Not Not While the Giro

by James Kelman

"Not Not While The Giro" is James Kelman's first major collection of short stories - originally published by Polygon in 1983. The reader follows the lives of young men, social misfits, whose lives are spent waiting - waiting for their next giro or menial job - in the pub, the dole office, the snooker table and the greyhound track. This collection, written with irony and great tenderness, confirmed James Kelman's status as one of the most significant writers in the UK, and remains as powerful, relevant and truthful as it was in the early 1980s.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Scotland, Contemporary

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Kelman says:

My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.

During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead, and his short stories began to appear in magazines. These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first person internal monologues in a pared-down prose utilising Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard. Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway. In 1998, Kelman received the Stakis Prize for "Scottish Writer of the Year" for his collection of short stories 'The Good Times.'
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hamsun, Bernhard, Dostoevsky, Miller all clear influences but a unique voice right from the off. Title story the highlight: the sound of maddened incongruity and growing dissolution, a man with no place in society cajoled by an articulated survival instinct that makes no sense; closed circuit of doom.

[Martha]

James Kelman, the last class-conscious fiction writer? Dialect and unreliable narrators are contentious devices in writing fiction, but Kelman puts them to the best purposes. This book takes me back to my downbeat, rather dreadful lifestyle in Belfast in 1998-9, with the constant trips to pubs and off-licenses, the miserable space heaters, and the home phones you had to put coins in. I dig that gloomy feeling of postcolonial British Isles sarcasm, hatred, wretchedness, and funk.

[Inside A Dog · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of stories focuses on the working class communities of Glasgow in Scotland. There are people who are socially very much on the periphery of life.

The stories are mainly about young men who are rootless, directionless and lost and they are all in some way or other waiting for something - usually for a pint in a pub, or their turn at a snooker table or for their "dole money" in the post.

I chose this book as one of ten books that represent my country, Scotland, because above all it reminds me of my home town in Greenock. As a young man in the early eighties I was unemployed at a time when much of Scotland was in the same boat!

There has always been a debate about whether or not Kelman's books are literature at all, never mind whether or not they are good! Even when he won the Booker, his book was famously counted as having used the word "Fuck" 4000 times throughout it's pages and one of the judges described it as "crap really!"

But there is no debate for me - these stories are part of my growing up and I adored them! If you are interested in any of the other books I wrote as part of those ten books that represent Scotland for me, you can find them at http://theonlywayisreading.com/2013/1...

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the books that inspired me to write.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kelman’s second story collection, published ten years after his early debut An Old Pub Near the Angel, lays the groundwork for the excellent novels on gamblers and ramblers A Chancer and Busconductor Hines, and cuts a path toward the signature stream-of-consciousness style that would become his calling card for the ol’ Booker. Admittedly, I have been feasting on Kelman with the rapacity of a starved grizzly coming upon a meaty backpacker in Yellowstone NP, so my tolerance for the more monotonous, opaque, and flatter aspects of his prose prick my sensitivity more than the new reader. That aside, this isn’t his strongest collection—anyone wanting warm feelings of lust towards the Glasgow GOAT must start with The Burn.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kelman's varied short stories I've always loved, but there are a couple in this that I go back to again and again

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a varied collection of short stories originally published in 1983 by Scottish writer, James Kelman. There are over two dozen stories of various length & quality, but each focuses on characters on the margins of working-class Glasgow (and sometimes London) at the turn of the early 1980s. The settings include pubs, bookies, factories & dole offices and the characters are often alcoholics, gamblers & the homeless. Kelman captures the Scottish dialect well, particularly in the amusing Nice To Be Nice, which is completely written in an almost impenetrable Glaswegian dialect. A Wide Runner captures the world of greyhound racing & dog tracks very well, while Remember Young Cecil does the same for snooker halls. The different styles brought to mind other writers such as Bukowski, Runyon & Hemingway, but transported to modern British cities. An interesting debut collection.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not, naturally, a short story reader. Prefer to immerse myself in a novel I can see the length of. Also I don't know how best to read them, because to just go one after the other in a collection seems bad manners somehow. So this has been beside my bed since February, me attempting to fit one or two in inbetween novels.
And not having picked it up for some months, with only the last one to read, I have been totally transfixed by the final, title tale. If I didn't have Angela Carter's short stories to read this would return to my bedside to be begin again. But I do also have 'How later it was, how late' to read.

And having now read the other reviews I can concur with Alan's saying it inspired him to write, since the voice is freeing, but have to say only one story in the whole book I found had because of the dialect.

[Godzilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really torn between giving this 2 or 3 stars: whilst I enjoyed the book in places, it also left me frustrated in others.

Anyone who dislikes reading in dialects needs to avoid this like the plague, because it's full of broad Scottish dialogue.

The dialogue is one of the things that worked really well for me: it's engaging, lively and powerfully effective. The characters jump off the page at you.

So what's my beef with the book? Well, it's full of engaging characters, but the stories often go nowhere, or worse still, stop suddenly without a denouement.

I'm hoping this is a short story fault with Kelman, because I've got another of his books waiting to be read....

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pish

[aster · Rating 3 out of 5]

so i picked this one off the english department shelf lmao usually i love short story collections but maybe just bc i lack cultural understanding this one was kinda a long read for me 😭 it has its moments and i like some of the characters and i get the point that they all want to drastically change their lives but don’t but it gets frustrating after a while especially under capitalism now which has just gotten worse 😭😭 it’s just so depressing man but like i guess that’s the uk for you

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kelman's short stories are often elliptical, sometimes frustratingly open-ended but still very evocative of a sense of place and character. I must say though that I do prefer his novels.

[Danny Crossley]

Much like his book Greyhound For Breakfast, which is a collection of short stories about the struggles of life in poverty-stricken Glasgow in the 80s, some of his stories are a bit abstract, but as a lifelong pauper myself, I can identify with his characters' struggles.

[Dr. des. Siobhán · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compilation of tales from Glaswegian author James Kelman who dives into the city and its people. Interesting to read but it partly annoyed me, I don't know why. I feel like my rating is doing the book an injustice but I don't want to reread it right now so...

[Sean Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid collection of short stories, but the major gem is the title story 'Not Not While the Giro', one of the saddest and most incredible pieces of literature I've ever read. An outsider and loner in true Beckettian fashion, only better.

[Paul Westwood]

I read this so long ago I can't remember anything about it.

[Michael Jarvie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Includes the incomparable flash fiction "Acid" and the Beckettian title story.

[Guy Salvidge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Early Kelman, not as good as his later stuff.