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Mar. 2nd, 2012 09:31 am
Mar. 2nd, 2012
Mar. 2nd, 2012 10:57 pm
Impossibly true
Apparently, Slievenamuck is an honest-to-goodness named place located in South Tipperary (which is also an honest-to-goodness place, in case you thought they just made it up for the song). I wasn't sure because of the context in which it appears in Seán Ó Faoláin's story "Falling Rocks, Narrowing Road, Cul-de-Sac, Stop.":
It was a much lighter story than reading his collected works had led me to expect, but it's from very late in his career and I'm still on his first book of stories, which deal with the weighty matter of the War of Independence and the Civil War. I'm not jumping ahead; this just happened to be the selection included in Modern Irish short stories and, in fact, the last story left in that anthology which I first started reading a year ago. As comic stories go, I don't think it can compare to "The weaver's grave" by Seumas O'Kelly, a "literary folktale" that is the most delightful thing I've read in ages.
Of course, that could change as I continue to work my way through Mary Lavin. "Happiness", her contribution to the anthology, is a sombre meditation on life, but my collection of her work contains a sweethearted reworking of a classic folktale of faerie abduction alongside the arch satire of bourgeois pretensions that I'm reading at the moment. Definitely glad I picked that up. And McGahern's "All sorts of impossible things" has me eager to read the book of his short fiction that I picked up as well.
It's a strong collection overall, although there are some misses. The Flann O'Brien story is nowhere near the calibre of his best work and the Beckett selection, "Dante and the lobster", is tedious in the extreme. Then again, that may just be Beckett--certainly, Corkery's contribution is on a par with the middling tale of his included in the survey volume I read last year; clearly the disciples (O'Connor and Ó Faoláin) greatly surpassed the master. And "The creature" is far from my favourite Edna O'Brien, but it's as well written as anything else she's done.
¹ Sliabh na muc "Mountain of the Pigs"; the official Irish form, however, is Sliabh Muice or "Pig's Mountain".
² fornocht
He was so outspoken, so trustful of every stranger, had as little guard over his tongue as a sailor ashore, that we could foresee the day when the bishop would become so sick of getting anonymous letters about him that he would shanghai him to some remote punishment curacy on the backside of Slievenamuck.The term one of my high school religion teachers used for the godforsaken hayseed town where an errant priest might be banished was "South East Jesus", so you can understand why I might think "Slievenamuck" an invention even apart from the fact that it is an anglicisation of the Irish for "Pig Mountain"¹. As it happens, our loose-tongued priest does get exiled to "a chin pimple of a village...on the backside of Slievenamuck" which Ó Faoláin calls "Four Noughts (the vulgarization of a Gaelic word meaning Stark Naked)"². Sadly, this does appear to be an invention; the nearest match in the logainm database is "Forenaghts" (for which no Gaelic version is given), but this lies in County Kildare.
It was a much lighter story than reading his collected works had led me to expect, but it's from very late in his career and I'm still on his first book of stories, which deal with the weighty matter of the War of Independence and the Civil War. I'm not jumping ahead; this just happened to be the selection included in Modern Irish short stories and, in fact, the last story left in that anthology which I first started reading a year ago. As comic stories go, I don't think it can compare to "The weaver's grave" by Seumas O'Kelly, a "literary folktale" that is the most delightful thing I've read in ages.
Of course, that could change as I continue to work my way through Mary Lavin. "Happiness", her contribution to the anthology, is a sombre meditation on life, but my collection of her work contains a sweethearted reworking of a classic folktale of faerie abduction alongside the arch satire of bourgeois pretensions that I'm reading at the moment. Definitely glad I picked that up. And McGahern's "All sorts of impossible things" has me eager to read the book of his short fiction that I picked up as well.
It's a strong collection overall, although there are some misses. The Flann O'Brien story is nowhere near the calibre of his best work and the Beckett selection, "Dante and the lobster", is tedious in the extreme. Then again, that may just be Beckett--certainly, Corkery's contribution is on a par with the middling tale of his included in the survey volume I read last year; clearly the disciples (O'Connor and Ó Faoláin) greatly surpassed the master. And "The creature" is far from my favourite Edna O'Brien, but it's as well written as anything else she's done.
¹ Sliabh na muc "Mountain of the Pigs"; the official Irish form, however, is Sliabh Muice or "Pig's Mountain".
² fornocht
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