Beatlebone by Kevin Barry (Forthcoming, 2015)

My Posts on Kevin Barry

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry is all the proof we need of the literary  brilliance of the Irish.  It centers on John Lennon, in mid-career.  Seven years ago he bought an island off the west coast of Ireland and he has left his residence at the famous Dakota Hotel in New York City to find his island amidst the many coastal islands.  The West of Ireland is a magic place, one of the portals a spirit inhabited world.  It is only gradually revealed in the narrative that we are dealing with the famous John Lennon, considered the intellect and creative force behind the Beatles, but as it is revealed on the cover it is hardly hidden.  But still the slow revelation is very skillful executed.  

John hires a local guide who turns out to be a shape-shifter.  John is concerned the Dublin press will end up swarming all over him.  

The prose of Beatlebone is just incredible, surrealistic at times, then lyrical then journalistic.  More than once I was stunned by the images invoked.  I thought and hope I knew what was meant when John felt a portal to the underworld was opening for him in the west of Ireland.  The dialogues are just a sheer pleasure to read.  As the novel progresses the narrative method or perhaps it is the prose style more than this changes to seem like Kevin Barry is at times writing a journalistic account of Lennon's time looking for the island.  There are also flash backs to older days in the Beatles, accounts of "Scream Therapy", drug fueled parties and numerous very striking minor characters.  We learn how Lennon came to buy an island and are given some West of Ireland cultural  lessons. 

I am sure Beatlebone will be very well received.  I totally loved it.

I was kindly  given a review copy of this book. 

KEVIN BARRY is the author of the highly acclaimed novel City of Bohane and two short story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2007 and won The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize in 2012. For City of Bohane, he was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Irish Book Award, and won the Author’s Club First Novel Prize, The European Prize for Literature and the IMPAC Prize. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. He lives in County Sligo in Ireland. - publisher supplied data. 

Mel u

"The Holy Terror" - Maeve Brennan's First Short Story (1950) - The Reading Life Maeve Brennan Project Commences

I offer my great thanks to Max u for providing me with a gift card that made this project possible. 

There are numerous ways to approach the incredibly vast short story universe.  One way is to read kind of at random and I have done some of that.  Another way is to pick out a writer whose short stories interest you and read extensively.  I have in the last few years read the complete short stories of Katherine Mansfield (in the published corpus), Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O'Connor.  Most recently I read and was blown away by the forthcoming collection of the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector.  In order to commence a short story project I need to have as my reading source an E Book.  I have begun to reread Katherine Mansfield.  There is no time limit on a project and my interest in these writers is permanent.  

Today I decided to commence Ths Reading Life Maeve Brennan Project.  Her published body of work, most of her stories and articles first appeared in The New Yorker, is under a 1000 pages so I hope to read her in full.  The Rose Garden is a posthumous collection that includes stories set in her birth country Ireland and stories placed in New York City.

I first encountered  the work of Maeve Brennan during Irish Short Story Month I in 2011 when I listened to a wonderful podcast of of the story on the webpage of The New Yorker in which Roddy Doyle reads the story.   During Irish Short Story Month Year II in 2012 I posted on a truly great cat story, set in her adopted home town of New York City, "Bianca, I Can See You".

Maeve Brennan's life should have been a perfect fairy tale of happiness.   There is a fey beauty in her face but I also see fear and a dark hunger.   

Brennan's father was the first Irish Ambassador to the United States.   Her father fought for freedom from British rule in  the Irish War for Independence.     The British imprisoned him for a while.    Brennan and her family lived in Washington DC until 1944 when her father returned to Ireland.   She stayed on in the US and moved to New York City where she got a job writing copy for Harper's Bazaar.   She also wrote a society column for an Irish publication.     She began to write occasional articles for The New Yorker.    In 1949 she was offered a job on the staff of the magazine.   She was incredibly beautiful, very intelligent, witty, petite, always perfectly dressed and made up.   She moved about frequently and had extravagant tastes.    Some people feel she was the inspiration for Holly Golightly, the lead character in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958).   In the 1960s people began to observe that she was now beginning to appear unkempt.    In the 1970s Brennan became paranoid and was an alcoholic.    She began to drift in and out of reality and was hospitalized   several times.    She ended up living either in transit hotels or in the ladies room at the offices of The New Yorker.   (I also read William Maxwell's introduction to one of her collections of short stories published posthumously and learned that to its great credit the magazine had secured for her a place where she could stay and be fed but she rarely went there.)    In  the 1980s she all but disappears.   She died in 1993 in the Lawrence hospital, a  ward of the state.    As I read this I could not help but be reminded of Jean Rhys but I think the story of Brennan is more tragic in that Rhys partially recovered from her years of darkness and was seen as a great writer while still alive. 

"The Holy Terror", 1950, is her first published short story.  I loved it and I bet the readers of The New Yorker who were the initial readers did too.   The central character is Mary Ramsey.  Mary is the attendent in the ladies' rest room at the Royal Hotel in Dublin.  She was acerbic and sharp tounged which made her an "Irish character" to the American guests.  She has been in her job for more than twenty five years.  She was the queen of her realm, terrorizing the rest of the staff.  Unlike most staff, she had a small room and got free food.  But nothing last forever and the new assistant manager, the very chic Miss Williams decides Mary needs to share the restroom, and the decent tips, with a new employee.  Needless to say Mary is not happy.  She goes to the manager to complain and ends up telling him about all the bad things the other employees do, from stealing to sex with guests.  Plus she falsely tells the manager Miss Williams bad mouths him at every opportunity, wanting to take his position.  I won't tell more of this beautifully rendered story.

Brennan brought Mary Ramsey and the world of the Royal Dublin Ladies' Room totally to life for me.

Please share your favorite Maeve Brennan stories with us.  

Mel u

Mildred Larson by George Moore - plus two short stories --A Look at What Paris Meant to the Irish - A Post for Paris in July 6

Paris in July # 6. 

OJ

I was very happy to see  Thyme for Tea's post announcing that she be hosting once again an event devoted to all things related to Paris, Paris in July # 6.   This will be my fourth year as a participant.  You can participate in a lot of ways  besides posting on literature related to Paris.  Pretty much anything tied into Paris is very much welcome.  There is a weekly link of participant posts and lots of special events.  

So far I have posted on a short story by the great French master of the form, Guy de Maupassant and a short story set in Paris by Mavis Gallant.

Today I will post briefly about three works by George Moore (1852 born County Mayo, Ireland, 1933 died London).  I have posted on several of his short stories and his excellent novel Esther Waters (1894) dealing with the great importance of horse trading and racing in Ireland.  Moore is now I think mainly read by those very into Irish literature. He was influenced by the realism of Zola. His short stories in turn influenced James Joyce in Dubliners.  Moore is considered by many to be the first modern Irish short story writer.  Moore was from a very wealthy family and at 18 when his father died was free to do whatever he wanted.  He wanted to be a painter and escape from what he felt was the repressive stifling atmosphere of Catholic Ireland.  He had an image in his mind of Paris as the world capital of art and of course he dreamed of making love to the beautiful French women who worked as models for artists.  So he went to Paris and did become an authority on French painters if not a successful painter.  

Mildred Lawson is the lead work in Moore's 1925 collection of three long short stories, The Celibates.  One of the grand themes of Irish literature concerns the sexual repression of the Catholic Church and the devastating impact this had on the lives of the Irish.  An Irishman or woman who tells their family and friends they are going to Paris to study painting is seen as entering a world of license and sexual liberation.  Mildred Larson is particularly interesting as it centers on a young woman of comfortable circumstances who goes to Paris to study painting.  She is shocked at first my the nude artist models, including men, who pose for art classes.  There is a lot of interesting material about art classes and the various students and teachers Mildred meets.  The drama of the story is in her long term relationship with an Irishman who wants to marry her. (She cannot given her deep enculturation in the doctrines of the Catholic Church have sex outside of a marriage).  If she does she will live out her days in a comfortable but unexciting in comparison to Paris life.  

"In the Clay" and "The Way Back" are the opening and closing stories in George Moore's collection of short stories, The Untilled Field (1915).  This collection directly influenced James Joyce and through it helped create the modern short story.  A movie was recently made based on one of the stories, Alfred Nobbs.

"In the Clay" is about a young man who wants to become a sculptor.  He is doing a statue of the Virgin Mary but he needs have a nude model to base  his work upon.  He tells a friend all clothed sculptures are based on nude models and then clothed.  Of course there is an underlying sexual element to this in repressive Ireland and I think this was considered a shocking topic in 1915.  These two stories are tied together.  "In the Clay" is set in Ireland.  A neophyte sculpturor has just completed his first major work, based on a nude model.  The "first draft" of the work is done in clay.  As the story closes the man funds his clay model smashed to pieces.  The guilty parties are the three brothers of the model who view posing as a model as on a level with being a prostitute.  He is driven to go to Paris by this episode.  In "Tne Way Back" we meet the sculpture many years later, he is now a mature artist and a sophisticated man of the world.  He encounters an artist friend from Paris and they talk about how their  time in Paris shaped their lives.

Writers, painters, and lovers of the good life have been drawn to Paris for hundreds of years.  Like no other city in the world it had special meaning in the art and literary world.  In these three works by a very important Irish writer we can see a bit of the power of Paris.

Mel u

The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015)

In 2012 I read and greatly enjoyed Anne Enright's novel The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch.  Set in Paraquay in the 1860s it is about  the Irish mistress of the ruler of the country.  I have also read a few of her highly regarded short stories.  

The Green Road centers on an Irish family, The Madigans.  The family consists of the mother, the father is deceased, and her adult children, two sons and two daughters.  Major publications such as The Guardian and The Irish Times have done highly laudatory reviews.  It has been referred to as a "very Irish work".  It is hard to disagree.  

The real time action is in Ireland in 2005 but much of the novel  is taken up with stories of the past of the children.  A very well realized section, focusing on Dan, the gay son who at one time wanted to be a priest, is set in New York City in the early 1990s.  Dan is engaged to a lovely woman but is heavily into gay sex at the height of the aids epedemic.  This era has been the locale of numerous literary works but Enright does a good job of letting us feel what it was like, with the special emphasis of Dan as a handsome Irish lad.   Another son is an aid worker in Mali.  We see the terrible poverty he tries to alleviate and are shown the various relationships of the workers.  One daughter stayed at home and we see her kind of cramped life.  Alcohol plays a big role in everyone's life.  The beauty and history of Ireland are wonderfully evoked in The Green Road.

In my 500 or so posts on Irish literature I have often, taking a lead from Declan Kiberd, said that one of the dominant themes of Irish literature is that of the weak or missing Irish father.  The Green Road, to me, very much exemplifies this.  The father is now dead but as he lived we see he began to disappear in silence.  The famine years play a big part in the background of the plot.   

Ireland is a magic place, one from which there seems little permanent  escape.  

The Green Road is a lovely book, with some very marvelous sections, very interesting characters skillfully set in time and place. The plot action is exciting and will keep you interested.  I recommend it to all with no reservations.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and her last novel, The Forgotten Waltz, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

I was kindly given a review copy. 

Mel u

"Unholy Living and Half Dying" by Sean O'Faoláin. (1952)

 Sean O'Faolain is one of Ireland's highest regarded short story writers.  In 2013 I posted on his superb story about an unfaithful woman,  "The Faithless Wife", his very classic story, "The Trout" and "The Sinners".  

Sean O'Faolain (1900 to 1991-Cork City, Ireland) was the son of a policeman.   He fought in the Irish War for Independence,  1919 to 1921.    He received M.A. degrees from the National University of Ireland and Harvard.   He  was the director of a very prestigious Irish literary journal, The Bell.  His daughter Julia O'Faolain is a Booker Prize nominated author.   

This will be my last post for Irish Short Story Month Year Five.  I kept it a simple low key event this year, I just read a few wonderful stories.  

"Unholy Living and Half Dying" centers on a single man, working in a bank and living in a rooming house.   (Rooming houses, land ladies, neighbors and such played a big part in literary works up until at least the 1950s or so.) I really loved these opening lines:

"J A C K Y C A R D E W is one of those club bachelors who are so well groomed, well preserved, pomaded, medicated, cated, and self-cosseted that they seem ageless-the sort of fixture about whom his pals will say when he comes unstuck around the age of eighty, `Well, well! Didn't poor old Jacky Cardew go off very fast in the end?' For thirty years or so he has lived in what are called Private Hotels".

The story revolves around the relationship of Jacky, his land lady, his pub friends and the local priest.

I read this story in Classic Irish Short Stories edited by Frank O'Connor.

Mel u

"The Fairy Goose" by Liam O'Flaherty (1927)

"For some reason, it was made manifest to them that the goose was an evil spirit and not the good fairy which they had supposed her to be. Terrified of the priest's stole and breviary and of his scowling countenance, they were only too eager to attribute the goose's strange hissing and her still stranger cackle to supernatural natural forces of an evil nature. Some present even caught a faint rumble of thunder in the east and although though it was not noticed at the time, an old woman later asserted that she heard a great cackle of strange geese afar off, raised in answer to the little fairy goose's cackle."

Liam O'Flaherty (1896 to 1984) was born in Inishmore on one of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.  His cousin was the famous Hollywood movie director  John Ford.    Like Frank O'Conner and Sean O'Faolain he was involved in the Irish War for independence against the British (largely a guerrilla war)1919 to 1921.    It was a bloody war of brother against brother in many cases.   It ended in Southern Ireland becoming an independent country with largely Protestant Northern Ireland staying under British rule.    

O'Flaherty worked for a time as a teacher until he became successful with novels like The Informer (which his cousin made into a movie) .     O'Flaherty moved the USA around 1923 to live in Hollywood so he could work with his cousin, among other reasons.   He was for a time a communist but returned to his Roman Catholic roots in latter years.  He was deeply into the reading life with a passion for French and Russian literature.    Even though much of his adult life was lived in the USA, his  writings nearly all deal with Ireland.    I first read his work during what was then Irish Short Story Week in 2011.  

"The Fairy Goose", set in rural Ireland, is just a wonderful story, I cannot imagine anyone into the form not loving it.  Compressing a bit, the story begins when an older village woman's sitting hen died and she hatches a goose egg by the firre.  The Goose is strange, never gets more than half normal size, never loses its yellow down for the white coat of an adult goose, and does not hiss at strangers.  Soon many people in the village begin to regard the goose as a fairy.  The old woman charges others to have the fairy goose cure sick cows and such and gains the reputation as a wise woman.  I want to quote a bit from the story as the prose is just so beautiful.

"That was done, and then the gosling became sacred in the village. No boy dare throw a stone at it, or pull a feather from its wing, as they were in the habit of doing with geese, in order to get masts for the pieces of cork they floated in the pond as ships. When it began to move about every house gave it dainty things. All the human beings in the village paid more respect to it than they did to one another. The little gosling had contracted a great affection for Mary Wiggins and followed her around everywhere, so that Mary Wiggins also came to have the reputation of being a woman of wisdom. Dreams were brought to her for unravelling."

Of course the local priest hears of this, a wise woman in a nearby village informed him, and he comes to denounce the Goose Fairy.  The ending is really exciting and I will leave it unspoiled.  I for sure felt I was back in Ireland in 1927, far beyond the Pale.

Mel u

"The Women" by William Trevor (2013 in The New Yorker, republished in The O Henry Stories 2014)

William Trevor (1928, County Cork, Ireland) is for sure one of the two, along with Alice Munro, greatest living short story writers.  I have read and posted on way to few stories by these writers, maybe because their stories need time to seep down into the depths of your consciousness.  

"The Women", first published in The New Yorker and included in The O Henry Prize Stories 2014 is an amazing story that shows the slow unraveling of an old family secret.  There are two central characters in the story, an affluent refined businessman and his daughter.  His wife left him for another man when his daughter was two and he raised her alone, with hired help.  Everything in the girl's life stays the same, she is comfortable and happy though lonely with no real companions but her father, a very good man, the household help and the tutor who home schools her.  Her father periodically takes her on nice weekends to Oxford or Csmbridge and on vacation to Paris, Venice, and Rome.  The father decides she needs regular contact with other girls so he sends her to a fine boarding school.  She hates it at first and wants to go home but in time she makes friends, settling in.  I don't want to spoil the main plot development for potential readers but it does involve a pair of very close rather odd fifty something year old women who start to come to the ice hockey games.  

The ending really makes you think about the collisions of worlds, the coincidences that can define personal histories.  The contrasting worlds of the life of the father and his daughter and the two strange women is really brilliant.

"The Women" is a simply wonderful story which I am so glad to have read.

Do you have a favorite Trevor story?

Mel u

"Yellow Leaning to Gold" by Shauna Gilligan (2015). - A Short Story by the Author of Happiness Comes from Nowhere

My Q and A Session with Shauna Gilligan (includes links to more posts by and about her)

I first became acquainted with the work of Shauna Gilligan during Irish Short Story Month in March, 2012 and I have been following her work ever since then.  I loved her highly regarded debut novel Happiness Comes From Nowhere,  she kindly did a guest post on Desmond Hogan and I have posted on several of her wonderful short stories.

I was happy to see Gilligan has a short story in a just starting literary journal The Lonely Crowd:  The New Home of the Short Story.  (There is a link at the close of my post).     My main purpose here is to let my readers know of the opportunity to read "Yellow Leaning to Gold" and to journalise my continued reading of Gilligan.

The brief story centers on five years passing in the marriage of a prototypically ordinary married couple.  As the story opens the man has just proposed marriage and tried to be  proud when his wife told him she was changing her name to his, "Brennan".  You can see Gilligan's elegant charged prose in these opening lines:

"It was a name which was neither specific nor personal. Brennan could have belonged to any male in Ireland, at any time.

When Eileen married him and took his name, Brennan desperately wanted to feel flattered. He tried the angle that women were not doing this sort of thing any more. But Eileen just laughed, told him she loved him. She kissed his cheek.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘Eileen Brennan works.’

With a crackle of clarity, Brennan realised that like him, the beautiful Eileen would be condemned to a life of mediocrity."

We next meet Brennan five years later.  It is his fifth wedding anniversary and he is on his normal forty-five minute train ride home.  He has a decent job.    I loved the scene where he watched a woman put on her make up.  It is kind of a metaphor for his life.  The subdued closing brings him full circle.  We see what begins as a blessing can return as a something very different,  

You can read "Yellow Leaning to Gold" by Shauna Gilligan at thelonelycrowd.org

Official Author Bio 

Shauna Gilligan‘s short fiction and reviews have been published in places such as The Stinging Fly (Ireland), New Welsh Review (UK) and Cobalt (USA). She holds a PhD (Writing) from the University of South Wales and teaches writing as part of the Arts Council of Ireland Writers in Prisons Panel. Her first novel, Happiness Comes from Nowhere (London, Ward Wood: 2012), was described by the Sunday Independent in Ireland as a ‘thoroughly enjoyable and refreshingly challenging debut novel.

Mel u

"A Journey" by Colm Toibin (2007, from Mothers and Sons)

Colm Tóibín  (Ireland, 1955) is one of my favorite fiction writers and a master interpreter of literature. I first read his excellant novel based  on the London years of Henry James, The Master, then Brooklyn about an Irish woman who moves to the New York City area, then the unique Testament of Mary and lastly his most recent book Nora Webster.  I also read his monograph, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush as well as several of his short stories.  I have profited from his essays on Henry James.  

This year's Irish Short Story Month is a lower key event than in the past but there are still stories yet unread in his anthology, Mothers and Sons so I decided to include his "A Journey" in this year's Irish Short Story Month.

The story begins shortly after a married couple has had, after twenty years of marriage, their first child, David.  They never expected a child after twenty years but he did not upset their comfortable routine as much as they feared.  Compressing a bit, we flash twenty years forward.  The father Sheamus is very sick, probably going to die soon.  The mother has gone to pick their son up from a mental hospital where he was treated for problems we never quite understand.  He rides in the back seat of the car and tells his mother he does not want any questions.  She is bringing him home to live.  She wonders if she can summon up the unselfishness to take care of them both.

This is a very moving story anyone who ever had a wonderful self-sacrificing mother will cherish.  It depicts how women are sometimes pushed into the role of caregiver.  

Mel u

"An Irish Problem" by Edith Sommerville and Martin Ross (1908?)

My Posts on Irish Literature 

Edith Sommerville and her cousin Violet Martin (who wrote under the name Martin Ross) were to Anglo-Irish writers famous for their stories portraying the life of the Irish.  The stories tend to mock the Irish in accord with standard stereotypes of the English and I think they are not very much read anymore.  I know from Q and A sessions I have done that some find their stories offensive and not without good reason.  They do provide us with a look back at a colonial mentality and if you can step back from your politics, they are well written, interesting and often fun though the fun is at the expensive of the Irish.  I have posted on a few of their stories and I enjoyed reading them.  Declain Kiberd in his landmark book, Inventing the Nation-Modern Irish Literature devotes a lot of time to their novel, The Real Charlotte, explaining the impact of colonial rule on Irish literature.

"An Irish Problem", from Sketches on an Irish Shore, is set in a courtroom in an Irish speaking part of the country, meant to indicate a "less civilized" area, where one man is suing another for the loss of a sheep.  The man suing claims the other man's dog harassed his sheep so much that it went into a lake and drowned.  Everyone in the court knows each other and the sheep is claimed to have a value anywhere from half a crown to ten crowns, to be maybe one year old to maybe fourteen.  Each claiment shows of the exaggerated verbal skills the Irish were said portrayed as having as well as their readiness to stretch the truth.  In a way, the story whether the authors had such thoughts or not, depicts how the weaker position of a colonized person forces the development of the skills of "trickery" which are deemed contrary to proper honorable manly behaviour by the ruler.

Yes we are back!  Ruprect, Rory and Carmella

Mel u

"Androcles and the Army" by Frank O'Connor (March, 1958, in The Atlantic)

My Posts on Irish Literature 

After having  read and posted on two Irish short stories over the last two days, I decided I would reinstate for my own purposes Irish Short Story Month, Year V March 2015.  This year I will just keep things simple and I will try to post on at least ten Irish short stories.

Frank O'Connor from County Cork Ireland is widely considered one of the 20th century's greatest short story writers.  His war stories like "Guests of the Nation" are his most famous but all of his work seems to focus on the life of ordinary people.

"Androcles and the Army" packs a great deal in a few pages.  Written in a comic tone, it centers on a lion tamer in a small Irish circus who decides to join the army to fight the Germans.  There are no dates in the story but I think this story is set in around 1914 as in World War II the Irish were neutral.  The story tells us how the long time lion tamer masters his charges with kindness and love.  When he decides to join the army, the circus owner is distraught.  He has to put the brutish strong man in as lion tamer.  In the climactic scene in the story, I will leave the ending untold, the lion tamer is in training at an army base in Ireland when the circus comes to the town near the base.  The reunion is just too great and totally hilarious.  There are great thematic and symbolic minefields in this story.

I read this story in the collection below

Over 700 pages long,  I think it is your best way to get into Frank O'Connor.  It does not give the dates or first publication data or have any sort of introduction, which it should but it is a very valuable resource.  (I was given a free copy)

Please share your favorite lesser known Irish short stories with us.

Mel u

   

"Saturday, Boring" by Lisa McInerney (2013, in Town and Country, Irish Short Stories, edited by Kevin Barry)

My Posts on Irish Literature 

Every March for the last four years I have read and posted mostly on Irish short stories.  I have done Q and A sessions with lots of Irish writers.  My respect for Irish literature is tremendous.  Galway, Ireland is one of the world's most productive literary cities.  This year I am reading a lot of European classics, works from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Balzac's Comedie Humaine, Eastern European Literature as well as continuing on in Post Colonial Asian Fiction but I have far from forgotten the Irish.  I might wander away but I will always return.

Yesterday I was looking an excellent collection of short stories edited and introduced by Kevin Barry, Town and Country - Irish Short Stories for something to read.  Happily for me I read "Saturday, Boring" by Lisa McInerney, from Galway.  "Saturday, Boring" centers on two fifteen  year old girls, best friends, out of the house for a Saturday afternoon.  The conversation centers on the decision of one of the girls to have first ever for her sex with her boyfriend.  Having three daughters 16, 19, and 21 this story hit home for me as being about the very last things a father wants to contemplate.  It makes me think of all those no-school days when the girls are going out with their friends and their mother or I would ask them where they were going and they would simply reply "Out".  When asked what they are going to do they, of course, reply "Oh, nothing".

The girl's conversation rings totally true.  McInerney handles the dialogues perfectly.  The friend quizes her friend as to why she wants to take this big step.  As to be expected, it is not a well thought out plan.  They talk about what it will be like and how the boy will act toward her after it is over.  A big fear is that he will tell what happened all town, especially at school.  The girls talk about their limited sexual experiences.  The friend tries to offer advice and tries to get the other girl to promise to tell her all about what happens.

McInerney in just a few pages lets us see into the families of the girls, their home life and what can happen on a boring Saturday.  I very much look forward to reading her forthcoming debut novel, The Glorious Heresies soon 

Author Data

Lisa McInerney was born in 1981 and just about grew up to be a writer of contemporary fiction. 

In 2006 she started a blog about working class life in a Galway council estate, ‘Arse End of Ireland’, through which she cultivated a reputation for documenting modern Ireland with her own particular brand of gleeful cynicism. In the same year, Haydn O’Shaughnessy in The Irish Times called her “…the most talented writer at work today in Ireland”, and journalist and author Belinda McKeon said that “she takes the Celtic Tiger by the scruff, and gives it a sound kicking in prose that sears”. Nominated for Best Blog at the Irish Blog Awards for three years running, she took away the Best Humour gong in 2009, which came as a surprise as she wasn’t aware she was being particularly funny at the time.

Lisa went on to write regularly for award-winning entertainment site Culch.ie, prominent feminist site The Antiroom, and Irish news site TheJournal.ie, taking a frequently acerbic look at social issues. She’s spoken at literary festivals both at home and in the US discussing new media, its effect on traditional publishing, and its possibilities for writers.

In 2013, Lisa’s short story ‘Saturday, Boring’ was published in Faber & Faber’s ‘Town and Country’ anthology, edited by Kevin Barry. Seeing as this was the first short story Lisa had ever written, she was rather chuffed and has since assumed there will be a similarly disproportionate award for her second – dinner at the White House or something. Though inspired by writers like Melvin Burgess, Irvine Welsh and Hubert Selby Jr, years writing for an online audience means she also draws from the humour and wordplay of the internet's hive mind.

Lisa lives in Galway with a husband, a daughter, and a dog called Angua. She learned the word “sporadically” from Clueless, and has endeavoured to use it sporadically ever since. 

Lisa's debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, will be published by John Murray in April, 2015. (From publisher's webpage)

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"THE PLOUGHING OF LEACA-NA-NAOMH" by Daniel Corkery (1917) - Some General Observations on Irish Literature

General Blatherings on Irish Litersture and other Matters.

My Posts on Irish Literature 

For the last four years I have dedicated much of my March posting to the Irish Short Story.  Through this I was lead to read many great works and meet a lot of wonderful people.  Thís year I am just devoting a few days to the Irish Short Story.  It is not from lack of love for Irish literature.  In any international literary shootout The Reading Life stands with the Irish.  This year I am devoting a lot of time to classical European works trying to increase the depth and width of my reading.  I want to read a few stories around Saint Patrick's Day to keep growing in my reading of the Irish short story and to show respect.   It is my strong belief that understanding with any depth the literature of one country requires you have a basis for comparison through diverse reading and study.  In the past I have generalized about what I saw in the 100s of Irish literary works I have read and I do not see how one can do that without at least a bit of Multiculturalsm.  Reading Indian and Filipino short stories has made me a better reader, I hope, of Irish literature.  Last year in the company of Max u, I made my first visit to Ireland.  I admit to being very moved to be in Dublin, to see the grave of William Butler Yeats, met some great writers and eat way to much awesome food!  

I have done Q and A sessions with nearly 100 Irish writers and I hope to do many more.   If anything is of lasting value on The Reading Life it is the Q and A sessions.

For my first Irish short story for this year's observation I read a very beautifully done story with just exquiste prose by Daniel Corkery, "The Ploughing of Leaca-Na-Naomh". 

Daniel Corkery (1878 to 1964-Cork, Ireland) was a teacher at several schools. At the close of his career he was Professor of English at University College Cork where Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain were among his students.  He was active in the Irish language revival movement.   He was also a playwright, wrote a novel, and some cultural works but he is mostly read now for the short stories he wrote about the lives of people in Cork.   He published several collections of short stories in his life. I have previously read and posted on two of his stories, "The Priest" and "The Awaking", both, as is this story, included in his collection, A Munster Twilighf". 

The "Ploughing of Leaca-Na-Naomh" is narrated by a calaoguer of Irish heritage.  He has gone on a visit to a rural homestead in a Irish speaking area, trying to meet the head of a family of very ancient lineage.   A Leaca is a flat stretch of land on a mountain, in Irish tradition a Leaca was a holy place, to be treated with respect and veneration.  The story turns on the tragic events that transpired when the landowner and family scion decided he would plough the Leaca.  I want to quote the opening paragraph as it shows the poetic beauty of Corkery's prose.

The story brings to life many old Irish folkways.  It is very much worth reading. 

Mel u

         

                             Happy Saint Patrick's Day from Ruprect, Rory and Carmela

"To the Trade" by Aiden O'Reilly (2008)

The 2008 Michael McLaverty Prize Winning Story

March will once again be Irish Short Story Month on The Reading Life.

The Michael McLaverty Short Story Prize, named for one of Ulster's great writers and administrated by the Linen Hall Library, was won in 2008 by Aiden O'Reilly from Dublin, for his short story centering on a father and son doing construction work on the house of an upper class Dublin family.

As the story opens the father and his son are on a scaffold on the house.  The father is doing the skilled work, the son basically is his helper, handing him needed items.  "To the Trade" is a very subtle story.  One of the several evoked topics are Irish class markers.  We see that when the son peers into one of the rooms and is impacted by the obvious femininity of the contents, elements of softness and comfort not found in his life.  We learn, without being over instructed, that his mother is gone.  

One of the characteristics of the Irish short story is the portrayal of deep but unshown on the surface feelings.   You can feel both a love and a tension between father and son.  The work is very hard and the weather is brutal.  The lady of the house tells them to come down for lunch but the father does not want to rush down as if he is a starving tradesman being fed by the lady of the manor in the back kitchen.  I felt a lot of real emotion when the father told his son to go eat while the food is hot.

While they eat the father and the woman conversing about lamb.  The woman notices the roughness of the man's hands.  The lines below from the story shows to me how O'Reilly uses his hands for a. kind of near symphonic bringing to life of the struggles of the working class people of Ireland:

"The father reached out for another cut of bread. His thin hands were appallingly abused. The thread remains of a bandage clung to the middle finger. The skin on the sides of the knuckles was cracked in a radial pattern. Dark grey concrete stains lined the ancient cracks; one of them seeped blood, but as though welling up from a great depth. Veins and tendons interplayed on the back of his hand. The fingernails looked like worn saw teeth, or a cracked trowel. They were alive, but had the appearance of things, of abandoned tools. One nail was like a hoof — flesh and keratin intertwined to close over old wounds. Another was split in two from the quick to the fingertip, and a hard growth filled the space between. A bulbous texture like the organic growth of a tree bark over a rusty nail"

One can feel the depth of pain in these lines.  The woman offers to put a plaster on his hands but he says no need but we know it has been a very long time since anyone has shown him any tenderness.

We see in the boy a trapped young man, he hates school and his only way he sees out is to do work on the homes of the rich.  He and his father's relationship is both simple and complex.

I will leave the emotionally devasting close of this story untold.  "To the Trade", which I read three times is very much an award worthy story I commend to all lovers of the form.  I have read some of the novels and short stories of Michael McLaverty and I think he would be honored by the awarding of a prize in his name for this story about working class Irish.  It is a very Irish story but the truths it contains are universal and it counters the claims some, including me, have made about modern Irish literature centering on the weak or missing father.  There is much more that could be said about this story I just hope it gets a large readership.

You can read this story HERE

Be sure and visit Aiden's very interesting webpage

Bio From his publisher's webpage, honestpublishing.com

 Aiden O’Reilly was interested in puzzles from an early age and published papers on a QM dynamical system before abandoning a PhD in mathematics. He has worked variously as a translator, building-site worker, property magazine editor, and IT teacher. He lived in Eastern Europe for a time, but only met his wife after six years there. He is a 6-kyu go player, enjoys reading Karl Jaspers, and lives in Stoneybatter.

I will soon be posting on his highly received debut collection of short stories, Greetings, Hero.  Aiden has kindly agreed to do a question and answer session so look for that shortly.

Mel u

In the Forest by Edna O'Brien (2002, 208 pages)

My Posts on Edna O'Brien

The Irish Independent has published twenty books in a series called "Irish Women Writers".  The very first book in the series is In the Forest by Edna O'Brien.  Edna O'Brien in works like Country Girls was one of the first Irish writers to deal with sexual themes in modern Ireland.  

In the Forest is based on three murders in 1994 in County Clare.  A man in his late teens murdered a woman, his sexual partner, and her young son on one occasion and shortly after that shot a priest.  In the Forest tells the story of how such an evil set of events came to pass.  The young man had live much of his life in state care with no one to really are about him.  He grew up in a brutal eniviorment with the basest of values but so do many who go on to normal lives.  In the Forest helps us to understand the genesis of these muderers.

Told in short chapters from multiple points of view, we see the killer's world.  He lived in a universe of prey and hunters.  The prose of O'Brien is exquiste.  This is a harsh world and she does not shield us from the darkest corners.  

Mel u

"Christmas Morning" by Frank O'Connor (1936, originally published in The New Yorker)

"And I knew that the look in her eyes was the fear that, like my father, I should turn out mean and common and a drunkard".  From "Christmas Morning.

I admit I never heard of Frank O'Connor until I noticed Mel u has posted on a number of his stories.  He is from one of the world's great literary cities Cork, Ireland.

"Christmas Eve" was first published in The New Yorker in 1936.  I read it in Mel's copy of The Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor published by Open Road Media.

The story is told by a young boy maybe nine at the most.  He has a younger brother that is the bane of his existence.  His mother puts a very high emphasis on education even though he hates school.  His little brother, a consummate suck up excels at school and always parades his success in front of their mother.  He has to constantly hear "why can't you be like your little brother".  Their father is a drunk.  On Christmas Eve he brings home his pay and begrudgingly gives his wife a little extra for the holiday. She tells him she knows most of his pay will go to "publicans" for his drinks.  The boys are arguing about Santa Clause, is he real, how do they get in touch with him?  Older rough neighbor boys have told them Santa Clause is a fraud, it is your parents.  The boys still cling to Santa Clause.

I don't want to tell the very sad ending of this story.  O'Connor in his spare prose compresses years of misery in the close and we see the narrator learn something no boy should have to, at any age.

"La Belle Femme" by Áine Greaney (2014)

My Q and A Session with Áine Greaney

My post on "Snow" by Áine Greaney

Earlier this year I had the privilege of reading and posting on a wonderful short story by Áine Gearney, "Snow".  Here is a bit of what I said about "Snow".

"Snow" is a deeply moving story centering on a middle aged woman, Delores, who moved from Donegal in the west of Ireland to New York State many years ago.  She has been married to an American for a long time and has a decent job as a buyer for a construction company.  She came back to Ireland when her cousin Bridgie, who began to run the family shop nineteen years ago when Delores' mother passed, called her and told her that her father had taken a terrible fall.  The father is an irrascible old man, made bitter by the passing of his wife and siblings, a feeling compounded by what he sees as the desertion by Delores, his only daughter, when she moved  to America.  The shop is on the first floor, the dwellings above.  People come in the shop for their daily needs.  The big town event is the purchase of a nearby hotel by a man from Dublin.  

Greaney in just a few pages does a masterful job of showing us, with great verisimilitude, what it feels like from both sides for an adult child, well into middle age, to be necessitated to move back into the parental home to take care of an aged parent. I know because I did this myself.  The child cannot help but resent the loss of freedom and does not like being treated as a kid and the parent is equally resentful at what he sees as an ungrateful child without proper sympathy and respect.

"La Belle Femme", Gearney's new short story E Book  is set in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland.  It centers on a long time married couple, prosperous through her husband's work as regional manager for a bank.  They are at the annual Galway Osyter Festival, an event his bank sponsers.  The wife is mad as he has left her stuck with two boring couples while he works the crowd.  It suddenly dawns on her that her husband is having an affair with one of the bank's loan officers.  She is somehow happy to learn his affair has only been going on for one year while her affair is in the fifth year.  

I don't want to spoil the very interesting and insightful final two thirds of the story other than to say Gearney does a superb job showing us how the ending of the affairs and their marriage impacts their lives.  Gearney brings all the major characters to vivid reality, nobody is really evil, nobody perfect.  We sense life will go on, in some ways better, some worse.

"La Belle Femme" is a beautifully wriiten humanly perceptive story I greatly enjoyed reading. 

Official Author Bio

An expat who now lives on Boston’s North Shore, Aine Greaney writes with an unmistakable Irish lilt and lyricism flavored with her own brand of style and humor.  Her most recent recognitions include a Pushcart nomination and selection as a "notable" in Best American Essays 2013. Aine is the author of two novels, a short story chapbook collection and a book on writing. Her fifth book, "What Brought You Here?" (a memoir), is a work-in-progress. In addition, her personal essays and short stories have been published in popular and literary publications such as Salon.com, The Boston Globe Magazine, Forbes, The Daily Muse, Generation Emigration, The Irish Times, Writers Digest and Books by Women. She presents and teaches at various conferences, book clubs, arts organizations and schools. Her website and blog are at www.AineGreaney.com

This story is published by Pixel Hall, a dynamic company with a most interesting very literate range of titles.

http://www.pixelhallpress.com/

I hope to be able to read much more by Áine Greaney.

Waiting for the Bullet - Short Fiction by Madeleine D'Arcy (2014)

Short Listed for The Edge Hill 2015 Prize for Short Fiction

"A story is an apocalypse, served in a small cup".  Hortense Calisher

My Q and A With Madeleine  D'Arcy. Author of Waiting for the Bullet

Doire Press - Publisher of the Best of Contemporary Irish Literature 

Waiting for the Bullet, the marvelous debut collection of Madeleine D'Arcy, is a beautifully written highly perceptive set of stories about relationships in times of transition, in periods darked by social and economic stresses and personal crisis.  The stories are set mostly in Ireland but they allow us to see the universal in the particular.  D'Arcy has a keen eye for small nuances in relationships.  She helps us understand the built in paradoxes in relationships that often bring them to an end, the tension between the craving for a partner that excites you, gives you a sense of the edge and one that provided stability and affection.  You can see this strongly in the amazing story "The Fox and the Placenta".  In writing on Irish fiction over the last few years I have been guided by the ideas of Declan Kiberd in terms of a post-colonial reading of Irish literature and I see repeated manifestations of the theme of they weak or missing father in these profound stories.   D'Arcy helps us see the humanity in others, one of the greatest benefits of deep stories.  I think another great story teller from Cork, Frank O'Connor, would have been an admiring reader of Waiting for the Bullet.  

I find reviewing short story collections very challenging.  Often the stories were written not for the collection but simply placed there.  When we read the stories as a group, one impacts the other, stories bleed into each other.  Most reviewers of short stories simply use a few metaphorical terms to apply to the collection and then write a line or two on a few stories.  To me this is not really a much service to potential readers or fully respectful of the artist.  I try to give enough coverage of at least half of the stories in a collection to convey a sense of the work.

I endorse without reservations of any kind Waiting for the Bullet to all lovers of a suberbly crafted short story.  The stories are beautifully written, at times nearly heartbreakingly sad, funny and not without some interesting sexual scenarios.  There is Irish slang in the stories and I enjoyed that a lot.

"Clocking Out"

"Then I see it trailing along behind me, slithering along the foot path like a big slug"

"Clocking Out", the lead story in Waiting for the Bullet, does superbly what first rate fiction at it's best does.  It forces us to see the humanity in people we try not to notice as we make our way around the city.  In just a few masterful pages Arcy takes us deeply into the life of a still young woman, not very smart, not too pretty.  She had a job nobody would take if they could get anything else, working in a factory as an assembler.   She overhears her mother tell someone she is lucky to have the job.  I really don't want to tell more of the plot of the story.  Their is a very visual scene where we are on the tube 

(the subway or city train) with the woman.  She looks at a smartly dressed couple and her thoughts brought me a great feeling of sadness when you feel the inferiority society has forced her to internalize.  

There is a starkly brutal event at the heart of this story, one that made perfect sense.  "Clocking Out" is a wonderful story fully in the tradition, as my limited knowledge sees it, of the Irish short story.

"Hole in the Bucket"

"It's 5.32 PM and I'm going home on the rattaling oxygen starved Piccadily Tube Line"

"Hole in the Bucket" makes an interesting pairing with "Clocking Out".  A good bit of both stories takes place on a London Tube ride, for starters.  "Hole in the Bucket" is about a woman mentally and financially secure people try not to notice on the tube.  "Hole in the Bucket" tells us what happens when Leanne, an office worker who recently ended a long relationship, see a woman she has has not seen for eight years or so.  They were teenagers together.  The other woman is now begging for money in the tube, singing horribly.  Leanne wonders if she should speak to her on slip off the train.  She makes the mistake of speaking and we see how different they now are when her old acquaintance turns on her.

We also sense an emptiness in Leanne's life, both women have their involvements with unreliable men.  Drink is a big factor in the story.  In just a few pages D'Arcy takes us into two very different lives.  

"Salvage"

"Salvage", like the prior two stories, focuses on someone recently out of a relationship and on how the breakup impacts them.   Only in this case our subject is a man.  Vincent's wife was a doctor.  She was not just successful she was beautiful.   At the start of the relationship Vincent made great money as a fire hazard inspector.  He was riding high on the rise in the Irish economy, the Celtic Tiger.  When the construction trade dropped way down, his income collapsed.  His wife basically got tired of paying all the bills and told him to leave. After some looking he finds a place in a  house with a room to rent.  This story is really a slice of a few days of life, not a problem solving life changing story.  Vincent adjusts to life in the house and becomes friends slowly with the land lady.  A cat plays a part in the story and that is a plus.  Alcohol, ever present in Irish literature, plays a part.  "Salvage" is an excellantly done story and the ending is moving.  I liked it a lot.

"Waiting for the Bullet" 

"I told myself that relationships were like economies, that they were cyclical things, with peaks and troughs".  

"Waiting for the Bullet", the title story of the collection, centers on a married couple aged about forty, going through a bit of a recession in their relationship.  You can see reflected in the literature of this century the impact of the decline of the Irish economy on relationships.  The couple are comfortable financially, the husband, the wife narrates the story, is in the building trade.  One day he brings home a very real looking toy gun.  His wife is shocked until she finds it is not real.  It makes a sound like a real gun when fired.   Compressing a bit, one evening they have couple over for dinner, the husband's clients, and the gun becomes the center of focus.   I don't want to tell too much more of the plot but the close  is very powerful.  D'Arcy does a suberb job of letting us see the dynamics of the marriage and gets us inside the mind of the wife.  Like the other stories, alcohol plays a big part in "Waiting for the Bullet".   

"Wolf Note"

"Wolf Note" is a very well done story about a married man cheating  on his wife for the first time.  Eddie is forty and owns his own company.  Christmas is approaching and his wife sends him a text message saying he needs to play Santa at the party for their children.  He and his wife exchange some texts as he doesn't feel like doing it but he agrees to do it to avoid an argument.  In the mean time his bachelor man about  town friend with a reputation as a ladies' man  invites him for a night out with the guys.  He wants to go but of course his wife does not like the idea.  The plot action is very interesting, a bit erotic, and I certainly learned something about cellos I did not know.  The story was a lot of fun to read and it is a good portrait of a marriage that still endures but might have seen better days.  Alcohol helps fuel the action.  

"Housewife of the Year"

"Housewife of the Year" is a fascinating rather frightening story that totally drew me into the world of the narrator, an Irish woman we first meet when she is in high school and with whom we part ways with at twenty nine.  Every year there is an Ireland wide contest for the title of "Housewife of the Year".  Her mother, a widow who runs the family hardware store, pretty much hates her five kids but she puts on a good act on the TV show finals and wins.  As soon as the children can, the narrator is the youngest, they leave home and move either to America or Australia.  The mother tells the narrator she cannot leave but she gets a civil service job, finds a man, and moves to Dublin.  I jus rio not want to spoil this story for first time readers but it takes two and I see a third shocking turn coming.  The very real power in this story comes from the brief undercurrents from which we must try to understand the narrator's actions.  This can be seen as another story about the missing Irish father.  This is a disturbing look at the dark side of family life.  We wonder what terrible memories destroyed so much.

"The Fox and the Placenta"

"The Fox and the Placenta" had me at the title.  There are two main onstage characters, a woman nine months pregnant and due right now and her boyfriend, who may or may not be the father of her baby.  I learned something I did not know from this story, that London has a lot of wild foxes.  The foxes are a nuisance as they knock over garbage bins.  

Marilyn's current boyfriend Brendan is solidly reliable, considerate and decent.  Her old boyfriend Sam was a "bad boy" sort.  We can see Marilyn kind of wishes for a fusion of the two characters.  In a very cinematic scene, Marilyn goes into labor.  I just cannot spoil this story but Brendan kind of becomes a bit of the wilder man Marilyn craves in a conflict with the foxes of maybe Marilyn just sees more into him.

Author Bio from http://www.madeleinedarcy.com/

Author Bio

Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal legal aid solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son. She began to write short stories in 2005.

In 2010 she received a Hennessy X.O Literary Award for First Fiction as well as the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.


One of her stories came joint-second in the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Competition 2011. Her work has been short-listed and commended in many other competitions, including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize (UK), and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition.

Publications in which her work has appeared include: Sunday Tribune; Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories; Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, Ireland); Irish Examiner;Necessary Fiction; Irish Independent; Irish Times; The Penny Dreadful; Long Story Short; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts;Short Story (University of Texas, Brownsville); and Unbraiding the Short Story (Ed. Maurice A Lee, University of Arkansas). Other stories are scheduled for publication in Surge: New Writing From Ireland (O’Brien Press, November 2014) and in The Quarryman (Bradshaw Books, April 2015).

A short film of Madeleine’s story ‘Dog Pound’, featuring the distinguished Irish actor Frank Kelly, was premièred at the Hennessy Literary Awards in April 2014 and will be screened at Waterfordand  Film Festival 2014.

She has been awarded bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland and by Cork City Council, and was the scholarship student on the inaugural Masters Degree in Creative Writing at University College Cork.

I loved Waiting for the Bullet and look forward to reading much more of the work of Madeleine D'Arcy.