Playing Through
A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In this lyrical, evocative, and heartfelt memoir, Curtis Gillespie chronicles the year he spent with his wife and daughters in quaint Gullane, Scotland. Against the backdrop of a uniquely beautiful landscape, Gillespie deftly explores the bonds of fatherhood and friendship, and the irresistible lure of links golf.
When Curtis Gillespie first played a round in Gullane, he was a graduate student on the golf team at the University of St. Andrews. He wrote to his father back in Canada about the unmatched peacefulness and loveliness of the place and promised that the two of them would golf there together someday. After his father passed away before they could play the Scottish course, Gillespie vowed to return himself. Thirteen years after his first visit, Gillespie uproots his wife and two young daughters and moves to Gullane, hoping to learn something about himself, and his life, in the process.
Early on Gillespie teams up with two aging local golfers named Archie and Jack (members at Gullane Golf Club for more than a century between them), and the ensuing friendship that blossoms between the elderly Scotsmen and the young Canadian infuses Playing Through with a sense of enchanting familiarity and easygoing charm. Gillespie samples courses like Muirfield and St. Andrews under the delightfully gruff guidance of Archie and Jack, soaks up the natural beauty of the countryside, and sets out to capture the full flavor of village life, haggis and all. The gregarious and eccentric locals, the stunning setting, the town’s history, and even his family’s response to their new life all converge in a warm, wonderful story rich with comedy and insight.
Skillfully interwoven through the narrative are anecdotes about Gillespie’s much-missed father, an ordinary man who inspired extraordinary love from his son. And though his father is not there to share in Gullane’s charms, the experience of moving to the village and coming to know its inhabitants helps Gillespie through an unexpected passage of discovery about his father, himself, and his own journey through fatherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a book that is part golf travelogue and part mushy memoir, Gillespie (The Progress of an Object in Motion; Someone Like That) uproots his family from their home in Edmonton, Canada, and moves to the coast of Scotland for a year to write and hit the links. Stitching together random memories, quaint observations on Scottish life, tributes to his deceased father, tidy domestic homilies and a sprinkling of golf yarns, Gillespie wanders across time and space, and generally gets entangled in the thicket of his own solipsism. Although he is intermittently humorous, charming and even moving, his earnest sentimentality smothers most of the book's touching moments and gives his anecdotes a manufactured, too-perfect quality. The most redeeming passages involve Gillespie's frequent golf partners, two crusty old men named Jack and Archie whose grouchy, plainspoken banter supplies a welcome respite. Although the writing is easygoing, there are some forced metaphors and a few genuine clunkers: "my tee shot, which had been little more than five yards off the fairway, had gone into an area of rough that seemed to be the site of some deeply twisted agricultural experiment to develop strains of vegetation that had learned to tie their stalks in knots." Readers looking for a book about golf or Scotland may be disappointed.
