Peeping up

A definite sign of the arrival of spring: Peeps™ on the "free" table at work!

More seriously, I saw my first fully-opened daffodils today. As usual, they were both in south-facing beds on Arthur just west of Sheridan. If that stretch wasn't such a student slum, I'd really wish we'd bought there instead. One daffodil does not a spring make, but they do make me realise how central they are to my idea of spring. There have been snowdrops, crocus, dwarf iris, and aconite for a couple weeks now, more recently squill and even a couple hyacinths, and though they all suggest spring, I've seen them all surprised by snow before. I've seen that with jonquils, too, but much more rarely. Of course the real show is around the corner: there's forsythia budding down the road from here.

Dad called last night and reported that around his place they've already moved on to cherries. I'm a bit bummed, to be sure, since I could just as easily have come down this weekend instead. He wanted to know how I wanted to cook our food--campfire, camp stove, or wood-burning stove in the cabin. How am I supposed to know? I can't remember the last time I cooked on anything other than a gas or electric range unless it was a grill in a Korean restaurant.

Name of the Day

Xom M. Vongsaly

So ends Irish Lit Month

Perhaps it helps to have a theme, since March really was a banner month. When have I ever tackled six novels in thirty-five days? Sure, they were all in English and mostly rather short, but I won't let that detract from my sense of accomplishment. Here are the five I both started and finished within the month:

1. Tóibín, Colm. The Blackwater lightship.
2. Tóibín, Colm. The heather blazing.
3. O'Brien, Edna. In the forest.
4. O'Brien, Edna. House of splendid isolation.
5. O'Brien, Flann. The third policeman.

I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed by the Tóibín. As I mentioned before, the first third of Lightship was so utterly engrossing as he deftly built tension between Declan's family and friends that on the strength of it I rushed out and bought Heather. But then everyone gets together and the fireworks I was bracing for don't go off. I complained about this to a well-read co-worker and she told me, "It helps to know that he really admires James." Now I haven't read much James, but I appreciate the fact that he has a dense distinctive style. of course, this is exactly what a lot of people hate about James, so perhaps they'd prefer Tóibín's, which is so subtle it's often imperceptible. Unfortunately, for me this meant that when the tension went slack, there was little to hold me in.

I especially noticed this with Heather, which for much of the novel alternates chapters between an aging judge's present and his memories of childhood. I found that I was rushing through the uncompelling narration of his days at the seashore to get back to descriptions of growing up in Wexford during the War. Then, about two thirds of the way through, it flipped, his grief at the loss of his wife becoming more interesting than his fledgling career in law. It didn't help that there was a certain sameness to the two novels, both being set (in the present-day sections) at the seaside town of Cush and both relying on the same central metaphor of that locale's slow subsidence into the sea.

Tóibín also suffered by comparison to O'Brien, who's much more lyrical in her descriptions (though by no means overwrought). Her novels had other problems. I don't care if she interviewed Dominic McGlinchey for House, I never quite bought her portrait of an veteran IRA operative. It's similar to the problem I had with Crying Game--if the Provos are this stupid, why on earth were they so successful for so long? She provides something of an answer in her disdainful depiction of Garda competence, a view reinforced by Forest--which, on the other hand, gave me little or no trouble suspending disbelief since it follows historical events so closely that it's hard to see why she even bothered changing the names.

Indeed, one of the criticisms I've seen of Forest is that, with just a little more research, it could've been published as a factual account of multiple murderer Brendan O'Donnell. But then there would've been even more criticism of O'Brien's attempts to get inside the disturbed man's head. It was refreshing to see a literary treatment of a killer who was anything but cold and methodical, but as I was reading I couldn't shake a sense of shame at indulging in something so lurid and voyeuristic. Not to denigrate that if it's your thing, but I'm not really sure what I was supposed to take away from it except that there are some truly messed up people in this world.

Shame more of them aren't just laughably depraved, like a Flann O'Brien protagonist. O'Brien in turn suffered from comparison to him, who I turned to in need of a respite from all this grim realism. The trouble is that you can only read a novel of his for the first time once and now I've only got one left. Tackling The third policeman is especially bittersweet since you can't help but speculate how differently literary history might've been had this only been published in his lifetime to the acclaim it deserves. But who can say, perhaps he only had a few brilliant works in him in any case. And in the end, five novels is better than none at all.

The main character is also a murderer, the action is (ostensibly) set in Ireland, law enforcement is buffoonish, and that's about all Policeman has in common with Forest. I wouldn't want to say more than that, since I found my enjoyment diminished a bit by spoilers in the preface. If you haven't read it, read it; as with At Swim-Two-Birds, I found myself both loath to complete it and confident I'll read it again. The rest of these books, by contrast, are going into the big box of books to get rid of. So if any of them sounds appealing, give a holler!

There were two other books I read significant chunks of in March. One was My father's child, the second volume of autobiography from Frank O'Connor. It's largely about his relationship to Yeats and Æ, who were about as different as two mentors from that generation could be. Not as much fun as An only child, but well worth it all the same. The other was Elizabeth Bowen's The death of the heart, which I finished only last night. But I'll save that for another posting, the one in which I review Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke. My brother's been asking about this since he gave it to me for Christmas, so I've tasked myself with reading it before I see him in a week.