The Lesser Bohemians

Surprisingly, after the first few pages I didn't feel the need to try and parse this book.  The language is a medley of cliche and very short metaphor.  It was bewildering, but after a while the words just flowed (just needed to change my mind set, and when I did it was magic, like I had learned a new, lyrical language).   Of course, it doesn't hurt to have some Joyce and Beckett under your belt before you begin, and urbandictionary.com handy  to help with some of the vernacular.

“Daub my soul with a good few pints til my mouth swings wide with unutterable shite. Laughing lots too, like it’s true. Worldening maybe, I think. I hope.” 

The Lesser Bohemians is the first of it's kind that I have ever read, and I was enraptured with the brilliance of this novel, it's bare and vulnerable style of storytelling (that wielded a powerful wallop that just stays with you).    It wasn't for the faint at heart.

There was lots to wince at, loads of sex, minute details I could really have done without, but like with What Belongs To You, there is a purpose to it.  I really didn't want to like or care about these characters (who I will call the lovers), but I just couldn't help be pulled in to their story, raw and brutal as it was.  Two stories pulled together into a very rocky intimacy as the lovers find their way (kicking and screaming most of the time) towards something that unites them.  As Michael Chabon put it;

"Beautiful, harrowing, and ultimately rewarding the way only a brilliant work of literature can be."

This is a book that I would really like to listen to.  Actually I would be really keen to see it as a performance piece, get a young Irish woman (just like in the book) reading it aloud... now that would be absolutely enthralling!

Up Next:  The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan  (about horse racing UGH, not my favourite topic AT ALL).

A Country Road, A Tree

                                              
Now here we go with coincidences again.   I couldn't have lined it up more perfectly if I had done it on purpose.  As I have written previously, I have just this year read Ulysses by James Joyce, what I haven't talked about yet is that just this March I found a good copy of Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett at the used book store I visited during Spring Break.  This I have also read quite recently.  Now my next coincidence is the book A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker, the next book on my list of James Tait Black nominees to read.

This book was wonderful!  I have been developing a fondness for historical fiction, since I have been reading some very good ones, All That I Am, To Say Nothing of the Dog and The German Girl  just to name a few.  I did read Baker's Longbourn last year, and enjoyed that.    But this one I really enjoyed.

It is a fictional account of Beckett's life just before and during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany.  History can be dry and somewhat uninformative of those things that I am interested in the most (the human side of it, thoughts, feelings and motives), which is why I was enthralled with the television drama To Walk Invisible, and A Country Road, A Tree is just as interesting and exciting.  There is some name dropping throughout the book, including James Joyce who did live in Paris at the time.  Having only read the one play by Beckett, I found myself wanting to read the rest of his works, especially when I reached the part in the novel that was a direct reference to Godot (just imagine what it would have been like if I could have read more of his works before starting this book...my head might have exploded!).

  So, in my usual book-geeky way I will come back to this book again sometime after I have read all of Beckett's works, and a biography or two.  I love it when a book just inspires you to carry on and read some more (of the author's work and of the subject's).

Next on my list: The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride (and I already have a pretty good idea about the title of that blog entry... something along the lines of What is it with these Irish writers?).

Ulysses

I place Ulysses by James Joyce in the category of really hard books to read so I have some tips on how you can read it.
I stopped and started this book a lot until I understood that there were no quotation marks and just a hyphen to mark when a speech begins.  But even that breakthrough didn't help a lot with the reading of my book.  So I decided to try listening to it instead.  My first attempt did not go very well, and I found that I needed to read along with the recording because some things weren't very clear.  That is when I put it aside for a while.  It was not until I found what I think is the perfect recording of Ulysses that I gave it another go and I will tell you why this version was of so much use to me... it was a full cast of Irish actors who did the job!  With different voices helping to differentiate lines and a copy of the book as well, I was able to successfully read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses! 

Once my technical issues were dealt away with I was able to focus on what the book was about.
In a nutshell, it is basically an account of Leopold Bloom as he lives through a twenty four hour period in Dublin.  Stephen Dedalus who I am already familiar with from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a secondary character (but more prominent than the rest).

What is also to be understood about Ulysses is that it is meant to be an odyssey of the mind (many passages being the stream-of-consciousness of not only Dedalus and Bloom but other lesser characters).  Listening and reading at the same time really helped to keep track of these switches from dialogue to what I can only describe as musings.  The episodes are named after characters from Homer's Odyssey (though the content of each section is only vaguely parallel to each other).   It was fun to spot the connections!  What I wasn't too keen on is the idea that Stephen was meant to be Telemachus and Bloom was Odysseus (ugh!).  While fascinated with these connections and what Joyce did with these characters I am still the purist when it comes to the Odyssey and I didn't like either Dedalus or Bloom at all to be connected with some of my favourites.
However, it was an odyssey-like experience reading this book, and I can safely say that I will attempt it again at a later date to see what else I can see (or what I had missed) in a second reading.  Listening and reading felt a lot like binge-watching a show, I was exhausted after each episode. It wasn't an easy, comfortable read, but I am glad I made the attempt.

Castle Rackrent

                  
I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did.  I even downloaded it at work so that I could read it on my lunch break.  I love these female authors who were brave enough to write their stories in the eighteen hundreds, and I am grateful that they did (Edgeworth is up there with the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen).  I look forward to reading some more of what this particular author wrote, and I should mention that it is a requisite to read it (in your mind of course) with an Irish accent.