The cult Irish writer is back with a prize-winning novel, Solar Bones, after a decade in the doldrums
“I couldn’t give my work away, to be honest with you. No one wanted to know.” Now in his 50s, Irish writer Mike McCormack spent a decade in the doldrums before the triumph of Solar Bones, a single- sentence novel in which the ghost of a Mayo engineer called Marcus Conway looks back on his life and death. Now out in the UK, it was originally published last spring by the tiny Irish press Tramp; hailed in the Guardian as a book for “anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes”, it went on to win the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction. As judge Blake Morrison pointed out, “its subject may be an ordinary working life, but it is itself an extraordinary work”: taking in faith and family, politics and art, sex, death and cosmic anxiety – as McCormack says now, “life, the universe and the whole damn thing”. What marks it out is the continuous prose, surging on through memories and digressions. “A ghost would have no business with a full stop,” he points out matter-of-factly. “It might fatally falter and dissipate.”
Related: Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Ben Brooks: is experimental fiction making a comeback? | Books feature
Crowe's Requiem received 'the worst review of a book I’ve ever seen. I’m quite proud of that now'
He thought that 'being an ordinary farm boy over in the west of Ireland was not the stuff of a writerly background'
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2sBN7BJ
0 comments:
Post a Comment