Tag: literature

Is that all there is?

Posted on by minorhistory

Diving For Pearls by Jamie O’Connell

The plot of Diving for Pearls centres around the death of Hiyam, a young Emirati woman. The novel flows through the voices of several characters. Through them, we discover her fate. For the most part, Diving for Pearls concerns itself with the actions and choices of one Irish family. The heart of the novel rests within the shifts of consciousness in Trevor, the troubled younger brother of Siobhán. Siobhán summons Trevor to Dubai where she has been living with her husband and children since the 2008 economic collapse. Like the dead Emirati woman, Trevor too ended up in open water as a result of a misspent evening. Siobhán thinks she can save Trevor without realising that she’s more lost than him.

Dubai feels like something out of a Mark Fisher book. It manifests as an expression of pure capitalist realism. Within its city limits, the global caste system is on full display. Public space is so inhospitable that if you attempt to spend time outdoors, you risk being seared to death by the sun. Refuge of any sort can be found only within the private shopping malls and hotels.

While O’Connell writes complex Irish characters, the foreign characters lack a certain dimensionality. On this point, I give O’Connell the benefit of the doubt. Diving For Pearls seems less interested in rendering characters’ rich inner worlds than in demonstrating that for every northern indulgence some southern family pays the price. This book has strong parallels with Jordan Peele’s film Us, where the Wilson family confronts the horror of their doppleganger family. The Wilson’s material gains result in torment and hardship for their counterparts who exist in a parallel underworld. O’Connell’s characters of non-white descent suffer endlessly and needlessly so that the white characters’ good fortune continues.

Within this novel, those with money are godless while the impoverished are pious. The worship of both capital and god relies on higher powers. These higher powers remain abstracted and unaccountable but widely believed. In the end, everyone relies on little more than hope. As Siobhán’s good fortunes flip from one moment to the next, in what is a comical scene, she tries to remember how to pray. In Diving for Pearls, Christianity provides a quiet sense of community. The Christians of diverse nationalities gather together to worship but also to commune with one another. The consumers seek individuals with whom they can binge in tandem. Both have a price.

O’Connell’s writing becomes urgent and compelling when he writes about faith. This seems a feature of the latest generation of Irish artists. While their fluency in Christian doctrine probably came through involuntary indoctrination, its immutable presence shapes their art. O’Connell’s writing expresses a final exhalation of Irish Christianity.

The Siobhán of this novel embodies the archetypal sleepwalking consumer of capital. She names her children Rocco and Milo after the new global deities. When Trevor enquires about the palpable inequality evident in Dubai, she’s quick to rationalise this as a law of nature. Someone has to slave! A certain comedy arises when Siobhán passes comment about Gete, her Ethiopian housemaid whose prospects of making a living in her homeland were robbed by foreign interests and whose entire fate rests in Siobhán’s hands. Siobhán thinks Gete fails to understand what is important in life, aka designer goods. Gete, knowing better than to ever comment, seems pregnant with opinion.

When Siobhán drags her family out to witness an actor scale the Burj Khalifa, the supreme moment of bearing witness fails to offset the discomfort of the voyage. Worship stripped of its religiosity splits Siobhán open for a moment. She realises that her entire life has been built on a lie; she chose luxury over ever knowing true desire. Her life’s milestones are garnished with disappointment. Nothing in her life has lived up to the hype. After this brief confessional moment, she returns to normal. Despite experiencing a great change in fortune, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to become conscious of the source of her malaise. Siobhán, as an embodiment of the general Irish population, and some might argue the entire global north, demonstrates comedic acts of cognitive dissonance.

Dublin and Dubai fail to differ enough to draw a strong contrast. Moving thousands of miles from one to the other offers distance rather than difference. For Trevor, Dubai might lead to a life post-Lucy Quirke. For Aasim, Dublin allows him the liberty of sharing a bed with a man without fear but also without love. Outside of that, both men know nothing but excess. Trevor tries to steel himself through building a thick muscular exoskeleton. Aasim flashes money to court friendships.

The one question I have is whether O’Connell could have written Diving For Pearls without Trevor. While O’Connell animates Trevor’s awakening with great skill, Trevor reads like a metaphor for the Labour Party or the American Democratic party. Although his lifestyle leads to the death and destruction of the global south, he retains the capacity to display some awareness and remorse. He understands the ills of the world enough for the rest of us to buy into him as a form of hope. Ultimately, he might change course but the change isn’t radical. A Diving For Pearls without a Trevor to add empathy would have been more realistic but less palatable.

Siobhán’s husband Martin remains voiceless throughout the novel. Everything that happens, happens because of his sense of entitlement. His shady dealings both stand up and tear down the lives of Siobhán and the boys. Martin lies beyond reach. He is both guilty and conscious of his actions. He may not mean to murder but he still robbed Hiyam of her life. Capitalism doesn’t mean to tear the planet to ribbons. The destruction of life and the environment is an unfortunate byproduct. Following the same natural order that necessitates modern slavery, Martin will never see the inside of a jail cell. His steady cash flow tethers him positively to his offspring even after all he has done. Even after her confrontations with reality, Siobhán continues to accept his money. The entire planet will plunge into flames and every one of us will die before Martin’s air conditioned apartment will experience mild brownouts. Martin represents everything that happens in the shadows. Deep down, we all know that the deals that Martin makes keep the known world spinning on its axis. Deep down, we’re all varying shades of Siobhán. In a metaphorical sense, we all choose Martin. If ‘he’ were to stop, some of the global north’s luxury would cease to exist. Martin goes unprosecuted because to prosecute Martin would mean confronting our own culpability.

Nothing is real. Nothing is certain or eternal. As quick as all this has been created, like Sodom and Gommorah, it can come undone. As much as Emirati wealth can couch them in luxury, the bodies still pile up. Sometimes they find their own family members among the casualties. As the fire grows nearer, the smoke will engulf us all.

What a masterful first novel from Jamie O’Connell.

Manworshipping 101: Ferrante’s ‘difficult second album’

Posted on by minorhistory

In The Lying Life of Adults, a tween named Giovanna overhears her father commenting that she’s becoming like his sister Vittoria. This alone causes her teenage mind to gallop in all directions, turning in on itself, whipping up a flurry of binaries that she uses to parse the world around her. Giovanna’s catastrophising of her father’s words sets off what seems like the main course of the book and leads us to Aunt Vittoria.

When Giovanna meets Vittoria, she first learns about the presence of a bracelet, a woman’s bracelet Vittoria allegedly gifted to Giovanna as a child. Giovanna’s parents deny any knowledge of such a gift. Soon, we learn that the bracelet resided all this time on the wrist of Constanza, the wife of Giovanna’s father’s best friend, with whom he had been conducting an affair for over a decade. When the affair comes to light, the bracelet then moves onto the wrist of Giovanna, as she defines and redefines herself in the aftermath of her father moving in with Constanza and her mother becoming his widow despite the fact that her ex is alive and healthy in another household. Tension over the bracelet leads Giovanna to her first odorous sexual contact with a man, and eventually moves from her wrist to that of the daughter of aunt Vittoria’s lover, Giuliana, who reveals that the bracelet had been stolen by her father Enzo from the wrist of his dying mother in law, and gifted to aunt Vittoria’s healthy mother in order to charm her and make a good impression. The bracelet comes back to Giovanna when she travels to Milan under the pretence of retrieving it for Giuliana, all the while burning with desire to sleep with Giuliana’s fiance, Roberto, before changing her mind. Ultimately, she abandons the bracelet in the final stages of the novel, left beside the bed where she lost her virginity. I hope someone sanitised the bracelet on occasion.

Aunt Vittoria and her adopted family spark all the action in the story. Their dialect breathes life into the stagnant imaginations of the middle class teenage girls. The precarity of their lives, their vulnerability, overt sexuality, poverty and piety excite Giovanna and her friends. Through the characters she meets in Vomero, down there where her father escaped from, Giovanna finds the opportunity to sing along with the common people, to rebel against her parents, before a careful regression to the mean, to the sum of her parents’ parts.

The book cast me under its spell quite fast as I trotted through its pages, convinced that the teenage character would serve as a conduit of truths and revelations about the adults of the story. Then with the introduction of Giovanna’s fascination for Roberto, it seemed like Ferrante suddenly struck a bum note. The careful setup veered off course. Every character introduced before this fades out. Almost everything that led to this moment gave way and descended into half baked adolescent trivialities more suited to a volume of Twilight.

Misguidedly, I foresaw a story that would unfold through a teenage lens about the adults. I thought that through its oversimplified use of binaries, the young narrator would deconstruct the notions of the father figure, of the illusion of order and civility in middle class lives, and go on to expose the futility of trying to transcend human nature. To some extent the book achieves this. Giovanna’s father, despite pulling himself out of the margins and into a respectable middle class existence, finds himself conducting a long affair, the same behaviour he condemned his sister for. He breaks up his family, ultimately destabillising his daughter. His intellectual life seems to have been his defining characteristic as well as his disavowal of Catholicism, yet he seems bored among his peers and desperate to ingratiate himself with the young Catholic intellectual Roberto. Rather than focusing in any meaningful way, these parts of the story simmer dully in the background while the narrator bleats about Roberto, someone she saw give a talk once.

Vittoria seemed poised to play a larger role. She’s the firestarter, yet Ferrante allows her to slip quickly into obscurity. She remains a half-drawn character whose potential for apocalypse and revelation never quite made the mark.

The Lying Life of Adults chronicles the teenage experience of total plasticity. We know next to nothing about Giovanna other than who she becomes from one moment to the next as she accepts and rejects new idols. The drama opens with her feeling ugly and rejected by her father. This causes her to seek out Vittoria and ultimately come under the influence of young men out to sexually exploit her. She teeters close to the edge of satisfying them on their own terms. Then, she falls under the influence of Roberto the fiancee of Giuliana, who calls her beautiful, and changes once again to become someone interesting to him. Towards the end of the book she meets Ida, the younger sister of Angela, with the two of whom she had spent her childhood, until her father and their mother were revealed as lovers, which fractured their friendship for a time. The book ends with her mirroring the actions of Ida, another random turn of events. If Ferrante intended to demonstrate the fickle nature of young women, the fact that all men are on the take, and the only real sensuality can be found in moments of experimentation among women, then she succeeded.

Ultimately, everyone who reads this book is looking for a repeat of The Neopolitan Quartet. Every review is a comparison of this new work and The Neopolitan Quartet. Every review I’ve read of The Lying Life of Adults is either an opinion piece on The Neopolitan Quartet or a discussion of Ferrante’s anonymity. It’s hard to judge The Lying Life of Adults with a clear head.

In Ferrante’s collection of essays and letters, Frantumaglia, which is one of the best books I’ve read in years, she mentions that she doesn’t publish unless she’s personally interested in the project. She has many book-length manuscripts stuffed in drawers that failed to meet her expectations. Either she tried too hard and it doesn’t feel natural, or she simply couldn’t make it work. The fact that The Lying Life of Adults is published means she saw something in it that she deemed worthy to release to the world. I wish I saw it too.

Lesbians in the Fairyfort: Strange Flowers

Posted on by minorhistory

In Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Strange Flowers, a twenty year old Moll Gladney, the only daughter of impoverished parents living at the mercy of Castle Catholics in North Tipperary, goes missing. Five years later, she returns with a black British husband and their white baby. You read on for another hundred pages until you learn that Moll went missing because she’d gotten an intercaste kiss off the Castle Catholic wife, Ellen Jackman. C’est ci.

Most people I know who read, are reading Donal Ryan. RTE declares that with Strange Flowers, “Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland’s greatest wordsmiths”. The Irish Independent describes it as “an expansive and thought provoking parable”. In an interview with The Irish Times, Ryan mentions that he “casts no shade”, aka, makes no negative comments in public about other writers, and taking its cue from him, The Irish Times refrains from evaluating his latest work. Friends have said to me that in Ireland – where so much depends on your network, who your parents are, and whether or not you are alumni of one or two universities – no one writes negative reviews. No published writer gets a roasting in a broadsheet or by the national broadcaster. A former colleague of mine, someone’s son and a Trinity graduate, confessed to me that he did not have the courage to write a negative review even of mainstream American bands for a local paper. Across the Irish Sea, after lavishing Strange Flowers with praise, The Guardian goes as far as to admit “Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book”.

The first Donal Ryan novel I attempted to read was From a Low and Quiet Sea. I opened the book at the boarding gate in Vienna Airport and drank from its pages until they called my flight. On a sentence level, Ryan demonstrates pure mastery. He is the foremost contemporary writer of the Hiberno-English sentence. His words flow in a natural North Munster vernacular. The levity of his writing zeros out the length of his sentences as he carries you through page after page at great speeds. In Vienna, by the time they called my flight, I had almost made it to the end. However, once I boarded the flight, I forgot all about it and never opened the book again. Despite not having made it through From a Low and Quiet Sea, I continued to read Ryan’s books because everyone who reads seems to be reading Ryan. And here I am, bewildered and reluctant to express what I think about this book because in Ireland no one takes such risks, do they?

Was it through this same lack of courage that Ryan arrived at the careful plot of Strange Flowers? His sentences meander through themes of interracial relationships and lesbianism but he seals them within the safety of a 1970s time capsule. The main characters, who subsist on the good graces of their wealthy landlord, never question their lot in life. When their mind wanders, it waxes lyrical about the beauty of the North Tipperary countryside, never to fantasies of seizing the means of production. Ryan grazes on themes of inequality, class, and race but never bites.

Because of the black characters, the publishers went as far as to hire a sensitivity reader who flagged and removed some issues from the manuscript. Despite this extreme caution, if Strange Flowers had been the work of a white US or British male writer, its flatness would have courted controversy. The portrayal of the black experience in Strange Flowers reads like a caricature of a Zadie Smith novel crossed with the British soap Eastenders. While Ryan does orbit the issue of black fragility, his continued reticence leaves the text both ignorant and ineffective. The black characters seem too hot to handle in any meaningful or insightful way to the extent that if there had been no blackness in this novel at all, would anything have changed?

In lieu of the roast of Strange Flowers I feel bubbling within me, I offer the Internet a few key insights into Irish life as gleaned from its pages:

  • The Gardai remain invisible in cases of sexual harassment, attempted murder, or rape. They materialise only if a black man comes to town, if a teenager has a tiny quantity of hash, or if the person who killed the one black man in town needs consoling.
  • Sexual intercourse occurs indoors only in London. In Ireland, sensuality remains restricted to the riverbanks and the Fairyforts.
  • The Castle Catholics, the 1% whose expansive inherited wealth means they determine the fate of those around them, are the only people who dwell on and lament the loss of even vaster fortunes they once held.
  • A shift between two Irish women lasts a lifetime.


Sunny on the inside: David Hockney A Life

Posted on by minorhistory

David Hockney A Life arrived on a rainy November afternoon. Its bright yellow cover with pink and blue circles contrasted everything about the dreary season in which it landed. Some book covers exude a strength, a confidence that announces the book before a single page is turned. More often than not, a front is nothing but, well, a front. However, the energy in Cusset’s portrait of Hockney, in his white suit and bleached hair, matches the strength and simplicity of the cover. Although this work is based on the life of David Hockney, Cusset assures us that this is a novelistic account where she has unified and threaded his life story with artistic license.

David Hockney’s talents unshackle him from his happy yet humble Bradford origins. As a young artist with a strong internal compass, he decides to paint only what matters to him. His artistic life follows a linear trajectory that doesn’t bow to the tastes of the modern art theorists or critics, and leads him to fame and fortune, a fairy-tale life to anyone on the outside looking in. If this was a work of pure fiction, would anyone believe that the life of a young, working-class artist from northern England could have progressed with such ease?

Hockney’s life marches along in a steady progression. Cusset doesn’t loop back; no elements of his childhood or adolescence return to haunt him as an adult. A close friend, Ann, describes Hockney as an island, a self-winding clock. David, however, doesn’t consider himself a self-winding clock; he needs to be surrounded by friends, who like many in the gay community, become his family. The character of Hockney as portrayed by Cusset, through his steady stream of successes, lovers, old and new friends, his migrations to and from California, his switching through different mediums and perspectives, suggests that he’s probably as close as a human can come to being a self-winding clock.

Although he laughs off critics and pins their work to his wall in defiance, their words sink to his bedrock. On weak moments, their opinions threaten to become gospel. Luckily, this never seems to last long. Nights spent lying awake in this story are few and far between. With the constant houseguests and dinner parties, drink and drugs, a traditional night’s sleep is not something that appears as a feature of the book until much later in his life, after he has suffered his second stroke. Very little of this story lies in wait for anything.

Towards the end of the book, David’s beloved sister says that she thinks the space around us is God. There is a godliness in the space this small book allows for the preservation of Hockney’s dignity. Despite narrating some of the most harrowing experiences in Hockney’s life: the loss of all his close friends to AIDS or pancreatic cancer, the loss of his parents, and the loss of his hearing, at his lowest moments, Hockney’s story keeps ploughing ahead. With a change of scene, a change of tools, an embrace of technology, a return to his canvas, he continues to find the beauty in his surroundings, whether it’s a billboard in Los Angeles or a hawthorn bloom in Yorkshire. Despite the fact that there are intimate details in the book such as his loss of erectile function as he progresses into his seventies, or how much he suffered when his first and probably greatest love, Peter, breaks off their relationship, Cusset writes scenes as if she’s working with watercolours. She gives, what seems like equal treatment to all parts of his life.

Hockney lives a charmed life. Despite all the odds, he emerged out of nowhere Bradford to become a prominent figure in the global art world. Despite living through the AIDs epidemic, losing many around him, he remained unscathed. Although his health has plagued him at times, he has recovered. Despite his deafness and progressing age, he continues to see the world anew.

This swift, bright, active text, is a winter tonic. David Hockney A Life, written by Catherine Cusset, is the literary equivalent to a Hockney painting.

Milk Drunk: A Ghost in the Throat

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In a short space of time, Tramp Press established itself as a publisher of books that capture the modern Irish experience. Over the last few years, its publication of both fiction and non fiction, such as Solar Bones, Notes to Self, and Handiwork, has raised the bar so high that I’ll gamble on reading anything Tramp Press puts out regardless of subject. For me, reading, A Ghost In The Throat was one of these gambles. If A Ghost In The Throat had not been published by Tramp Press, I’m not sure I would have read it.

Without knowing the first thing about Doireann Ní Ghríofa, the subject of this book would have been enough to dissuade me from reading it. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose keening I was unfamiliar with, lived in a period of Irish history that I find unbearable to read about. I struggle to read accounts of both early Irish civilisation and Ireland under British rule. I have vivid memories of the despair I felt sitting in the library pouring over a battered copy of Maire and Liam de Paor’s Early Christian Ireland among other books that were prescribed reading in first year of university. I avoid reading books about early Ireland because it saddens me to read of a culture that didn’t survive. I avoid reading books about Ireland under British rule because I don’t enjoy reading the mechanics of how the culture didn’t survive. Ní Ghríofa’s work explores the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose husband Airt Uí Laoghaire was gunned down by British soldiers in 1773 in rural Cork. The historical timeline, setting, and backdrop are all laced with a politics that I avoid in my leisurely reading. However, Ní Ghríofa has managed to deliver a text so maternal that it shields the reader from the politics of the era. She has wrapped her words in a warmth that is uniquely feminine. At the beginning of the book, Ní Ghríofa asserts that this is a female text, and she does not exaggerate. This is a female text that is swimming with the deranged and milk-drunk optimism of mothers who continue their daily tasks regardless of the era and crises that erupt in the outer world.

Some people whether real, fictional, or historical, stay with us for a lifetime. Regardless of whether we knew them or ever met them, we encounter them and elevate them to an eternal pedestal. There’s a window of time in which this is more likely to happen. As children, with one foot still in the dreamworld, we’re too removed to form this kind of connection. As adults, we’re too busy or broken, too cynical or distracted. During those tender years between childhood and adulthood, in a haze of hormones, we run a high risk of imprinting upon someone and carrying them around in our heads for the rest of our lives. Ní Ghríofa encounters Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill at three stages of her life. As a child, her first reading of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire fails to leave a dent. As a teenager, she identifies with the pain of lost love in the way only teenagers can. As an adult, forced to leave Cork city as the rental crisis made life there unsustainable for her and her young family, Ní Ghríofa drove through the unfamiliar countryside that was now her home and realised she was living close to where Ní Chonaill spent her married life. Somewhere between her third and fourth child, between the school runs and the household tasks, Ní Ghríofa found herself compelled to attempt a narrative of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. She found herself haunted by and haunting Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. In trying to shed light on the life of a female poet in 18th century Ireland, Ní Ghríofa sheds light on the life of a female poet in 21st century Ireland. In painting a portrait of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa paints a portrait of herself.

A Ghost in the Throat is a series of parallels, of cycles, of paying it forward in words, deeds, breast milk, and pony tails. While Ní Ghríofa searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we travel with her between Muskerry and Derrynane, between her and Ní Chonaill’s own rebellions and lust.

The lives and deeds of Irish women are as poorly recorded and appreciated as any. Although Ní Ghríofa leaves no stone unturned in her pursuit of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, we only have of Ní Chonaill what Ní Chonaill willingly gave. Very little else remains of her: no artefacts or accounts of her life outside of her keening. While she searches for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa cherry-picks intimate moments from her life that reveal her own sexuality, sorrow, lust for life, and a maternal instinct that threatens to envelop everyone in its path. This account of her own life is probably the account she would have loved to read about Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Despite the fact that we now live in the year 2020, the revealing nature of A Ghost In The Throat is still a brave act. In a country with a small population, often with one or two degrees of separation between people, texts this intimate are few and far between.

If I hadn’t read this book, I would have missed out. Ní Ghríofa created a work so powerful that I can imagine some future youth, tender in age, imprinting onto Ní Ghríofa, elevating her to a pedestal, and in mining Ní Ghríofa’s life, discovering herself.