Abstrakt
Tormod "a' Bhocsair" Caimbeul / Norman Campbell (1942-2015), is generally acknowledged as one of the most significant Scottish Gaelic writers of the twentieth century, and as the most innovative and complex novelist the Gaelic Scotland has produced so far. Nonetheless, as relatively little research has been devoted to Gaelic fiction, his oeuvre still awaits due critical response and remains completely untranslated.
His first novel, Deireadh an Fhoghair (The End of Autumn), was published in 1979. The almost plotless digressive novel centres around three old people who live in a remote part of the Outer Hebrides.
This essay focuses on the reception of Deireadh an Fhoghair, which is characterised by high praise but very little detailed analysis, and points out its connections to the Gaelic literary tradition and its experimental aspects which exhibit the influence of European modernist and postmodernist trends. The essay is accompanied by my own provisional translations of extracts from the novel into English.