I have been doing this for a few entries, but I want to start addressing, other than poetry, a newish addition to this blog is the text testimonials. I enjoy reading and hope that you do too, and if you are in need of a book recommendation view the label- Text Testimonials. For now its safe to say a genre of the books are contemporary irish fiction and please please share any good books you have been reading!
Fishing The Sloe-Black Rover- Colum McCann
Sisters
“My promiscuity was my autograph. I was hourglassy, had turf-coloured hair and eyes green as wine bottles. Someone once bought me an ice cream in Achill Island, then we chipped some amethyst out of the rockbanks, and climbed the radio tower, then woke up, later, at the edge of a cliff, with the waves lashing in from the Atlantic. The next day my father, at the dinner table, told us that John F. Kennedy had landed a man on the moon. It was a shame, he said, looking at me, that it had turned out to be a heap of ash…He told me once that he had overhead a man at his printing shop call me ‘a wee whore’ and I heard him weeping as I tuned in Radio Luxembourg in my room."
"My older sister, Bridgid, succeeded with a spectacular anorexia. After classes she would sidle off into the bog, to a large rock where nobody could see her, her school sandwiches in her pocket, her Bible in her hand. There she would perch like a raked robin, and bit by bit she would tear up the bread, like a sacrament, and throw it all around her… I sometimes watched her from a distance. She was a house of bones, my sister, throwing her bread away. Once, out on the rock, I saw her take my father’s pliers to her fingers and slowly pluck out the nail from her middle finger of her left hand. She did it because she had heard that it was what the Cromwellians had done to the harpists in the seventeenth century, so they could no longer plug the cat-gut to make music. She wanted to know how it felt. Her finger bled for days. She told our father that she had caught her hand in a school door. He stayed unaware of Briged’s condition, still caught in the oblivion caused, many years before, by the death of our mother—lifted from a cliff by a light wind while out strolling. Since that day Brigid had lived a strange sort of martyrdom. People loved her frail whiteness, but never really knew what was going on under all those sweaters. I envied her that unused body that needed so little, yet I also loved her with a bitterness that only sisters can have. "
This is how the book begins, if its enough to catch you for the second page pick it up! The book is chaptered by different short stories, all fabulous. If you have an text testimonials, please share!!!
on a secret insight to one of my deep desires- sometimes I wish my contemporary irish fiction professor would read to me in St. Stephan's Green- he has such an wonderful voice makes any text have a simple elegant rhythm- but for now I just have my horrible attempt of an irish accent to listen to (only in my bedroom)!!
