A book for the beach: I Put a Spell on You by John Burnside

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jul/17/book-for-the-beach-john-burnside

Version 0 of 1.

The requirement for summer reading used to be a vast, compelling book. Something to lose yourself in. Tolstoy, Conrad, Dostoevsky or Lewis Grassic Gibbon: these were the kinds of books which transported you to a different time and place. But my tastes have changed; family holidays don't offer the hours of uninterrupted reading. You can only do half an hour here or an hour there. Plus, I began to think what's the point of all that packing and travelling to some beautiful place only to then spend hours immersed in 19th-century Russia.

So now I like summer books that linger in the mind. Like my taste in wine – less about quantity than quality. I want a book that makes me think, which triggers those delightful hazy reveries when lying in hammocks watching clouds, or gazing at the sea's horizon pondering what I have just read. I now have a really exacting requirement of summer reading; it has to meet the André Gide test – "the book which has failed is that which leaves the reader unchanged". I want books that change me, which fundamentally shift some perception, understanding of life. These are the books that might be candidates for that small shelf in a home in my 80s! The 50 or so books which have shaped my outlook on life.

This summer, I have found a brilliant candidate – John Burnside's I Put a Spell on You. The title proves uncannily true. A week since I finished reading it, I am still spellbound. The sentences, ideas and experiences he describes still rolling around in my head and colliding like snooker balls: the humour, the tragedy, the confusion, the insight. Another reason to be grateful: it has provided me with the epigraph for the new book I am writing. This is a small book which speaks with an extraordinary capacious humanity and penetrating precision.

There is a beautiful border country between poetry and prose, and increasingly it's the bandits in this border country whose books bring me up short: Kathleen Jamie, Andrew Greig and John Burnside are all poets (and Scottish). Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby was my book of the summer of 2013. All of them construct books with no obvious narrative pull, no beginnings or ends; but with digressions, memoir and reflection all sitting alongside each other. As if they are curating a collection of their own ideas and writing, and as with the best artistic curators, you are left to connect (or not) the disparate material, to find the resonances or fill in your own. These are books which prompt a particular kind of engagement: they give you work to do because of their own untidy sense of incompletion.

Burnside's starting points are often autobiographical. Reflecting on a childhood in working-class communities in Cowdenbeath in Scotland and Corby, he takes his reader on a spiral – Catholicism, sexuality, glamour, the role of women, male identity, class, urban planning – and always to the accompaniment of music and its lyrics. Time and again, one is caught up short with an insight framed with both modesty and profoundity.

"Slow attrition of mistaken commitment" for example. An oblique reference to the figure who haunts these pages, his wonderful mother who struggled to make ends meet and bring up her children in the most unpropitious of circumstances of alcoholism, and boiling male frustration. Burnside is a rare man who sees deeply into female experience – his portrayal of the absurdity of much adult male identity had me smiling with recognition – and describes it with deep sympathy. "In the town where we grew up, the will of girls and women was continually sapped, from cradle to crone, boyfriends and husbands taking over where the parents left off." It's a sentence whose full implications we are still only beginning to understand. What if a girl did not seek male approval but pursued the understanding of her own will, her own independent spirit?

But to pick out these themes is already a disservice. There is so much more. Unexpected conclusions such as "there is nothing very interesting about romantic love". Or an essay on murder ballads – a terrifying tradition marking (even celebrating) domestic violence. Narcissism, mental breakdown and the careful analysis of one of those confusing experiences we long to find an explanation for in which, as a young man, he rejected a woman he was passionately in love with.

This richness is obviously shot through with pain but Burnside's spell – the one persistent thread is in "glamourie", "thrawn" and associated words expressing the contrary compelling wildness of the human spirit – works its magic, enchanting you to read on and find from these pages a world more thrilling than ever, despite the presence of pain.

• Madeleine Bunting is writing a book for Granta on the relationship between England and Scotland.