MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Ireland We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE by Josephine Hart /2010/the-truth-about-love-by-josephine-hart/ /2010/the-truth-about-love-by-josephine-hart/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:15:35 +0000 /?p=7913 Book Quote:

“For love we’re asked to do the strangest things in life. Love! It asks the strangest sacrifices.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (FEB 21, 2010)

What can one say about Irish writers? Deep into this book, here’s what Josephine Hart says: “A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we’re teachers, missionaries.” And then, a few pages later, as a character summarizes a reading experience: “When I finished the book I thought, language–that’s his real subject, not history.” When you read sentences like these, in a book like this, you sense you’re on to something special. The Irish writers take themselves seriously. They are bent, as noted above, towards the mission–with style.

This is a story of tragedy. Might that not be the opposing force to love, the subject of the book? It begins with the death of a young boy, briefly told, as he expires, in first person. It is a backyard accident which takes him from his family. And it is related in haunting fragments, ebbing like the blood which is leaching the ground around him. Here’s how it begins, page one, moments after the accident, paragraph one: “…and the sky rolled, rolling over me, heavy light. And bright too. Is it bright? Yes. And I lift my face to the light and I am flying towards it but I cannot reach it. And now I am falling, hurtling fast to the ground. And now the ground is close, closer, rushing hard. Please? Not yet!” You can feel your pulse race as you step into the stream of narration, hoping against hope, not sure what you’re reading, but suspecting the worst. Then you know. And it hits you. Nabokov said that good writing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You will experience that sensation many times over reading this novel.

Good writing is wonderful, but as an end to itself, it’s just an exercise, albeit an exercise of the highest order. That is where the story telling comes in. This slim novel is a meditation on love in all its multifaceted forms. There is the love of a mother for lost–and surviving–children; the love of a husband for a wife; of neighbors for one another. But perhaps most of all, it is a novel about love of a place, Ireland, and a tradition. The narration turns on all this and is spoken principally through three crystal-like interwoven voices.

There is Sissy the boy’s mother. He is her second child lost and we follow her into the depths of depression, as she inches close to madness. She survives, not least of all because of the enduring love of her husband, Tom. “He thinks love, his love, can bring me back to life,” she tells us. “A man in love never gives up. Never. Tom O’Hara is certain he will not fail at this.” Tom is salt of the earth and loves his wife and his family. He is stable and certain and somber. He is broken over loss, but not so broken as to forsake his more damaged wife.

And there is Olivia, the boy’s sister. We follow her from the moment of the accident. (The boy was blown apart building a rocket, but this is Ireland and troubles abound. Young men make bombs too.) Olivia has interests beyond the village and the motherland. She is cosmopolitan, interested in poetry and intellectual traditions. She ultimately becomes an actress, but not before wrestling with the agony of loss and the challenges of adolescence. Of all the characters in the book, Olivia stands to define the modern Irish tradition born of a history of violence and horror and loss. Yet, she survives, even flourishes, as if symbolic of the tiger that once heralded from the Emerald Isle. But we now know that tiger made for higher ground and was soon lost to the mountains.

Most enigmatic is the third major voice of the novel, that of Thomas Middlehoff, “The German.” Middlehoff immigrated to Ireland in the 1960s. He is a chess-playing intellectual, a writer who has set upon the task of observing and ultimately writing about his neighbors, the Irish, who treat him with a suspect-tinged respect. Middlehoff is the non-Irishman scholar to whom we turn to better understand the degree of intensity of those about him. But Middlehoff is from elsewhere. He will never belong. That does not mean he cannot also have a love, of sorts. Middlehoff loves a woman married to another man, a woman for whom even this disciplined Teuton turns to mush, for that is the nature of his love. That is the truth of his love.

I’ve heard it said that the trouble with America is that there is no long sense of collective history. That is, our history is only that of a couple hundred years and is not defined by any one group or collection of people. Europe, is vastly different–and the Irish then some. The Truth About Love is about the love of people and land, villages and cultures, mothers and children. It is a love woven and bound by and for the other, the thing, the person, the place. These characters would not transfer across the country for a new job, or pick up and set out for parts unknown, just for the hell of it. They are too tied to their village, their land, the doctor that delivered your children and you. I can’t help but read this book–as too I sometimes feel reading Joyce and Yeats, in particular–and long for a sense of place that is deep and crowded and so twisted into my DNA as to ache. These people are bound by a sense of land and history that I think we, as Americans, find quaint, being the fresh upstarts that we are in the societal evolutionary ladder. Too, of particular interest to me is the question, suggested here, that the strength of bonds, one to the other, reflects the bond to the culture and the history. Not to read too much into all this, but might the inverse also be true? That without the deep sense of place that the oldest cultures feel, and its attendant implications those of us of the newer cultures also might lack the intensity to love to the same degree?

Regardless of those questions, it is a measure of this book that they arise. This is a wonderful book, written with a rare skill. That the canvas is so expansive belies the simple, pedestrian even, nature of the subject matter. Love. Everybody talks about it. But really, what is its truth?

AMAZON READER RATING: from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (August 11, 2009)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS:
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]]> /2010/the-truth-about-love-by-josephine-hart/feed/ 0 LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor /2009/love-and-summer-by-william-trevor/ /2009/love-and-summer-by-william-trevor/#comments Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:44:20 +0000 /?p=4869 Book Quote:

“He paused at the windows in case a display had changed overnight. None had: draper’s dummies were as they had been since early spring, the spectacles on an optician’s cardboard faces had been the same for longer. Pond’s beauty aids were still reduced, travel bargains still offered, interest rates steady.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (SEP 12, 2009)

In William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer, past and present don’t collide but instead merge into a shimmering, elusive and painful present. The novel set in the 1950s explores the lives of interconnecting characters following the funeral of Mrs. Eileen Connulty in the Irish town of Rathmoye. Mrs. Connulty was a respectable pillar of the community, and the Connulty family is one of the most affluent in the area. Eileen Connulty was a widow and she ruled the family and the family businesses–a pub, a boarding house, a coal yard and a number of other properties–with a rod of iron. She leaves behind two middle-aged children, a daughter “she was glad to part from,” and a son: “her pet since he first lay in her arms as an infant.” Most of the townspeople mourn Mrs. Connulty’s passing:

“The funeral mass was on the morning for the following day, and when it was over Mrs Connulty’s mourners stood about outside the cemetery gates, declaring that she would never be forgotten in the town and beyond it. The women who had toiled beside her in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer asserted that she had been an example to them all. They recalled how no task had been too menial for her to undertake, how hours spent polishing a surfeit of brass or scarping away old candle-grease had never been begrudged. The alter flowers had not once in sixty years gone in need of fresh water; the missionary leaflets were replaced when necessary. Small repairs had been effected on cassocks and surplices and robes. Washing the chancel had been a scared duty.”

Mrs Connulty’s death is not equally mourned by everyone. To her daughter, her mother’s passing gives some belated freedom and lifts the oppressive atmosphere in the Connulty home. To Miss Connulty, at least, there’s a sense of impending change.

On the day of the funeral, a young man named Florian Kilderry travels to Rathmoye to photograph the shell of the town’s burned-out cinema. While in Rathmoye he catches a glimpse of young married Ellie Dillahan, and over the course of the next few weeks, the two lonely young people strike up a relationship. No one seems to notice the budding relationship–except Miss Connulty, and watching Florian and Ellie fall in love stirs painful, long-buried memories for the middle-aged spinster.

For readers of William Trevor, this is familiar territory–the Irish Diaspora that still haunts a country devastated by poverty, relationships wrecked by piety, and a society ruled by religious dogma. In Love and Summer, Florian is the by-product of an Irish-Italian match made by feckless, hopelessly romantic parents. While Florian inherited the family home after the death of his parents, it’s a shambles and is rapidly disintegrating around his ears. With no prospects of employment, Florian has put the house up for sale and is gradually selling off the valuables and burning personal property. Florian destroys his past yet faces an uncertain future while many other characters in the novel, Miss Connulty for example, are prisoners to their pasts and their memories.

While Florian’s home is ravaged by neglect and decay, his surroundings are in contrast to the home of Ellie’s much older husband, Dillahan. Dillahan is a character who’s a prisoner of his past, but he survives and endures by absorbing himself into the minuscule repairs required around his farm. Consequently, his farm is in excellent condition but underneath the surface of this immaculate homestead, is the turmoil of Dillahan’s grief and guilt for past events.

These characters merge and then move on into their respective futures in this gentle tale of an Ireland that longs to change while still mired down by immovable religious opinion. Duty permeates everyone’s lives, relationships and marriages, and yet will duty be enough for Florian and Ellie? Or do they want something more from life?

Love and Summer revisits some of the themes of Trevor’s last novel, The Story of Lucy Gault, and while Love and Summer is not Trevor’s strongest novel, yet once again the author shows his skill in recreating a sense of timelessness and a present that is permeated with loss and contaminated with stagnation and slow decay.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 46 readers
PUBLISHER: Viking Adult (September 17, 2009)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AMAZON PAGE: Love and Summer
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on William Trevor
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More William Trevor reviews:

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]]> /2009/love-and-summer-by-william-trevor/feed/ 0 BROOKLYN by Colm Toibin /2009/brooklyn-by-colm-toibin/ /2009/brooklyn-by-colm-toibin/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:50:56 +0000 /?p=4064 Book Quote:

“She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.  Now, she felt she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared…”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Poornima Apte (AUG 13, 2009)

The very first page of Colm Toibin’s new novel sets the stage beautifully: In Enniscorthy, a small town in Ireland, Eilis Lacey looks out the window as her more glamorous sister, Rose, returns from a game of golf with her professional acquaintances. Rose has an important job, provides for the family and is the arbiter of most conversations the homely Eilis shares with her mother. It is Rose who pays the bills and who writes letters of condolence when near and dear ones pass away. She is accorded all the importance and seat at the table that a primary wage earner in the 50’s was. When Eilis looks out the window, it’s as if an adoring child is watching a parent return home.

So it comes as no surprise when, after a visiting priest from Brooklyn, Father Flood, suggests that Eilis should look for opportunities in America, the decision is already made for her. Rose decides her sister must go to the land of opportunity—to seek out a better life—perhaps even one that might make some use of the beginning bookkeeping skills she has learned in Ireland.

Eilis, who has learned to forever be obedient, to bend to everyone else’s wishes, is not sure she wants to emigrate but emigrate she does—to Brooklyn—in a painful journey by ship. Father Flood sets up her living arrangements with a fellow expat Mrs. Kehoe, and Eilis soons learns to adjust to her living conditions and her new more worldly-wise roommates. She gets a job on the sales floor at a local department store and even takes up bookkeeping classes at a college to keep her evenings busy and structured. Eilis hopes to maybe one day even move on a to a real bookkeeping job in the city.

Father Flood, through his parish, arranges for social events, and some of these are dances. It is at one such dance that Eilis meets Tony—a young Italian, who asks her out. In true form, Eilis can’t say “No.” Slowly she begins to realize that Tony is the real deal—a caring and loving man, someone she could set up a home with and spend the rest of her life loving.

Just as things get serious between her and Tony, Eilis receives news from home that forces her to return. Once home she begins to evaluate her life in Ireland through a new lens. It remains to be seen whether her experiences abroad will color her perceptions of life in the small town or not. “It made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew,” Toibin writes of her return to Ireland.

The woman who until very recently has lead a very sheltered existence, finds the other side a mirage, as a mere fantasy, wherever she is. When Eilis is in Brooklyn, she gets caught up in its daily pace yet back in Ireland, everything that happened in America seems like it was part of a dream.

The high point of Brooklyn is the strong character studies. Toibin does a wonderful job of portraying the dynamics of women and their small foibles—whether through the interactions of Eilis with her roommates in Brooklyn or her friends and family in Ireland.

The Lacey women—especially Eilis, whom Toibin sketches precisely and beautifully, come through vividly. And this, for some, can also be a problem. One can find malleable and timid Eilis a tad tiring after a while. She can never say “No”—to her mother, to friends in Ireland who ask her out, to her sister, to Tony. After a while you begin to wish that instead of letting life just happen to her, that she invest more energy in shaping her future. Of course one could also argue that it is exactly because Eilis is so malleable that she reflects the immigrant experience so precisely. Eilis is a blank canvas. She changes nothing—instead she lets things change her. The reader has to give Toibin this much: Till the very end, perhaps vexingly so, Eilis stays true to her character.

Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is a quiet and studied reflection on what it means to set roots in unfamiliar ground. It is worth a read even if one might occasionally wish for a protagonist with a little more spunk.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 285 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Colm Tóibín
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of The Master

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