Outside In

The title for this collection could not be more appropriate: Alastair Reid is the quintessential outsider, one who lives at a distance from the world, maintaining an itinerant lifestyle where 'matches and toothpaste are the only continuities', yet his writing captures the intimacy and minutiae of everyday life. Despite travelling the globe and becoming fluent in another language (he is known as much for his translations of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda as his own poems and prose), Reid retains something of what Robert Louis Stevenson called 'a strong Scots accent of the mind': an indefinable sense of isolation. Yet his writing is spare, precise, but not surgical; it is delicate, warm and wry. Much like Milan Kundera's, the melancholy he captures is uplifting because it is so authentic and beautifully realised.