Gan mheidir gan mhias gan bhiadh gan anlann

Today I reached the end of another disappointing Irish novel, Brian O'Doherty's The deposition of Father McGreevy. I really should've given up on it well before the halfway mark, but I convinced there had to be more to it than what I'd seen so far at that point. Not really. The initial mystery was to be dropped halfway through with hardly an afterthought. Once I realised what the actual subject was and resigned myself to it, it wasn't a bad read, but had I known that was it from the start, I never would've bothered. There goes a bit more of my faith in the Booker Prize shortlist.

It helped at least that I figured out fairly soon I could skim without missing much. It's a straightforward tale told in an unadorned style, first-person reliable. The prose wants to be rich and rewarding, but it's not, it's rather repetitive and insipid, and the main narrator is not much of a raconteur. A decent man, when all's said and done, but prudish and without a sense of humour to speak of. The frame story turns out not to be entirely gratuitous, as the author uses it to draw in the voices of a couple additional characters, but it only makes one ponder how much more interesting it might've been to have multiple narrators.

But O'Doherty just isn't a man to take any risks, apparently. He tries to squeeze in a lot of Gaelic idiom for local colour, but the effect has none of the naturalness of McGahern or O'Flaherty. (It's not in the least surprising to read that he grew up in Dublin and has lived for the last half century in NYC.) At least the Irish is correct, thanks to Dr Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith of University College Dublin. (There are so many fluent speakers out there who would happily check writers' grammar for free simply for the satisfaction of not seeing it munged in print, you wonder why more of them don't take of advantage of that.)

I needed some relief, so I turned first to Annie Proulx and then to Herman Hesse. I still have a couple of short stories left in Close range and I'm hardly fifty pages into Der Steppenwolf (which is still enough to get to his rather hilariously condescending assessment of jazz and "childish" American culture in general). If I don't want to keep being bored, then it's time to start challenging myself a bit more with my reading again.

April snowshowers, or, Lusanna an chromchinn sa sneachta

Sorry to post so much about the weather, but it's been the most interesting thing going on around here. When they predicted snow for Monday night, I didn't think it would stick. When I saw it sticking (mainly to leaf litter and other natural detritus), I didn't think it would stay. And when I saw it in the morning, I didn't think it would survive the day.

Wrong on all counts! This was the morning I thought we'd have yesterday: A few small patches in shady corners and plenty of green elsewhere. The flowers all seem to have made it through okay, though the daffodils were really displaying why the Irish name for them is "herb of the bent head". There were plenty of them about: I was waiting patiently all last week for them to finally bloom, and it finally happened over the weekend. The warm weather also set off many of the trees, leading to the jarring site of snow clinging to branches of blooms and fallen maple buds forming the nuclei of balls of ice on the sidewalk. (They looked like some sort of odd Japanese sweet.)

The squill has finally emerged as well, which is good since I've been wondering what became of it all. Tulips, though, haven't really started yet and I've yet to see a single flowering shrub in bud let alone in bloom. Our freezing nights, however, may at long last be coming to an end, though it's a while yet before I can think of sticking anything in the ground.