 |
| Art: Sean Roche |
To my knowledge, I don't have a drop of Irish blood. None. Nada. Nil. In fact, my whole family skews Eastern European (Russia, Ukraine, Austria, German.) But I really like Irish stuff! I like U2 and I adore The Pogues. I like Irish actors (hello there, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Liam Neeson) and soda bread. I love the color green. I like Irish wool. I like Irish Whiskey, even though it makes me fighty. I'll confess, I have no great love of Guinness, but I drink Straub for God's sake.
And I love, love, love Irish writers. Mostly.
We all know about James Joyce and his unGodly sentences, "untroubled by punctuation." (Think he's overrated? Check this out.) But then there's Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, and Jonathan Swift! Each one more readable than the next!
Contemporary Irish Authors
There'll be times when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it.The Jack Taylor series has received numerous awards and nominations, including two Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America and the Best Series Award from the Crime Writers Association. Jack Taylor is a former member of the Irish Guards, an alcoholic and very self-destructive. He reminds me of an Irish Harry Hole (Jo Nesbo, Sweden.) Jack Taylor is dark and brutal, but also incredibly smart and witty. The novels are a little bit crime, a little bit childhood and a little bit the life of Jack Taylor.
It's the only thing sexier than a sexy woman. A sexy woman cooking fuckin' sausages.Doyle is sort of a Renaissance Man. He writes novels. He writes short stories and stage plays and screenplays. He writes children's books. He wrote a memoir about his parents. He won the Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Doyle is perhaps most well-known for his Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van.) The trilogy is about the "World's Hardest Working Band" trying to bring soul music to 1980s Dublin and is told almost entirely in dialogue. A good short read for music lovers, it feels like you are sitting in on their rehearsals and shows.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this--two things: I crave truth. And I lie.I love this series. I've written about it a number of times, here and for my work blog. If you are interested in in-depth police procedural novels that include equally in-depth character development, then French is for you. Her first novel, In the Woods, won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel- and each novel in the series is better than the last. All of the books in the series are well-written, nuanced and creepy, but for me at least, Broken Harbor was the creepiest. All the talk of mystery rodents, and an empty, ghostly housing plan- CHILLS!
I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That is would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.Neil Jordan has done a lot of stuff. He's directed a bunch of movies, written a bunch of screenplays, novels, short stories and then some. He's probably most famous for being that dude that wrote and directed The Crying Game. (To this day, I'm still not entirely sure what happened there.) I like Jordan because of his first book of short stories, Night in Tunisia and his novel Shade. I am also apparently the only person on Earth who didn't find Shade confusing, difficult to read, staged or stagnant. Some of the reviews are actually hostile. It's narrated by a the ghost of a murdered woman (partially) and is very, very detailed. Like Charles Dickens details, if you know what I mean. Night in Tunisia is bleak and melancholy and beautifully written. And keep in mind, he was 25 when most of the stories were written. So, you know, grain of salt and whatnot.
My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.Keegan is considered one of the best Irish writers living today. I agree. Sometimes you read a book exactly when you need to. That is how I felt about Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica. The stories are dark, all about betrayal and consequences. There are no happy endings here, but somehow that's better. It won several awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book (2001.) Foster, winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, is eerie and heart-breaking. A young girl is sent to live on an farm in rural Ireland. Instead of back-breaking farm labor, she finds shelter in a warm kitchen, treated like an only child ("a gem") for the first time. Don't blame me for the ending.
'Bye Bye, Father, I said as the confessional door clicked shut behind me, 'Ah's' eyes following me, wondering, I suppose, what He'd been drinking the day he went and made a twilight zone disaster like me.I think if I met McCabe, we could be friends. He has that anti-authoritarian attitude that I appreciate. Also, he is writer cut. And his novels are darkly funny. That kind of funny where you laugh and then think, "Oh, I'm surely going to Hell for laughing at that." His third novel, The Butcher Boy was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Irish Times Aer-Lingus award for fiction. Butcher Boy is written in a stream-of-consciousness form that isn't for everyone. Francis (Francie) Brady is a young man living in a violent fantasy world in 1960s Ireland. McCabe addresses the stagnation and cloying atmosphere of small-towns in many of his novels, but in Butcher Boy you feel it the most. The town has a lovely veneer covering the brutality and violence within. Patrick McCabe is also credited with creating the genre "Bog Gothic" which hasn't failed to make me laugh since I discovered it.
The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.First of all, Colum McCann is a very active Good Reads user- as in , he actually gives books stars and talks to other users. That's a rare thing for a popular author to do and pretty neat. Second of all, Let the Great World Spin is one of the best books ever! Many different stories are interwoven around the "artistic crime of the century," or the famous tightrope performance by Philippe Petit in August of 1974. A priest, prostitutes, mourning mothers: they all stood mesmerized for one hot summer morning. Dave Eggers, an excellent author in his own right, wrote, "This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it's a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York." I wholeheartedly agree.
Edna O'Brien, novels, plays, short stories
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls (1960) , was banned in her native land. That's how you know it's good! She's won a boatload of awards, including the Frank O'Connor Prize and a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Literary Academy. I haven't read the Country Girls Trilogy, but after reading the reviews, it is definitely on my list. The lives of the women in her novels are dismal and repressed and the endings are not all happy.
Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.Toibin has won more awards than I can reasonable list here. If you really want to know, click on his name. It's a lot. And all well-deserved. When I read Brooklyn, I had no idea Toiblin was Irish. Not that it mattered, but I felt like he really captured the essence of post- WWII America. A young Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, comes to America to escape the desolation of her small town. Finding work in a big department store, she lives in Brooklyn which is "just like Ireland." She slowly falls in love with Tony, an Italian with a huge family and a great love of baseball. Brooklyn is a good reminder of how most of us are just mutts, a mishmash of different nationalities that all came to the US to escape one thing or another.
I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can write unless you read.Trevor has a cool story. He first worked as a sculptor in Northern Ireland. Traveled to England to find work. His first novel failed. He wrote copy. Since then, he's written over 40 novels, won a ton of national and international awards and is way less bitter. My favorite title of his is The Story of Lucy Gault. Set in 1920s Ireland, the history alone is worth the read. Living a life of privilege, the Gault family decides to move to England to escape the threat of violence. But 9 year old Lucy doesn't want to leave her home. She runs away, putting in motion a tragic series of events. Trevor's writing is beautiful, descriptive- you feel like you are in the scenes, especially the landscapes of Lahardane.
Happy Saint Patrick's Day Reading!
p.s. If anyone has any idea how to add acute accents to letters in Blogger, please tell me. Sorry to all the Irish writers who lost their accents today.
No comments:
Post a Comment