My ten favorite books list this year may have more than ten books: this is another one that I admired greatly. I read another book by Deirdre Madden (Molly Fox’s Birthday) and like this one as well or better. The Buckley family in Dublin during the flush economic times is the subject of this lovingly told story that centers on Fintan, a man who loves a good hearty lunch and immediately...
This short novel about the life of an Irish woman who moves to New York in 1962 will be in my top ten for the year. It begins with the death of Tess’s mother when Tess was an 8-year-old; joy goes out of the house and her dour father withdraws his meager love. She finds comfort in her sisters, the dog, and Mike Connolly who works on their farm but even so she has lost the ability to speak...
This is my fourth Colm Toibin and I found it to be yet another wonderful book. It is story of an Irish woman whose husband died while she had two young sons at home and two daughters old enough to be away at school. The most mundane aspects of her life are revealed with the same deliberate calm voice as the more dramatic moments as she comes to terms with the loss of her beloved husband. The...
I was enthusiastic about the previous book of hers that I read, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, so was excited at the prospect of reading Maggie O’Farrell’s new one. I learned about it from the review by Tony”s Book World. The story unpacks the family of Gretta and Robert and their three adult children and reaches back to Robert’s brother in Ireland. This Irish family...
In Reading Matters‘ top ten novels for 2011, Leaving Ardglass is not to be found in the library at UVa, but I was able to get it on the kindle. Through the lives of two brothers, it tells the story of changes in Ireland from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, beginning with times when migration to America and England was the key to getting out of poverty, to boom times in Ireland. The...
Ann Enright’s Man Booker prize winner is a grim exploration of dissatisfaction within a large Irish family. The pivotal event is the suicide of one of the sons, Liam, the favorite sibling of the narrator, Veronica. The mother is described as a ghost, and her other siblings are alcoholics, psychotic, her husband hates her, she hates him, and so on. Then she goes back a generation to...
The subject of this coming of age story is Martin, an appealing 17-year-old who is not a successful student, his good friend Kavanaugh who is, and a recently arrived student who brings danger into their lives. The story is set in Belfast in the early 1960s so the priests are in charge; figures in the art books have been given India ink bathing trunks. The story focuses on Martin, who lives...
This is the story of a low to middle class family which begins with the marriage of the parents just after World War II and ends as the four children come of age. It is recounted by incidents that illuminate them. The druggy 60s figure in the story, as does the Vietnam War. The picture is of a family that spends lots of time together, but the inevitable separations between them are clear. The...
This book, a Man Booker prize winner, is told in a most interesting voice. The narrator was able to make me very intensely sad for reasons that were not entirely clear and at the same time he speaks in a very rationale unemotional voice. His great love for his wife was a contrast to his distance from others — his daughter, in particular. It is a lavishly descriptive book and evokes a...