Anne Enright's Blog, page 4

Love, loss and the missed connections of family life are restlessly observed in this profoundly playful collection from the American writer

A sentence, in English, is as long as a piece of string. You can keep going so long as you don’t arrive, so it is as much about deferment as delivery. The long sentence is an open road: our pleasure comes not just from the sights along the way but also from the pace of the trip, the writer’s ability to change tack from clause to clause, to spin, twist, add, qualify and generally dodge syntactical mortality. It is often funny – not because of the content, so much as the rhythm, the sense of freedom and avoidance, of dancing between the full stops. Catherine Lacey’s stories are bark-out-loud funny in a way that makes the reader feel a little odd. Much of her work is about pointlessness. Characters wander from nowhere much to a different kind of nowhere. Stories about couples start after the failure of the relationship and simply continue. They are all, however, driven by an expressive energy, by uncontainable personality, wit and the restless need, in the plots as in the sentences, to get the hell away.

In Lacey’s 2015 first novel Nobody Is Ever Missing there is a long sentence in which the narrator talks about how she fell in love with her husband’s losses and bereavements as he fell in love with hers. The sentence circles around these double absences for a number of pages, to give a description of mutual sympathy that is impossibly tactful, elegant and sad. Lacey’s characters cry a lot. They like crying, even though it gives them no relief. In the story “Family Physics” Bridget watches her sister admiringly, in a fast food outlet: “That morning Linda made me realise that the public cry was truly an art that contained possibilities I had not previously known.”

You can let this story push you around or find it almost immoral to use language in a way that seems so self‑delighted

As the Man Booker prize turns 50 and readers vote for their favourite ever recipient, novelists reveal the highs (and lows) of winning ‘the Oscar’ of the literary world

1969: Something to Answer For by PH Newby
1970: The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens and Troubles by JG Farrell
1971: In a Free State by VS Naipaul
1972: G by John Berger
1973: The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell
1974: The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer and Holiday by Stanley Middleton
1975: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 
1976: Saville by David Storey
1977: Staying On by Paul Scott
1978: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
1979: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
1980: Rites of Passage by William Golding
1981: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
1982: Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally
1983: Life and Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee
1984: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
1985: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1986: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
1987: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
1988: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
1989: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1990: Possession by AS Byatt 
1991: The Famished Road by Ben Okri
1992: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
1993: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
1994: How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
1995: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
1996: Last Orders by Graham Swift 
1997: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
1998: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
1999: Disgrace by JM Coetzee
2000: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
2001: True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
2002: Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2003: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
2004: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
2005: The Sea by John Banville
2006: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai 
2007: The Gathering by Anne Enright
2008: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
2009: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2010: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
2011: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
2012: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
2013: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
2014: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
2015: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
2016: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
2017: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

When you despair at how your country treats migrants, remember: you made our lives bearable

It is time to say thank you to Britain. We should have been saying it all along. Thank you for looking after Irish women when the Irish state would not, when Irish doctors could say nothing, offer no help, no advice, not even a phone number. Thank you to the hospital in Liverpool that looked after so many Irish women whose babies suffered fatal foetal abnormalities. Thank you for making them not feel like pariahs because their babies were going to die, but for affording them the proper and compassionate medical treatment that your doctors’ code requires. Thank you for taking all that sorrow and pain and folding it into your hearts without complaint, or racism, and with a complete absence of nationalistic or governmental ire.

Related: I had to travel abroad to end my doomed pregnancy. Ireland must change its abortion law | Siobhán Donohue

Thanks for not blaming them, or calling them whores, or telling them to offer it up for the Holy Souls

In the coming weeks, voters in Ireland will have the chance to repeal the eighth amendment, which recognises the equal rights to life of a foetus and the mother during pregnancy. We must send a message to the world, the author declares

Recently I spoke to a reasonable, sane Irish woman who said that she was against abortion and because she was so reasonable and sane, I was curious what she meant by that. Was she against the morning after pill? Certainly not. What about chemical abortifacients? They did not really worry her too much. So, what about terminations before 12 or 13 weeks, the time when woman are often given the all clear to confirm their pregnancy to family and friends? This woman was not, all things considered, against terminations during this window, when pregnancy is not considered medically certain. She was also, just to make clear, in favour of abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, rape and incest. In 1983 this woman might have voted “against abortion”, despite the fact that she is not against abortion, especially if it happens during those weeks when the natural loss of an embryo is called miscarriage. She just found abortion, in general, hard to vote “for”. Had there been no referendum in 1983 – where people with a range of uncertainties were asked for a single “yes” or “no” – then limited abortion might well be available now in Ireland, in the way that the morning after pill is legally available and widely used.

The 1983 referendum was a little like the Brexit referendum – a population voting about something that seemed, on one side, clear, and on the other, contingent and hard to describe. As it turned out, the language problem worked both ways. In order to bring the issue to a vote, a new legal term had to be minted, one that did not appear in any previous laws. The eighth amendment to the Irish constitution acknowledges the right to life of “the unborn” and this seemed to invent a new category of rights-holder, possibly a new kind of person. By acknowledging the “equal right to life of the mother” an impregnated woman was changed from a human being into a relationship, that of motherhood, and a peculiar equivalence established. Pregnancy was a binary state, in which two souls temporarily shared the same blood supply. The question of who had it first was neither here nor there and a fertilised egg was a grown adult, temporarily inconvenienced by being a few hundred cells large.

How does access to abortion vary across the UK?

Acknowledging the 'right to life' of the unborn seemed to invent a new category of rights-holder – a new kind of person

Related: Ireland's government approves abortion referendum bill

In 2016, Britain and the US voted for the tribal and symbolic –in Ireland we had a tribal, symbolic vote in 1983

The book I am currently reading

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. I am on a retro jag.

Related: Chris Riddell illustrates the 2017 Forward poetry prize shortlist – in pictures

Amis is sublime on JG Ballard, writes Anne Enright, but she is less convinced by his views on Islam, ‘foreigners’ and war

Some writers make poor critics because they can only ever describe themselves, so it is greatly to his credit that Martin Amis really does write about Nabokov in his essays about Nabokov, and about Roth in the pieces about Roth. His portrait of Iris Murdoch is more about her presence in life than on the page, and this gap allows in some other thing that is hard to identify – is it sorrow? “I knew Iris; I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, secretive smile” – maybe it’s just Oxford.

His piece on JG Ballard is sublime for managing to illuminate the work of both writers at once, and should stand as a classic in any discussion about influence, but it is hard to see anyone other than Amis in a piece about Saul Bellow’s essays. This reads like a manifesto, a note to self. Bellow is “abnormally alive to social gradations”; a highbrow writer who nonetheless has “a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets”. He is a “rampant instinctivist”, whose “fictional and non-fictional voices intertwine and cross-pollinate”. Bellow had certain core principles: The writer must “resist the heavy influences” of people such as Flaubert and Marx as well as “the savage strength of the many”, because the imagination has an “eternal naiveté” that he cannot afford to lose.

Related: Why we love to hate Martin Amis

Related: Martin Amis rounds on Donald Trump and his 'army of neo-Nazis'

Anne Enright remembers a tender and compassionate chronicler of small town life

This is the news cycle, now, when a great writer dies. On Monday, just after 3pm, Penguin Ireland announces, on Twitter, the sad passing of William Trevor, at 88 years old. Thirty minutes later email and phone requests are sent out by Irish and British media for tributes and comment. At 6pm, the Irish Times online publishes an impressive roll call of Irish writers who pay real and heartfelt homage to someone whose work has clearly meant so much. There is no hesitation. Everyone is at their desk. Each author highlights an aspect of Trevor’s work that mirrors their own hopes and concerns, and a picture emerges of a writer who, in the faceted transparency of his prose, allows us to see an entire tradition. An hour later, the obituaries, lurking for some months – or years, perhaps – are published alongside critical appraisal and appreciations across the English speaking world. The news is four hours old, the day is not yet over. It is difficult to think of the poor man’s mortal self and the fact that he is gone through the many tributes now calling his work to mind.

The words that writers use about Trevor are full of yearning. He is described as wise, scrupulous, tactful, eloquent, a master craftsman. There is a regretful sense that, despite his great achievement, he was not placed at the centre of the Irish literary consciousness. Like many great writers he was an outsider, and as such was free, for the most part, from the struggle with language that besets and enlivens many of our best writers on the page.

It would be nice to get time to mourn the man before the public business of remembering the great writer begins

Related: William Trevor obituary

Ahead of the European referendum, we asked leading authors and thinkers from EU countries to write letters to Britain. Do they want us to stay, or are they ready to say goodbye?

It must be tempting to shut the doors and pull the curtains, keep the money under the mattress and think about the past

Let us not be fooled there is some better place, once we drift away. There isn’t. There is only the cold Atlantic Ocean

Imagine the famous picture, The Congress of Vienna, without the British delegation. Have they really left the table?

Those who knew Maeve Brennan described her as stylish or Irish; she went from celebrated New Yorker writer to obscurity in a nursing home. But her short stories, lovely and unbearable, live on

Maeve Brennan didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped. She did not have to become a bag lady for her work to be revived, though that possibly helped too. The story of her mental decline is terrifying for anyone who works with words, who searches her clean, sour sentences for some hint or indication of future madness, and then turns to check their own.

Brennan is, for a new generation of female Irish writers, a casualty of old wars not yet won. The prose holds her revived reputation very well, especially the Irish stories. These feel transparently modern, the way that Dubliners by Joyce feels modern. It is partly a question of restraint. Benedict Kiely, Walter Macken, perhaps even Mary Lavin, ran the risk of being “Irish” on the pages of the New Yorker, which is to say endearing. Frank O’Connor was the cutest of the lot, perhaps, as well as the most successful. Brennan remains precise, unyielding: something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page.

Her book was well received but did not make it across the Atlantic. It was a promising start for a career already over

No Irish paper published an obituary when she died, in a home where no one knew her history, not even Brennan herself

‘I am at the stage where everything is connected to this book, I keep bumping into it. I love this feeling’

9.00 Cup of coffee on the night table. Thank you!

9.20 Wake to drink cup of cold coffee. I am in Brooklyn. I have recovered from the jet lag, the winter vomiting bug and the stress of getting us all here, but it is still a bit of an adventure opening my eyes. I lie there, and try to figure out how to get my dressing gown out of the laundry basket upstairs without getting out of bed. Not as easy as you might think.