Category: Book review
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Exhaustion and exhaustive: Colum McCann’s ‘Apeirogon’
Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a novel. I know this because it tells me both on the cover of the hardback edition, and in the acknowledgements. In the latter, McCann explains that this is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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Trans* today or yesterday? Andrea Lawlor’s ‘Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl’
In a 2017 book Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, Heath Fogg Davis asks: ‘Why not use transgender experience to fundamentally question the social custom of administrating sex?'[1] Using a queer logic that has roots in poststructural theory—the intricacies of which don’t need elaborating here—Davis joins two arguments. First, he argues that sex-identity discrimination—which ‘involves judgments…
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Pre-reading and re-reading Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’
As I read the contents of Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’, two things struck me. First, that I was pre-reading the poems by virtue of their mapping in the contents. Second, that I was pre-reading the contents by virtue of my prior knowledge of Longley’s poetry. This blog is about the first of these.
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Slow reading: Adrian Duncan’s ‘Love Notes from a German Building Site’
Adrian Duncan‘s Love Notes from a German Building Site (Head of Zeus, 2019) tells Paul’s first-person story as he emigrates from Ireland to Germany to start afresh with his girlfriend, Evelyn. Paul is an engineer by trade, but his relationship with his job is tested and stretched by time spent on a job in Berlin—it…
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Two spatial poetics: Niamh Campbell’s ‘This Happy’
Niamh Campell’s This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) plots Alannah’s uncanny experience of her love life repeating itself from when she was a ‘young’ 23 to an ‘old(er)’ 30 years old. The two experiences—first with a married man, Harry, second with her unnamed husband—are not identical, but there are enough similarities for the storylines to…