Anne Enright's Blog, page 2

The celebrated US author of Blood Meridian, The Road and No Country for Old Men has died. Here, leading contemporaries and critics pay tribute to him

• Cormac McCarthy, celebrated US novelist, dies aged 89

British writer and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge

He looked like a bird colonel I knew over there in that other world watching through his binoculars as the F-100Ds and Super Sabres of the 352nd came in low over Bien Hoa, pregnant with the firejelly they would drop in an orange curtain, burning a miscarriage in the green, turning part of the overstory to ash and skeleton palms. The men and women too, them calling nahn tu, nahn tu to no one who could hear or care if they did.

The characters in these absurdly funny stories are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, as Saunders investigates the prisons we make for ourselves

“The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.” George Saunders was writing about the unforgiving nature of the short form, but he might as well have been referring to the worlds in which his characters are trapped. Why is such a nice man so mean to the nice people he invents?

In interviews, Saunders comes across as a benignly thoughtful regular guy, a practising Buddhist who constantly tries for kindness. Some part of his writing day, however, is spent imagining complex and original ways to punish the people he has created. They are trapped by their own foolishness, or by the dreams of hyper-capitalism. They are also sometimes locked up underground, or suspended in intriguing configurations. “Suspended” here does not just mean “existing between one state and another” – though they are also that. It means hung up and left dangling, like abandoned puppets.

Why was she holding a can opener?

Hmm.

The beloved writer of the Wolf Hall trilogy and Beyond Black has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute

• Hilary Mantel, celebrated author of Wolf Hall, dies aged 70
• The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write’: Hilary Mantel in her own words
• ‘We’ve lost a genius’: authors and politicians pay tribute to Hilary Mantel

Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, and twice Booker winner

Authors recommend their favourite recent reads, from addictive novels and fascinating cultural history to a game-changing graphic memoir

Bernardine Evaristo
More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, edited by Kayo Chingonyi, brings together a wonderful array of outstanding poets whose linguistic flair and wide-ranging perspectives excite, inspire and challenge in equal measure. As a companion, Canongate is also republishing the 1998 anthology The Fire People: A Collection of British Black and Asian Poetry, edited by Lemn Sissay.

Hilary Mantel
A novel featuring the young Joseph Stalin might not sound like summer entertainment, but Stephen May’s Sell Us the Rope is fresh and original: jaunty, cunning, thought-provoking but never solemn. For nonfiction, and a venture into the strange world of coincidence and prediction, try Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau. It’s a book hard to classify, but wholly fascinating: lively, nimble, its subject poised on the frontiers of the possible.

One of the leading proponents of the short story explores how to be a man in a country on the turn

The short story is seen as either a natural form, close to conversation, or an art like poetry, requiring great skill and restraint. But some poems are huge and some short stories are restless, just about contained. Some stories push at their own edges, trying to escape themselves.

In The Ways, the second story in Colin Barrett’s superb second collection, every sentence is as full and alive as a sentence can be, while managing to stay ordinary. A landline “mewls”, waking a girl from the “cosy rut” of her bed. As she comes downstairs, “she swatted each light switch as she passed, in order to feel less alone”. Every chosen word catches and enlarges the character of Pell, one of three siblings who try to nurture each other after the death of their parents. Pell is similar to the characters in Barrett’s first collection Young Skins, which concerned itself with the disenfranchised, the peripheral, the damaged and the lost, and won the Guardian first book award in 2014.

This mystical, wildly original study of grief and love considers God, art and what it’s like to be a leaf

Ejaculated is a tough word to place in a novel, these days. Nobody uses it to describe dialogue any more and in a sexual context it seems a little functional. Also, for technical reasons, it is tricky to employ from a female point of view. So the reader really does notice when Sheila Heti’s narrator says that something has been ejaculated into her “by the universe” and that something, which is now “spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels”, is the spirit of her much-loved, just‑dead father. But each to her own – you have to admire the leap.

I was pulled into Pure Colour, Heti’s follow-up to 2018’s Motherhood, by a description of life before the internet that held a nostalgia I needed to name. Mira begins the novel in a world now lost to us: it was a time when choice was limited and things stayed particular. This was before seasons became “postmodern”, before we knew that “there were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people”. In those days you could see a certain lamp in a shop and know it was your favourite lamp of all time, and “your friends were simply who was around”.

My mother considered it a dirty text, but this profoundly democratic book has liberated female Irish authors

When I was young, growing up in Dublin, Ulysses was considered the greatest novel in the world and the dirtiest book ever written. I bought a copy as soon as I had money and it was taken away from me when my mother discovered me reading it – though Lolita, for some reason, had passed unnoticed in our house. I was 14. I was outraged, and delighted with myself, and a little confused. Ulysses contained something worse than sex, clearly, and I did not know what that could be.

“It is very scatological,” my mother said and then, “Look it up!” which is certainly one way to develop a daughter’s vocabulary, though the definition left me no further on. What could be so terrible – or so interesting – about going to the toilet? After much argument, I put the book up in the attic, to be taken down when I had come of age. Four years later, I retrieved it and read the thing all the way through, though I think I skipped some of the stuff in the brothel, which seemed to contain no actual information about brothels, or far too much information, none of which was real, and which managed all this at great length.

How do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels? Rooney examines meaning, art, friendship and the price of fame through the story of two couples

There has been such a lot of noise around Sally Rooney’s work, such an amount of fervour and possibly manufactured division. “The cult of Sally Rooney,” says one headline. “Why do so many people hate Sally Rooney?” asks another. The discussion cannot be about the quality of her sentences, which are impeccable, or about her tone, which is thoughtful, often sweet-minded and always rigorous. This is prose you either get or don’t get; for some it is incisive, for others banal. Which makes me wonder if it is so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right back at them.

Rooney is certainly interested in accuracy: her first two novels managed to be sexually exact without being smutty, and this is an interesting trick. In its repudiation of shame, the style represents an advance of some kind, and it may be this autonomy that irritates those notional critics who are notionally male and notionally misogynistic. Also – and this really does annoy some people – Rooney writes about love.

The author on writing her novel a cottage in County Clare, and letting her scattered characters take on lives of their own

In 2012 we took a long rent on a cottage in County Clare with a sea view that went all the way to the Aran Islands. It was a fancy version of the cottage my father grew up in, 30 miles south along the coast and, when I told him we were going there, my father, whose voice was damaged in his great old age, started to whisper a poem of his youth: “Oh little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair, / Oh little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!”

Truth be told I was running away to County Clare, in the turbulence and ardency of middle age. I walked out like a madwoman every evening up the grass-covered, green road that began near the house and which went many miles over the uplands of the Burren. During the day I wrote about an Irish aid worker in Africa. I had been writing this for some time. The little house belonged to a builder who was working in Nigeria because of the collapse of the Irish housing market, and I thought this a nice synchronicity. Every time the aid worker sent a letter home he thought about the stone walls of the west of Ireland with the fuschia and orange montbretia (as we call crocosmia) growing alongside it.

Related: The Green Road by Anne Enright review – a family’s worth of stories

The Booker prize-winning author on Mare of Easttown, her favourite lockdown park and the fearsome power of folk music

Born in Dublin in 1962, Anne Enright studied English and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and received an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Formerly an RTE television producer, she has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of essays and seven novels, including the 2007 Booker prize-winning The Gathering and The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence in fiction. In 2015, she was named the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction. Her latest novel, Actress, published by Vintage, is out in paperback now.