An atmospheric debut, capturing the slow-moving rhythms and ordinary tragedies of Irish country life.
A lovely, moody debut collection examines hardscrabble days in rural Ireland.
In four long stories O’Keeffe brings the reader to the village of Kilkelly and its environs, where love, jealousy and madness underscore the persistent loneliness of country life. Though taking place in the 1950s and ’60s, the tales seem from an age long ago: One young woman delivers milk in a pony-cart, another listens to the wireless. Rural poverty brings with it a kind of isolation that defies time. In the best piece, “Her Black Mantilla,” young orphan Alice is sent to Tarkey’s farm. She’s to help with the milking and also with James, gored by a bull many years ago and left to the quiet of his room. Middle-aged Davie Condon senses something familiar behind the black mantilla covering Alice’s face, something reminiscent of his pregnant Margaret, abandoned and forgotten long ago. As Davie spies on her from across the field, Alice gets strange comfort from James as she washes his shrunken body and listens to his tales of lost love. In “The Postman’s Cottage,” widowed Kate Dillon, returning from her very first trip out of the village, to visit her son in Dublin, shares the train ride with Timmy O’Rourke, nephew of handsome, notorious Eoin, who courted Kate as a young woman. As their train conversation progresses, Kate recalls the details of Eoin’s disappearance; at the time, he was assumed to be a suicide, but now Kate faces the awful truth that he was murdered, and knows who did it. The titular novella spans the 20th century. Young Jack is mesmerized by the short life of Albert Cagney, a WWI veteran who returned shell-shocked from the trenches, killed himself, and thus altered village life. Jack spends some summer weeks with his old Aunt Mary, a spinster still holding on to the memory of her Albert while the rest of the village tries to forget.
An atmospheric debut, capturing the slow-moving rhythms and ordinary tragedies of Irish country life.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03398-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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