Review by New York Times Review
THE TITLE STORY of Kevin Barry's new collection records the thoughts of a teenage girl struggling against the urge to cut herself. Instead of working or traveling, as most Irish kids do on their "gap year" before college, Sara holes up alone in a country house built by her father, "a radical architect who had reinterrogated the concept of walls." His cool-father texts are unhelpful, as is the fact that he pointedly left the designer knives in their block in the kitchen space. Sara is one of the few privileged characters in the book. Despite the scars down her wrists and thighs, she is also one of the most reasonable. Most characters are marginal in some way: Goths, squatters, alcoholic country doctors, drag queen meth cooks. The women tend to be young, defensive and thinned by chemical habits. The men tend to be rabid with sexual frustration. Everyone is drinking too much lager and cooking up pots of "curried veg." Many stories take place in the Irish equivalent of trailer parks, or in working-class areas of Liverpool or Berlin. Barry's flamboyant first novel, "City of Bohane," chronicles a feud between nattily dressed fast-talking ganglords and gang-ladies in the dystopian near future. This collection is subtler, more poetic and more disturbing. It reveals the menace of everyday life. There is a mentally impaired man who walks into a remake of James Joyce's "Encounter." There is a pair of elderly women on a horrifying mission in north County Sligo. There is a noisy ale-club train outing to Wales. ("There are those who'd call us a bunch of sots but we don't see ourselves like that. We see ourselves as hobbyists.") We meet a young father on the run. ("Things had gone wrong in Cork and then they went wronger again. I had been involved with bringing some of the brown crack in that was said to be causing people to have strokes and was said to have caused the end altogether of a prostitute lad on Douglas Street.") We meet a homesick Irish I.T. worker in East London. ("He walked the evil local park on Saturday afternoon. The dads coddled their pitbulls and kicked balls at shaven-headed children. The light was giving up by four.") We meet a family-minded criminal. ("The daft child had a black-moon look about the eyes and Patrick reckoned if the Teedge wasn't held safe behind bars, he was going to be toes up on a slab with the hair parted wrong. So he turned his own brother in and that felt so like it was off a film he almost heard the music strike up on the soundtrack.") Only a few characters fail to convince, including a young arrival to Berlin in thrall to clichés and to a lesbian named Silvija. Generally, by the end of a story, Barry has me in full sympathy with someone I might edge away from on the train. His regard for characters big and small and capacity to be funny without playing them for cheap laughs recalls George Saunders. At McSorley's recently I happened to meet a fellow reader, a schoolteacher from County Mayo. He pronounced Barry "brilliant," but worried we Americans might lose our way among the slang and regionalisms. I did run into difficulty, despite time spent in Ireland, but nothing some amusing Google searches couldn't fix. It doesn't get more obscure than this: '"You'd want a good class of a pelt on you,' he said to the girl at the till. 'Brass monkeys weather.'" Or: "Of course the buck in the kiosk at the clampers had a face on him like a dose of cancer." For Barry's characters, language is a struggle and a hobby and an art. In the book's best story, a blocked poet buys a hotel in stormy Killary where he pulls pints and eavesdrops, hoping to pick up some local color. "My first weeks out at the Water's Edge I had kept a surreptitious notebook under the bar. The likes of 'thrun down' would get a delighted entry. I would guess at the likely etymology - from 'thrown down,' as in 'laid low'? But I had quickly had my fill of these maudlin bastards." A few hours later, the ocean breaches the sea wall and the poet hands out free drinks as the inn floods and waters rise. RACHEL NOLAN has written for The Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Bookforum and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Young as he is, Barry is already pushing a wheelbarrow of prizes stacked high with expectations. His first novel, City of Bohane (2012), received rapturous reviews and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has also been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2011 Author's Club Best First Novel Award, and a story from this collection won the Sunday Times Short Story Award. As the title suggests, the stories are full of starry skies and scarred and scary types. Barry's tales feature bogs and dogs, booze and lager, drugs and suffering. One character remarks, I was finding out how carelessly life might be lived. Several of the denizens of this dark Ireland live very carelessly indeed, as do those in exile in England. The writing is spectacular, alternately stately and hurried, occasionally clipped but never languid, steeped in the vernacular but never lacking precision, and very often pulsing with the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Smashing, compulsively readable stuff: Barry will be a household name, and soon.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
There are a lot of pleasures to be had in Barry's second short story collection. First, there's his way with language-a bent form of Irish that makes the most mundane exchange, like those of the mileage-obsessed locals at the hotel bar in "Fjord of Killary," somehow hilarious. Then there's the pleasure of safely spending time in the company of people you might well cross the street to avoid, like the Mullaney brothers in "White Hitatchi," who are well-known to the local constabulary, or the law-abiding but big, sweaty, and, as their beer-tasting excursion extends, presumably loud, friends of "Beer Trip to Llandudno." Whether they did well in the high-flying Celtic Tiger years, or, more likely, missed out entirely, whether in Ireland or part of the vast Irish diaspora, Barry's characters tend to be aware of both the exact alcohol content of their chosen beverages and the likelihood that the road they're on isn't leading anywhere good. Though "Dark Lies the Island"-one of the few stories told from a female point of view-isn't the collection's strongest, it does offer the perfect title overall: the island and its inhabitants aren't doing well, and Barry is a master at showing both the darkness and the piercing moments of humor and self-knowledge that now and then penetrate it. (Sept. 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Barry offers a second story collection that offers all the best qualities of his IMPAC award-winning debut novel, City of Bohane-the dark humor, apt characterization, and sharply condensed emotion, so well contained by the beautiful sentences. Some of the stories artfully offer whole communities. In "Fjord of Killary," for instance, a narrator full of romantic idealism and the desire to remake himself has bought an old hotel in the wet west of Ireland and now finds that he despises the very rag with which he mops the bar. He senses that he's despised in turn by the crusty, exasperating locals, who think he acts superior. But during a particularly bad storm, as the water rises dangerously, the regulars in the bar explode into a round of dancing, and the whole story captures the darkness and exuberance of the Irish spirit. Other stories are fine portraits, as in "Across the Rooftops," which tenderly depicts a shy young man attempting a first kiss. VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of short stories, Irish literature, and good reading generally.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In his latest, Irish author Barry (City of Bohane, 2011, etc.) offers 10 pieces of literary fiction. A postmodern lens reflects youthful ineptness in "Across the Rooftops." In "Wifey Redux," perhaps the collection's best story, Saoirse, "blonde and wispily slight with a delicate, bone-china complexion," marries, births Ellie and turns to Pinot Grigio, while her dutiful husband becomes consumed by their daughter's beauty and her sex-obsessed suitors. A blocked poet turned innkeeper herds horny Belarus staff and droning, alcoholic locals in "Fjord of Killary" until, epiphany-flooded, "I felt a new, quiet ecstasy take hold. The gloom of youth had at last lifted." In "A Cruelty," a boy/man/child, autistic perhaps, time-obsessed, fixated on lunch-pack Chocolate Goldgrains, is accosted by a bully, perhaps a rapist, certainly "hyena," his safely circumscribed world forever fractured. Later, a sad group of ale fanciers makes a humorous and melancholy "Beer Trip to Llandudno." Irish lyricism shines throughout the collection. "Ernestine and Kit" opens so--"the world was fat on the blood of summer"--but relates a tale as black as a witch's heart. A kitchen steward, "black mass of backcombed hair and a graveyard pallor," fumbles into a double-dealing bombing plot in "The Mainland Campaign." A broken lover laments in "Wistful England," and Jameson whiskeyloving "Doctor Sot" finds drunken perceptions reflected by psychotic Mag, a traveler. An on-the-run drug dealer confronts the devil, twisted overseer of two sisters, eight wild children and chained feral dogs in "The Girls and the Dogs." A rattletrap "White Hitachi" van is home to Patrick, incompetent thief, intent upon saving his brother from "Castlerea prison, or the secure ward at the madhouse (many a Mullaney had bothered the same walls)." The title story is penultimate, a young artist, a cutter, from a fractured family seeks west Ireland solace. "Berlin Arkonaplatz--My Lesbian Summer" concludes the collection, Irish writer Patrick entrapped and enlightened by bohemian Silvija, "beautiful, foul-mouthed and inviolate." Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Barry writes stories that are character-driven, archetypical yet magnetic, pushing toward realism's edge where genre becomes irrelevant.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
