November 15, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

How To Build A Boat by Elaine Feeney

How To Build a Boat is a contemporary Irish novel that deals with people in a community navigating lives complicated by things that have happened or are happening to them, in this case a 13 year old boy Jamie is starting high school and it’s clear he is being singled out by some of the mean boys (and not for his height or bright red hair).

Irish Literature literary fiction Booker Prize longlist 2023

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2023, both of which announce winners in late November.

In a way it reminded me of Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, in the sense that it relates to the power of connections in the community, the unexpected and the previously unknown, that can help pave the way towards healing and the passing through of the tumultuous hallways of grief.

Old God’s Time is more introspective and focused on a single character, while How To Build a Boat gives equal weight to a number of characters, there is more dialogue and a greater sense of place, of the physical environment and dwelling places of its inhabitants.

How can I miss someone I have never met? Jamie said.
Grief was profoundly different for both humans. One felt an intense anger he had never recovered from, the other knew something was missing, a vacuum to where a mother should fit, and he had a fixed determination to fill it.

Jamie’s mother Noelle died post childbirth at the age of 15 and he is being raised by his young father Eoin and grandmother. He takes everything literally and is serious minded and ambitious.

Jamie got it. He just didn’t want to get it. Noelle had never stopped moving from the first minute he had met her on screen. She was in constant and limited motion.

His one resounding ambition is to invent/create a machine that will be in perpetual motion; in his mind it will somehow allow him to remain connected to his mother, who, though he never knew her, he visualises through the one remaining video that is left of her, competing in a swimming gala.

There had been hundreds of clips. Noelle laughing after school. Noelle walking in the woods. Noelle soaked to the skin on a picnic. Noelle pulling faces outside the cinema. Noelle painted like a Dalmatian at Halloween with a black-and-white hair wig. But after a rare night out with the soccer club, Eoin, angry and lonely and drunk in his small, dark living room, deleted the phone’s contents. After which, he placed his phone on the laminate floor of the two-up-two-down and smashed it hard under the heel of his foot. After which, he vomited. After which, he passed out until morning when he woke frantic and pacing about with a dry mouth and a pounding headache, and in a lather of sweat and overwhelmed with the desire to disappear. But Jamie woke, crept downstairs and began asking so many questions that Eoin had no choice but to recover and get on with the getting on a young boy requires. And for years after, Eoin replayed each deleted clip in his mind before he’d fall into a fretful sleep, until the clips grew so hazy and faint and there came a time when Eoin couldn’t visualise Noelle’s face at all,
and though he tried to (re)build it:
smile, red hair, eyes, freckled nose, wide shoulders
parts of her vanished until it was finally impossible to recreate her.

Yusra Mardini Butterfly The Swimmers Elaine Feeney — Photo by Heart Rules on Pexels.com

At the new school he encounters Tess (Mrs McMahon) the English teacher and Taigh (Mr Foley), the woodwork teacher, whose classroom has been built in what was the old swimming pool.

These two are also in the midst of transition; Tess is married to Paul who has little patience or empathy for his wife’s uncertainty. She has come to the end of being able to suppress her feelings and knows that running away is no longer a sustainable solution to her agitated, easily triggered mind.

They were almost a decade married now and to avoid misinterpretations in the way they communicated, they had grown polite and consistent with each other. To Tess, it was as though she had catapulted. She stopped giving Paul her point of view. And Paul stopped worrying about what ailed Tess.

Taigh has left the island where he was raised and keeps his distance from people, avoiding growing close to anyone while he adapts to his newfound independence.

The three are connected through the school and Taigh’s suggestion to Jamie that they build a currach (a traditional Irish boat with a wooden frame, over which animal skins or hides were once stretched, though now canvas is more usual).

It is a school project that a number of the boys work on and commit time to, though not necessarily supported by the very traditional, linear leadership or parents with single-minded expectations of their protege. The project in different ways facilitates consideration of the many pressures weighing on them all.

It is a heart-warming, thoughtful novel of the importance of community interactions and the power of imagination and creativity and teamwork to nurture and heal and progress the journey of everyone involved, when obstacles are removed and the way is cleared for out of the box thinking, support and the healing that can result from going with the flow.

I thought it was an excellent, enjoyable, thought provoking read of hope and optimism.

Elaine Feeney, Author

Elaine Feeney is an award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright from the west of Ireland.

How to Build a Boat, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is her second novel. The 2020 debut, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award.

Feeney has published three collections of poetry, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story ‘Sojourn’ was included in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Feeney lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway. 

” I am constantly imagining and reimagining this place; its socio-economics; geo-political landscape; pagan versus Christian traditions; new cultures; power and who holds it; the post-colonial effect on language, emigration, class and agriculture. Our proximity to the sea seems to energise writers.” Elaine Feeney on Ireland

November 10, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Poor, A Memoir by Katriona O’Sullivan

Grit, Courage, and the Life-Changing Value of Self-Belief

Poor is the story of a young woman as she looks back at the circumstances of her birth, childhood and younger years, through the lens of having been raised by parents who were addicts. The middle sibling of five children, she would become pregnant at 15, abandoned and homeless. And then things got even worse – until she began to find the support and mentors she needed to begin the long climb out of a destiny she desperately wished to avoid.

It is a riveting read, constructed from the hopeful perspective of having by chance – in the people she met along the way – found support and been shown how to save herself and the path to higher education.

More importantly this book is essential reading for anyone considering working with children, for parents and those in higher education who might have a tendency to favour “the good, the ideal” student, to think about how we might uplift and give hope to those who might not fit that category.

Turning Points In A Life

Irish Book Awards Biography of the Year 2023

Katriona’s story pinpoints the moments in childhood that mark a life, both the good (the teacher who taught her and facilitated her being able to manage her own cleanliness) and the bad (a man her parents left her with), from which there is no turning back, but perhaps with the right resources, there can eventually be a kind of healing.

Being able to look back and identify those moments that shifted her self-worth, while often devastating to relive, enabled her to understand their impact and address them through appropriate methods, and where they were positive shifts, to cultivate gratitude.

It also highlights the many adults that let these children down.

I know my parents let us down, significantly. The blame is with them. Of course it is. But the world around us let us down too, and in a way, that is worse. Because my parents were drug addicts and that is how it all got so bad and messed up. But the people of the world around us – the police, the teachers, the social workers – they were untrustworthy. They pushed us into a corner and frightened us. How could we have grown up to do anything else but bite them back?
My parents let me down, but so did the world. And the world was where I had to live.

She is one of the few who has managed to climb out, to break a cycle; her story is shared in the hope others who identify, might find the motivation to pull themselves towards something that might bring them out of what is almost inevitable if you’ve grown up in such an environment.

I’d take a heroin addict parent over an alcoholic one any day of the week. That may seem surprising but there is a meanness in booze and horrible unpredictability that you just don’t get with heroin addiction.

It is also for those who have never known such misery, to refrain from judgement, to be open to understanding what happens to people in these situations, how they got there, the consequences and the ineffectiveness of today’s government policies in properly identifying the cause, creating and applying appropriate, sustainable solutions.

This isn’t a tale of woe is me or blame, and neither is it a story of a one-off. It is a demonstration of the difficulty of these lives, and a desire to want to change the world in a more caring and empathetic way than it is now, to search for and find and fund solutions, so that more might learn how to follow a different path, when similar struggles are present.

My education has taught me that choice is a myth: our path is set by history and it is very rare for someone to change that path. I am one of the lucky few who escaped the destiny set for me by my parents’ addiction.

Inclusivity and Diversity, We Must Do Better

She challenges educational institutions to do more to be inclusive of struggling students, to strive for the value of greater diversity. “Diversity brings power”.

Although the ‘same’ opportunities are open to people of all backgrounds, we live in a system where those coming from stable, secure childhoods do well and there is no allowance for the struggle of those who don’t. We need equity in education, not equality. If someone can’t see straight because the world is falling in around them, we need to raise them up to clearer skies…and the truth is, we are losing some brilliant minds in the trenches of poverty.

In an interview with the Guardian she expresses her fury at the rhetoric around poverty – that if someone is poor, it is their own moral failing, and if only they worked harder, they could drag themselves out of it. It is society that loses, she points out.

“We’re missing talent, vibrancy and creativity. Because I’ve been empowered, I have been able to change my life, my children’s lives. I’m not costly any more to the state. I’m not doing all of the things that happen when you live in poverty. The people who are making decisions are clearly very educated and yet they don’t seem to have the long-term lens on what investing in reducing poverty can do.”

A brilliant and engaging memoir and an important voice in support of educating children out of poverty.

Highly Recommended.

Poor has been shortlisted for two categories in the 2023 An-Post Irish Book Awards for Biography of the Year and for the Listeners’ Choice Award (winners announced 22 November).

Katriona O’Sullivan, Author

Dr Katriona O’Sullivan was born in Coventry to Irish parents. In 1998, at 20, she moved from Birmingham to Dublin and subsequently enrolled in the Trinity College access programme. She went on to gain a PhD in psychology from Trinity and joined its staff.

She now works as a senior lecturer in Digital Skills in Maynooth University’s Department of Psychology. She has worked with policy-makers to develop strategies around education and inclusion, and has been an invited speaker at the UN, the World Education Forum, the European Gender Action Workshop on Women and Digitalization.

Most recently, the programme she leads to improve working class girls’ access to education in STEM subjects won the Most Impactful Initiative Award at the Women in Tech Europe Awards in Amsterdam.

She is married with three children and lives in Dublin. Poor is her first book.

“I needed encouragement to build my life and the tools to give it structure and strength. I needed tools to understand the world and how to think.

I needed an education.” Katriona O’Sullivan

November 9, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Time For Outrage, Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel tr. Marion Duvert

Looking Beyond the Ordinary & Expected

On a recent visit to Paris, I accompanied friends on a day-trip to the town of Épernay in the North East of Paris, 30 kilometres south west of Reims. Like Reims, it is known for its champagne houses, vineyards and the close to 50 kilometres of underground tunnels built to store their wine, a veritable underground city.

The town sits on layers of chalk, which gives those underground tunnels their unique aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of their product and why the fierce protection over the use of the word ‘champagne‘. Champagne is only ‘champagne‘ if grown and cellared and produced in the Champagne region of France. If not, its crémant, prosecco, cava, sparkling …

The archbishops of Reims controlled the town of Épernay from the 5th-10th century, it then passed to the counts of Champagne and in 1642 to the Duke of Bouillon.

It was badly damaged during the Hundred Years’ War, and was burned by Francis I in 1544. Having been destroyed or burned more than 20 times, the town has few ancient buildings, the mansions you can see there today are mostly from the 1800’s.

The Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars are on the World Heritage list for the Protection of World Culture and Heritage for all humanity.

The town also houses some 9th century manuscripts, a wine museum and archaeological artifacts.

Stéphane Hessel encourages youth to engage!

As we wandered along the famous Avenue Champagne with its palatial 19th century mansions, some of which can be visited for wine tastings, I looked for number 31 (a favourite number) to take a photo. At about the halfway point in the long, fairly sterile avenue, it was not a champagne house, but a 2,000 + student lycée (high school), named Lycée Stéphane Hessel.

I was intrigued and delighted to see the name of this institution, certain that it must have been named recently, I knew that Stéphane Hessel had died only 10 years ago.

The high school was named in 2013/2014 when the lycée Godart-Roger et lycée Léon-Bourgeois merged to become the lycée Stéphane Hessel, renamed in tribute to this inspirational author of a best-selling essay, written and directed specifically towards youth.

Discovering this lycée was one of the highlights of my visit, I found it brilliantly provocative that in the middle of this world famous avenue of procuring bubbles, sat a human rights activist, member of the Resistance, a voice for peace and equality, the author of a famous essay, written in his 93rd year, 3 years before his death in 2013.

It a short half hour read that has since been translated into numerous languages and sold 4.5 million copies worldwide.

I knew about it because at the Salon de Livre in Paris in 2014, there were massive queues of young people lining up to get their booklet signed by him or to listen to him talk. Journalists were intrigued and wanted to know why these young students were so interested in the words of a very old man. The response was “because he lived it” they said, unlike most who teach us about this era, this man actually lived through everything he has written about. He is authentic, we respect that.

The Essay

Stéphane Hessel wrote his essay in his 93rd year and considered himself fortunate to be able to reflect at that age on events that laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to politics and human rights.

Born in Germany, he became French in 1939 and in 1941 fled to London and became part of Charles de Gaulle’s group of Resistance members.

He returned to France to organise communications, was captured and sent to Buchenwald, tortured and later sentenced to execution by hanging. He and two others managed to escape execution through an act of identity exchange.

He wrote of the declaration adopted by the National Council of Resistance in March 1944, a set of values and principles created to guide the nation’s modern democracy once it was freed from occupation. He reiterated the importance of many freedoms that came with the end of the war, demanding that they continue to be protected for the good of all.

It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain one of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion or a society that disputes the welfare state or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy.

Find Your Reason

The basic motive of the Resistance was indignation. He addressed his young audience, reminding them of this and implores them to find their reason for indignation, to join the great course of history, to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if encountering someone who is robbed of these rights, to have empathy and them help them reclaim them.

He wrote about the rise of fascism and his understanding of the origins of it, and how young people today will find their own reasons for expressing their outrage. His indignation was born less of emotion than a desire to engage. He was influenced by the words of Jean-Paul Sartre who said “You must engage – your humanity depends on it.”

The Worst Attitude is Indifference

There are unbearable things all around us, look for them he said:

This is what I tell young people: If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. “There’s nothing I can do; I get by” – adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage.

He highlights the challenges, of grievous injustices inflicted on people deprived of the essential requirements for a decent life, the widening gap between rich and poor and the violation of basic freedoms and fundamental rights, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” and his own participation in the creation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I will never forget the crucial role played by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose great kindness and natural authority worked wonders to help reconcile the disparate personalities that comprised the commission. She was a vibrant feminist, and it is largely due to her that, for the first time, and on a global scale, the equality of men and women was inscribed without ambiguity in an official text.

His message is one of active engagement, nonviolence and hope, against injustice.

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

It is an inspiring short work, that I encourage everyone to read, its message could not be more appropriate at this time, given all that the world is currently facing.

Stéphane Hessel, Author

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel (20 Oct 1917–26 Feb 2013) was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance member. Born in Germany, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and protection for the post-World War II social vision.

His book IndignezVous! (Time for Outrage! )sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.

November 5, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

I’ve long wished to read a novel by Sebastian Barry and somehow not got to one until now.

Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the 2023 Irish Book Awards, Novel of the Year (winner announced 22 Nov).

literary fiction Irish — Book Toothbrush for Livia

This is a slow burn, introspective, literary read, of a man in decline, in the 9th month of his retirement from the Irish police force, now in his late 60’s. He has relocated to the annex of an old castle-like building overlooking the Irish sea and rarely has contact with anyone, though he is aware of his elderly landlord weeding the garden, a young woman with a child in the turret of the same building and a lone, trigger happy cellist.

His thoughts are of his wicker chair, his view, his peaceful existence and the joy of the privilege he has had to love his wife June, who he believed loved him in equal measure.

Over the course of the next week or so he relives memories of being with his wife and we develop a sense that this good fortune was not something either of them expected from life, given their rough beginnings, both abandoned as babies or small children.

His nostalgic meanderings are disturbed by a visit by two young policemen working a case against a priest, and looking into the cold case of another murdered 20 years ago. They want to know what he remembers from that time, as it was a case he worked on. Their arrival also coincides with the beginning of tentative relationships with his neighbours.

What a thing to bring to your old friend’s door. A new peril of cold cases that he had never foreseen. Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch.

old god's time cormorant — Photo by Sindre Fs on Pexels.com

The visits disturb and awaken old memories and feelings, going all the way back to his early days in the army, a year in Palestine and then in Malaya, where he was a sniper and other dark shadows of memories long buried.

The slow revelation of his past, of his job and family, his son and daughter, his wife and their experiences as children create intrigue as he alludes to disturbing events that take time to unveil.

His often-time confused mind sometimes makes those memories feel like events happening in real-time around him; people appear to him who are no longer here. Figments of imagination or angelic attendants preparing him?

Sometimes he awakens and realises it was a dream, other times he realises it was a form of hallucination.

But he was obliged to believe it. Because in the first instance a witness should be believed. A lot of mischief and mischance had arisen from not believing witnesses. Rejecting out of hand. Poor soul standing in front of you, spilling the dreadful beans, and it not sounding likely. But oftentimes the unlikely was the truth, as you might find out, in the end, when it was too late. He felt he should believe – believe himself.

We read and we are in his mind trying to decipher what is real and what is imagined or desired. At a certain point it doesn’t really matter, except that the two young policemen may suspect he is implicated in something.

Far from being depressing or exhausting, given the burden of what he has lived through, there is a sense of gratitude for the gift of a shared love he had with June and pride he has in his children.

Behind the plot is a seething rage at the years long refusal to follow up with child abuses nor charge priests suspected of child abuse, men covering the despicable deeds of other men, of one type of power enabling another, predators against the weak and helpless and the long term psychological distress this trauma has inflicted on hundreds of thousands of children, not talked about but passed on through their own DNA, becoming a form of collective trauma of a generation(s).

The lack of redemption for victims, the theft of their freedom, of their peace of mind, the deep wounds that remain, that continue to fester, to destroy souls.

It was up to him now to know less about times and details and more about the moiling mysteries of the human heart. Things happened to people, and some people were required to life great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed, and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure.

Setting the novel in this man’s twilight years takes a dramatic subject and allows it to be reflected on in slow paced, methodical way that combines the experiences people go through and witness, the effects and consequences that they continue to live with and attempt to overcome or heal from, or take revenge for and the aftermath, what survives.

Brilliantly written and rendered, thought provoking, holding its threads of hope and faith in the power of genuine love. It is a book that is worth immersing in due to its dream-like reality, an ideal weekend read.

Highly Recommended. Have you read any Sebastian Barry novels? Do you have a favourite?

Sebastian Barry, Author

Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet, one of a small group of authors to have been nominated for the Booker Prize five times.

The 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, Barry had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), before Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023.

He has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

Barry was born in Dublin in 1955, and now lives in County Wicklow. 

November 2, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg tr. Frances Frenaye

I’m planning on reading a few books by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, as mentioned on reviewing her excellent memoir Family Lexicon which I chose to start with, before diving into her fiction.

I start her fiction at the beginning with this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947, The Dry Heart.

Captivating right from the opening lines,

“Tell me the truth,” I said.
“What truth?” he echoed…
I shot him between the eyes.

Natalia Ginzburg’s debut novella starts with a shot and then goes into the domestic detail that preceded that moment.

Those first lines begin halfway down the page, just a couple of paragraphs before you turn the page, where not only is the husband shot, but in the last sentence before we turn the page, she tells us,

But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

She then leaves the house and over the course of the day, she recalls in minute detail how she met Alberto, her husband of four years, their long drawn out courtship, her wavering feelings for him that seesaw between love and hate but never indifference, before deciding what she ought to do now.

I put on my raincoat and gloves and went out. I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of a café and walked haphazardly around the city. It was a chilly day and a damp wind was blowing. I sat down on a bench in the park, took off my gloves and looked at my hands. Then I slipped off my wedding ring and put it in my pocket.

A school teacher living in a boarding house, surrounded by different characters on the periphery of her life, she had a vivid imagination and had fantasized about marriage. Alberto hadn’t fit that image but over time that had changed.

When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.

The novel vivdly portrays the roller coaster of her young imagination, the frustration and desire she feels, the willingness to compromise and accept a less than perfect situation, the significant step forward their marriage takes when a child comes into it, until the day she snaps.

There is no mystery, all is laid bare in captivating, enticing prose, that is direct and insistent while exploring the dark aspect of a relationship that can’t be controlled, of characters who are ill-suited yet drawn towards one another, until that spontaneous combustion of their marriage.

It’s a novella, just over 100 pages, one to dive right in, highly recommended. A feminist classic.

Brilliant.

Also reviewed earlier this year by Jacqui at JacquiWine’s Journal and Kim at Reading Matters Blog.

Natalia Ginzburg Italian literature Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg, Author

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws.

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

Word by Word

Thoughts on Literature, Expressing Creativity, Being Authentic

Month: November 2023