The Bend for Home

Boston Globe

A lyrical and powerful memoir of love, kinship, and loss in an Irish family.

Globe and Mail

A wholly original memoir by an award-winning Irish writer -- intensely lyrical, poignant, richly comic and unforgettable.

Independent

Truly wonderful...[Mixes] the surreal with the concrete, weaving humor with a sustained sense of loss.

Irish Times

A marvelous book, satisfying on just about every one of its many diverting and artful levels.

Scotland on Sunday

[A book] of seemingly effortless craft overflowing with warmth and compassion.

Toronto Star

The Bend for Home is a memoir in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, richly, highly selective and tinged with poetry.

Washington Post Book World

Invigorating...When it's all over, and Healy steps out of the confessional he experiences that inimitable feeling of sacramental cleansing.

Publishers Weekly

Novelist and poet Healy has produced not a memoir, as claimed, but an episodic novel in the form of a memoir. Writers, he contends, "not only make up things, but get things wrong as well. Language, to be memorable, dispenses with accuracy." That explains Healy's strategy, which includes confessions later dismissed as inventions. Still, improvements on his memories of life in Irish villages in the 1950s and 1960s do make for a sprightlier book. "It annoys me to remember those days," he writes, while relentlessly remembering them in his fashion. Healy's lengthy dialogues are clearly novelistic, and his accounts, sometimes explicit, of randy teenagers, lascivious priests and ill and dying elderly villagers, although clichs of Irish autobiography, are given freshness here. The slender narrative thread is the slow disintegration of Healy's father, a policeman retired for failing health. A long epilogue evokes the equally miserable death of the author's mother when Healy is already acquiring a reputation as a writer. The usual suspects are rounded uppoverty, hypocrisy, loneliness, failure, nostalgia, laughter, dreams, drink, death. As Healy owns up, "Those who had been there told all that happened to those who had not. And we exaggerated all we'd seen. As I am doing here, and not for the first time." (Mar.) FYI: Healy's novel A Goat's Song will be published simultaneously in paperback by Harvest.

Library Journal

A charming memoir from Irish poet and fiction writer Healy. (LJ 2/15/98)

Kirkus Reviews

Eschewing straightforward chronicle, Irish poet and novelist Healy (A Goat's Song, 1995), born in 1947, re-creates his upbringing through a series of impressionistic word-pictures and characterizationsmost poignantly of his father, a policeman who retired early due to ill health. Writes Healy, taking his bearings here, "What happened is a wonder, though memory is always incomplete, like a map with places missing." The young boy felt trapped with his family's move from the small village of Finea to the town of Cavan, where they lived above the busy bakery-tearoom operated by his aunt Maisie and his mother, Winnie. He and his father were both sleepwalkers, seeking escape in night dreams ("most nights we set off for Finea"). Healy gives little description of how he grew to be a man in London, though he does allow a self-deprecating glimpse ahead to the writer who returns home to find himself fabricating, to the editor of the local paper, a literary success he's not yet achieved. Thematically and stylistically, Healy's talents are ever on display here; the occasional sustained heroic catalogue of Cavan, for examplethe author piling clause upon vivid clause, like so many layers of frostingproviding technical tours-de-force; though his later experience at Saint Patrick's Secondary College, rendered primarily through re-created diary entries, is far less memorable. In closing as he flash-forwards to the 1990s and his return to Cavan to care for his aged mother, infirm and losing her faculties, Healy evokes the surprising bawdiness of the old woman's humor and ruminates on an imaginary place, Hy Brazil, like another Atlantis rising out of the sea, out beyond where the author lives, in NorthSligo. The island, he concludes, is, like life, "peopled with uncertainties." With his descriptive talent and his knack for making comedy out of tragedy, Healy has written a beautiful, imaginative, full- blooded memoir.