Irish Fiction, Phases of Life - Fiction, Character Types - Fiction
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Overview
I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle years of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields, and on the building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind, and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the sea-scapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played and the woman he loved.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
This is a quietly ambitious, grave and earnest book that mixes the elegiac prose of Chicago-born novelist O'Grady (Motherland) with the haunting photographs of Englishman Pyke to establish, remarkably, a quintessentially Irish novel. It's a tale, in the form of a lament, about sadness, longing and resignation, the story of a west of Ireland man who leaves for England in search of work sometime in mid-century. O'Grady's text consists of impressionistic sketches of a hard but colorful youth left behind, of an entire family marked by poverty and transformed by the dire requirements of growing up poor. It's all recalled from a kind of old-folks home, as the narrator remembers the things he could do"Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds.... Read the sky.... Remember poems"and those he could not"Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch.... Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen.... Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering." The keening of the narrator is peculiarly uplifting, distinguished by a teary-eyed lucidity. Pyke's photos support this mood like a fiddle might back an Irish air. Unrelated in subject matter to the text, the images nonetheless underscore displacement while extending the sense of loss into real bogs and real faces and incredibly gnarled "spalpeen" hands. (Mar.)Anthony Cronin
I Could Read the Sky . . . speaks in the manner of an important work of art, memorably and beautifully. --Dublin Sunday IndependentCharlotte Mendelson
If the words tell the story of the voiceless, the bleak, lovely photographs that accompany it show their faces . . . Fiction rarely gets as close to the messy, glorious truth as do memories and photographs. This rare novel dares to use both. -- The Times Literary SupplementBook Details
Published
April 1, 1998
Publisher
Random House UK
Pages
173
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781860463860