this, but the stories I've read are beautiful and vulnerable.