Meets 6:30 pm at the Irish Center.
Book List:
Apr 27: Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor
May 25: John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
Dear readers,
In a New York Times review of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, James Kincaid wrote, “This is a brave and artful novel disguised to appear safe and conventional. One can read on for some time as if it were simply a ‘terror stalks the high seas’ thriller, but one would be an uncommon fool to do so for very long.” The book is enjoyable, but Kincaid wants to be sure the readers get everything they paid for by noticing all the social history that’s packed onto that famine ship, too.
O’Connor, who is one of Ireland’s bestselling contemporary authors, has a poem on his website titled A Blackbird in Dun Loaghaire. The image of a blackbird in the treetops of Ireland reminds me of several of the books we’ve read this year, but I think the mood of this poem is also a good introduction to our May book, John the Revelator by Peter Murphy. Murphy calls it a “blues noir,” incorporating inspiration from American blues and film noir. (Here’s a recording of Blind Willie Johnson singing “John the Revelator.”)
We’ll meet to discuss Star of the Sea next Tuesday, April 27, and to discuss John the Revelator on Tuesday, May 25. Both will be at 6:30 p.m. at the IMCC in Union Station.
May the Star of the Sea guide us,
Catherine Eilers
Dear Readers,
Last month we read The Burning of Bridget Cleary, in which the author, Angela Bourke, pointed out that the landless rural laborers of Bridget Cleary’s time–she died in 1895–were among the poorest of the poor, the people Irish history has ignored. This month in the novel A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle, we pick up among their urban counterparts in the Dublin slums a few years later, with the birth of the charismatic Henry Smart in approximately 1902. A prodigy, he eventually finds himself fighting in the Revolution, though while his superiors talk about fighting for Ireland, Henry always fights first for his own survival.
We’ll meet to discuss A Star Called Henry at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 30, at the IMCC in Union Station. Those of you who have finished the book might be interested in the sequel, Oh, Play That Thing! Recordings of Roddy Doyle reading excerpts at the 2004 Chicago Humanities Festival are available at the Festival’s website.* Click “Launch media” (below the picture) to get to the recordings. Doyle’s third and final book about Henry Smart, The Dead Republic, is scheduled to be published on April 29!
Looking ahead, in April we’ll be reading another historical novel, but this one from an earlier time: Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, a murder mystery set in 1847 on a famine ship.
May you all receive gold stars in reading,
Catherine Eilers
*If the link doesn’t work, copy and paste this address into your browser: http://www.chicagohumanities.org/en/Genres/Literature/Roddy-Doyle-oh-Play-That-Thing.aspx.
Dear Readers,
About ten years ago, I spent a summer working as a legal advocate for domestic violence victims. I sat in a judge’s chambers and listened to a man tell the judge that his and his wife’s marital problems (which had primarily been in the form of her getting beaten up by him) had been caused by their house: it was a bad luck charm. Now that they were selling it, he saw smooth sailing ahead. The judge wasn’t buying it, but the man’s wife chose to, and the judge finally had to honor her request to drop her order of protection.
Another man told my coworker and I, as we were leaving a courtroom, that we were Cadaver People. He explained that he called us that because we killed marriages. Again, he chose to see evil in an outside force haunting him, rather than to believe that his wife had decided to divorce him because he kept hitting her.
My own opinion is that these men were self-delusional, but on the other hand I truly believe that their wives could vouch for the reality of living with capricious forces that could harm or even kill them.
This month, we’re reading The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke, a non-fiction book about a woman who, in 1895, became very sick and almost dying. She was treated by a medical doctor, a priest, and a fairy doctor who prescribed herbs. The fairy doctor had been consulted under suspicion that Bridget had been taken by the fairies and replaced with a changeling. Part of the treatment involved scaring the fairy away with fire, but Bridget’s part in her own story ended with her being burned to death by her husband. In relating the case, Bourke explores not just the recorded facts, but the background of fairy legends and the changing world of Ireland at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.
We’ll meet to discuss The Burning of Bridget Cleary on Tuesday, February 23rd, at 6:30 p.m. at the IMCC (in Union Station). Did Mr. Cleary really believe his wife was changeling? Was he confounded by her worldly ways? Did he just seize a good opportunity to kill her? Was it all an accident? Bring your theories!
Looking ahead, for March we’ll be reading A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. A historical novel set during the Irish Revolution (1912-1923), it has everything–humor, sadness, politics, and yes, some sex and violence. (Not so much on the rock-and-roll, but the second book in the trilogy this one starts does feature jazz.) And all of it centers on a charming boy named Henry.
Be careful out there,
Catherine Eilers
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Dear readers,
It’s four degrees outside, my front walk has drifted over yet again, and my native Midwestern landscape is on my bad side. Let’s think about Ireland! This month we’re reading Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney’s translation of the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne (Mad Sweeney).
Cursed by a saint, the king Sweeney goes mad and leaps and flies across the Irish wilderness, living on water and watercress and praising the landscape around him. While the poem has a bit of a plot–Sweeney’s former acquaintances try to entice him back home, he reconnects briefly with his wife, and he finds himself doomed by the consequences of a contest with a strange woman who has a similar supernatural ability to leap great distances–but for the most part it lacks the cohesiveness we would expect from a more modern work. Yet Sweeney has important place in folklore and literature and, more than that, the book includes some beautiful poetry, which is brought out more in Heaney’s translation than in the earlier English translation by J.G. O’Keefe, on which he based it. For example, where O’Keefe writes,
O apple tree, little apple-tree,
much art thou shaken;
O quicken, little berried one,
delightful is thy bloom,
Heaney finds instead,
Low-set clumps of apple trees
drum down fruit when shaken;
scarlet berries clot like blood
on mountain rowan.
Sweeney Astray was also published in an edition called Sweeney’s Flight, in which Heaney crafted parts of the larger narrative into individual poems and juxtaposed them with photographs by Rachel Giese (now Rachel Brown). The photographs–but not the text–can be seen here on her website.*
We’ll meet to discuss Sweeney Astray on Tuesday, January 26, at 6:30 pm. at the IMCC in Union Station.
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Looking ahead, in February our book will be The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke, a nonfiction account of a woman suspected of being a witch and then killed for it in rural Tipperary in 1895. Check out this New York Times review** of the book alongside another also written about Mrs. Cleary.
Stay warm!
Catherine Eilers
*If the link doesn’t work, please cut and paste: http://www.rachelbrownphoto.com/html/Sweeney.html.
**This link: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/08/reviews/001008.08mccollt.html.
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Dear readers,
Our book for this month is French’s first novel, In the Woods. In it, our narrator Detective Rob Ryan and his partner Detective Cassie Maddox are investigating what happened to a 12-year-old girl found murdered on the site of an archaeological dig. This case is special because Rob grew up in this place, and when he was 12, he and two of his friends were in those woods when his friends disappeared. They have never been found.
With no strong leads, the detectives find themselves examining every angle they can think of, and French pulls their world close in about them with thick-woven allusions to literature, popular culture, and Dublin life. Figuratively speaking, they are lost in the woods. Are they walking in circles? As the plot gets more and more complicated, the reader knows that more is going on in this book than a simple whodunit.
We’ll meet to discuss In the Woods at the Irish Museum and Cultural Center in Union Station at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1st. Note that we’re adjusting for Thanksgiving and Christmas by meeting once the first week of December, rather the last weeks of November and December in the usual pattern.
Mysteriously,
Catherine Eilers
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Looking ahead: For January 26, we’ll read Sweeney Astray, Nobel-prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Irish poem Buile Shuibhne. Heaney’s translation is also combined with photographs by Rachel Giese in an edition titled Sweeney’s Flight.
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Dear Readers,
The nights are getting colder and the leaves are beginning to fall. But while the wind howls outside, stay cozy inside and let the chills come from your reading!
Our book for the Leabhar Power book club this month is Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (ISBN 0-486-27795-X). We’ll be meeting to talk about it at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 27. We have a conflict with another event at the IMCC, so watch for an announcement about where we’ll be meeting–possibly it will be elsewhere in Union Station.
Dublin journalist J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) is today best remembered for his short stories and novels of suspense set in Ireland and England. His vampire story “Carmilla” was an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published a quarter-century later, but although Le Fanu’s writings are over 150 years old, few other writers have matched his skill at the Gothic.
Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories collects four short stories: “Green Tea,” “Squire Toby’s Will,” “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh,” and “Sir Dominick’s Bargain.” The last story begins,
In the early autumn of the year 1838, business called me to the south of Ireland. The weather was delightful, the scenery and people were new to me, and sending my luggage on by the mail-coach route in charge of a servant, I hired a serviceable nag at a posting-house, and full of the curiosity of an explorer, I commenced a leisurely journey of five-and-twenty miles on horseback, by sequestered cross-roads, to my place of destination. By bog and hill, by plain and ruined castle, and many a winding stream, my picturesque road led me.
Of course, as our narrator approaches a ruined mansion, the shadows begin to lengthen…
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Looking ahead, because Thanksgiving and Christmas will be drawing our attention a bit too much for our usual pattern of meeting the last Tuesday of the month, we’ll be combining November and December into one and meeting Tuesday, December 1 to discuss In the Woods by Tana French. Tana French had an international childhood, growing up in Ireland, Italy, the U.S. and Malawi, and she has lived in Dublin since 1990. In the Woods, a mystery novel, won several prizes, including the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. For a preview, check out this short video interview at YouTube.*
Happy tales!
Catherine Eilers
*If the link is not working, copy and paste the following URL into your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkqYAvG2GgQ.
