Abstrakt
Tormod Caimbeul / Norman Campbell (1942-2015), or Tormod a' Bhocsair, as he preferred to be known, is generally acknowledged as one of the most significant Scottish Gaelic writers of the twentieth century. His first novel, Deireadh an Fhoghair (The End of Autumn, 1979), has been praised as the greatest Gaelic novel of all times.
Nonetheless, his work still awaits appropriate critical response and remains completely untranslated: fellow Gaelic novelist A. P.
Caimbeul has referred to him as ""one of the great literary secrets of monoglot Scotland"". Caimbeul's works are characterised by daring, energetic use of language (interlacing highly idiomatic Gaelic with English, according to the common practise in Lewissian Gaelic dialects), wide-ranging references (from Gaelic place-name lore to 1950s radio shows and Flemish art), close relationship to drama and film, and exuberant sense of humour interspersed with poignant sadness and psychological insight.
Shrapnel, his second published novel, appeared in 2006. Set in Edinburgh's underworld, it represents a unique contribution to the Gaelic crime writing and one of the few Gaelic works of literature dealing with crime in the metropolitan context.
It is not difficult to see why Shrapnel has been compared to Welsh's Trainspotting several times, yet Caimbeul's novel is by no means a derivative. In my paper, I introduce Caimbeul's Shrapnel in the context of his other works, position the novel in the history of Gaelic writing about crime, and point out the experimental aspects of Caimbeul's writing which link him firmly with European modernist and postmodernist trends.
Caimbeul's oeuvre is one of the most convincing proofs that Scottish Gaelic culture, although affected by unfavourable social circumstances and hostile policies, produced literature which deserves to be studied on par with European writing, not only as a marginal rarity. The paper is accompanied by my own translations into English.