Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.
First American publication of a collection of very early, very short stories by the Irish master of the literary novel.
Since a slightly different version of this volume was issued in Britain in 1970, Banville has earned much greater renown as a prize-winning novelist (The Sea, 2005, etc.) and has subsequently won a popular readership through a series of detective novels as Benjamin Black (Christine Falls, 2007, etc.). The seeds of both branches of his fiction can be found in these elliptical, elemental stories. Though there are only hints of the more lyrical prose that would subsequently dazzle admirers (while seeming overwritten to detractors), the sea and the solitude it affords were plainly a preoccupation early on. And there’s some mystery at the heart of practically every one of these stories—an unexplained relationship or situation, an inscrutable murder (in more than one story), a dilemma not completely understood yet requiring escape. The Banville of his early 20s could write dialogue like this from “Lovers”: “We’ll be free. We’re young and the world is wide. We’ll be free.” Yet he already knows that such freedom is an illusion, an empty promise. And more often, his characters find themselves lamenting the passing of old ways, such as the stranger who seems oddly familiar to a son mourning his father in “A Death”: “There is a new brand of despair in the world. The old ways are dying, and the old religion too. When people turn their backs on God what can they expect?” Other stories have similarly elemental titles—“Sanctuary,” “Summer Voices,” “Island”—and similar obsessions with transition and loss. “Look it at,” says the drunken host at a party of friends he doesn’t like. “The new Ireland. Sitting around at the end of a party wondering why we’re not happy. Trying to find what it is we’ve lost.”
Formative work by an author who would later revisit what’s best in these stories through longer and more ambitious fiction.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-80706-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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