what a mastery of language in these stories but also it felt like I was reading the work of a writer who hadn't yet figured out what she wanted to usewhat a mastery of language in these stories but also it felt like I was reading the work of a writer who hadn't yet figured out what she wanted to use her gifts to express, I mean, more than ever I've come to believe that swerving toward the grotesque, the violent--insisting on the opposite of a redemptive outcome--is the easy way out. It's so much easier to write a vivid story about a woman's adulterous love affair where it turns out her lover is a serial killer who leaves her, in the last scene, handcuffed to the bed, awaiting her upcoming murder, than it is to, I don't know, just let the story have something profound and human happen between two people.
Now I want to re-read Small Things Like These which I found too sentimental, too easy on its characters, but now I'm thinking, yes, this author swerved away from the easy violence of these early stories, toward something deeper. And then I want to read everything in between, as well, and also to read Foster, to see if there has been a progression in Claire Keegan's work toward what I'm talking about, the maturity and patience and willingness to let a story tell itself quietly and profoundly without the need for explosive ugly nonessential stuff to spice the story up somehow, because you're afraid if you don't then someone reading your story will get bored and quit. This may be the most personal and indefensible reaction I've ever had to a work of fiction....more
Magee has pulled off something so rare in literature with this novel; the prose sings; the observations about the complexity of human relationships arMagee has pulled off something so rare in literature with this novel; the prose sings; the observations about the complexity of human relationships are revelatory; the novel manages to both be intellectually challenging, and also filled with heart; its scenes feel immediate and visceral, but somehow they are also steeped in deep historical references; that it's a tragedy that manages to also be a testament to human resilience.
Updating my review today to add my thoughts on the audiobook, which I've just finished listening to. When I read the hardcover it at times felt like a stage play to me, because of the preponderance of dialogue, mixed with interior monologue. The dialogue-heavy quality of the storytelling makes the novel a perfect fit with Stephen Hogan's incredible narration. The audio performance was a different but equally magnificent experience. Hogan gives the characters a voice that at times surprised me. I had 'heard' these people differently, when I read it silently. The differences delighted me, and his interpretations gave me another way to think about the characters. A really great performance!...more
The stories in this Irish author’s new book are about loss, death, the inevitability of grief, the indignities of age and the way a life can suddenly The stories in this Irish author’s new book are about loss, death, the inevitability of grief, the indignities of age and the way a life can suddenly slide into the abyss. It could have been very grim going, but MacLaverty writes with such compassion that his stories never feel bleak; they feel humane. They feel hopeful.
I found the first half of this novel to be a little quiet. I wish it had begun about halfway through and that it had been conceived as a short story. I found the first half of this novel to be a little quiet. I wish it had begun about halfway through and that it had been conceived as a short story. There seem to be some opinions in me about how this story is told--I think I would have preferred the story to be told from the point of view of one of the Magdalen girls, rather than a perspective that seems a little distant to me. There is a quiet grace in the prose that I found pleasant to read, but it didn't grip me. Furlong, the protagonist, is a good person trying to do the right thing, to an extent that he seemed a little one-note....more
Oh my goodness. This book is incredibly fine. Now I know what the phrase ‘razor sharp wit’ really means. On a sentence level the novel delivers one peOh my goodness. This book is incredibly fine. Now I know what the phrase ‘razor sharp wit’ really means. On a sentence level the novel delivers one perfect zinger after another. Dolan is particularly good at capturing the way men talk to women whom they mistakenly think are not as smart as they are. The dialog is brilliant throughout. You have to understand that this is the kind of story I have very high standards for because the plot is an evergreen plot: young person at loose ends making her way in the world and deciding who to love. And yet it’s so original. I dove right in and read from beginning to end, and now I’m giving thanks that such a book exists in the world—light, sweet, sad, true....more
As with Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter--to mention three other hauntingly beaAs with Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter--to mention three other hauntingly beautiful books that this novel reminds me of in the best ways--a reader can't claim to understand everything that happens here, but the impact is undeniably powerful, and undeniably female.
Authors of the books I mentioned in my review are all deliberately using the irrational, and the unexplained, to describe experiences and feelings where logic doesn't apply. These authors leave us readers out in the cold, and without the key to the map.
I can think of many other books published recently that have this same irksome quality, of not wanting to give up all their secrets. As a way of writing, it intrigues me, since it seems so counter what a good book is supposed to do. It's different from surrealism or absurdism, because those movements are deliberate critiques of logic, whereas these new books seem to be saying "i'm describing a real human experience to you, but it's an experience that doesn't fit logically into the rational world. Logic has nothing to do with it." ...more
Incredible reportage. Terrific writing. I wish it hadn't happened.
One of the best examples of narrative non-fiction I've read since Truman Capote creIncredible reportage. Terrific writing. I wish it hadn't happened.
One of the best examples of narrative non-fiction I've read since Truman Capote created the genre with In Cold Blood, and, like In Cold Blood, I wish it didn't need to be written, and maybe also I wish that I hadn't read it.
It's important to be apprised of what humans can do to one another, but sometimes it leaves me feeling so weary and defeated, to have the truth about us presented to me so baldly....more
This week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these booThis week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these books accurately and relentlessly (and, somehow, beautifully, which makes them each disturbing on a whole other level) portray how sexual abuse and predation fit so easily into what seems to be normal life on the surface.
The writing style here--an elliptical returning to a very similar sentence, for instance, with a different verb substituted, plus a very repetitive rhythm in sentence structure--seems to reinforce the actual sense of the story, and to reinforce the situation of a much older woman trying to review and understand her memory of being stalked as a child. The style reinforces for me the idea of a woman trying to pin down a very elliptical and emotionally fraught truth about her past.
But there is so much more to this story. It's also a story about way that the violence of "the troubles" has become so frequent that it has become casually accepted, as part of everyday life. People are walking around in fear for their lives, and also in fear one another, and in fear anything or anyone that deviates from absolutely normal, and it's just the way it is. How one young girl navigates her world is something to behold--because most astonishingly of all this is a book of hope. It's a book about joy. It's a book about how love wins in the end, even if the victories are sometimes tragic....more
Here is one of a string of books I've read lately that exquisitely accomplish what they set out to do, and yet leave me feeling dissatisfied and troubHere is one of a string of books I've read lately that exquisitely accomplish what they set out to do, and yet leave me feeling dissatisfied and troubled.
I'm wondering why this novel was something Pheby felt compelled to write in the first place. Over and over again I read about horrific abuses being done to Lucia Joyce, written from the point of view of a man who is abusing her, including her brother and her father and her passing-lovers and her caregivers at the institution. It's a disturbing experience.
And I'm not sure how I feel about the absolute requirement put on the reader to research and to understand the swirl of fact and rumor surrounding Lucia Joyce, if you want to make any sense at all of what is written here. For instance, at the beginning there is a scene of a man burning letters. I get the idea of someone being erased, but it's all very oblique without the context, without knowing that Lucia Joyce's letters and papers were destroyed by the Joyce estate.
Most of all I'm troubled that Lucia Joyce is silenced in this book just as surely as she was in life. Pheby has talked in interviews about his moral choice to not act as a "ventriloquist" for Lucia--he felt that would be disrespectful to her, especially since he is a man. But the result of his moral choice is the sense that Lucia Joyce has no inner life or agency at all.
So I fully admire the exquisite craft of this novel, while at the same time wondering if I should have let the novel into my head at all....more
I kept reading because this novel reminded me in a direct, visceral, uncanny way of the stories my mother used to tell me at bedtime until I was 7 or I kept reading because this novel reminded me in a direct, visceral, uncanny way of the stories my mother used to tell me at bedtime until I was 7 or so...my mother would start her story with a vivid character and describe them in great detail, and then some small, nearly inconsequential event would happen to this character, and then some other character would enter the story, and be described in turn with great detail, and this character too would experience some small event, and on and on, where the person I was supposed to care about as a protagonist kept changing every night or two, and the story never went anywhere.
The great nostalgia I felt while reading Carnivalesque, for precisely this meander of a storytelling style, kept me reading, because I had forgotten all about those times with my mother every night in those early years of my life.
But if you have no such fond memory of your mother telling you endless stories with no real story attached to them, then you may want to give it a skip....more
This is a terrible book with ludicrous characters BUT it's terrible in a really good way, and the ludicrous characters are never boring. It's as if maThis is a terrible book with ludicrous characters BUT it's terrible in a really good way, and the ludicrous characters are never boring. It's as if master storyteller O'Brien were a master jazz pianist sitting down blindfolded in front of a deeply out of tune piano--it still sounds terrific. She riffs on anything she pleases, writing on and on about inconsequential trivia about characters who have no point being in this story. It feels like O'Brien just let any skinny bit of thought that came into her head make its way to the page and then she worked it and made it beautiful. She is so talented--she is even channeling Virginia Woolf here and there, I would say--just compare the chapter "On the Veranda" to early chapters in The Voyage Out. The lovely stark beginning which gives this book its title is the best part, though--the novel never reaches the solemn promise of those little red chairs....more
McBride tried to do something new and that's always worth applauding. The story itself and the way it was told didn't work for me, however. The sentenMcBride tried to do something new and that's always worth applauding. The story itself and the way it was told didn't work for me, however. The sentence fragments and the abundance of full-stops in the text gave me a feeling analogous to getting your car stuck in mud and trying to rev it out of there and failing. I don't exactly need iambic pentameter in my sentences but a book that so egregiously goes against the natural rhythms of the language it is written in defeated me, in the end, to the point where I couldn't do more than push my eyes across the page without much caring for the experience. The argument that this is stream of consciousness writing doesn't wash with me, as no matter how experimental a novel is, the author still has an obligation to the reader on some level to make the book readable...and it feels in my head at least that I spend a lot of time thinking in full sentences. So the way McBride chose to write this story didn't work for me, although it evidently did work for other readers....more
Some stories were completely new to me when I sat down to read this collection from beginning to end. Others deeply familiar. And then, The Dead. WellSome stories were completely new to me when I sat down to read this collection from beginning to end. Others deeply familiar. And then, The Dead. Well. The best story ever written....more
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