The Forgotten WaltzAnne Enright Vintage, £7.99
“Once we had begun, how were we supposed to stop?” This is the question at the heart of this tale of love and loss in boomtime Ireland. Gina, the narrator of this latest novel from Booker winner Anne Enright, is looking back on the summer of 2002, when life was all bottles of Krug, short-haul flights and 100 per cent mortgages. That was also the year she first set eyes on Sean Vallely at a barbecue in her sister’s garden. And while the risks of getting involved with a married man – not to mention the complications of his troubled daughter and frosty wife – were clear to Gina, they were also unavoidable. When his daughter catches them kissing, things get complicated. Set against the reckless atmosphere of a country gambling with its future, The Forgotten Waltz delicately weaves the personal and political into a wry, tender exploration of family, marriage and the price of passion.
Sorcha Hamilton
Half Blood Blues
Esi Edugyan
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99
The most gripping passages of this novel are set in Berlin, in 1939, as a group of black jazz musicians struggles to adjust to a rapid change in fortune. Their previously popular music is banned, given that it’s deemed a plague designed to weaken Aryan youth. A walk back from the old Jewish baths, a rare public space still open to black people, ends with a savage beating by jackbooted thugs. Their most gifted musician, a black German, is now stateless because, by legal definition, a German is never black. As the narrator, a light-skinned black American, says: “What is luck but something made to run out.” Despite the tightening noose, the narrator still prefers the housepainter’s Berlin to Jim Crow’s Baltimore. The book is weakened by its structure, which skips to wartime Paris and contemporary America and Europe, but I’m in a minority: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year.
Mary Feely
Lucky Break
Esther Freud
Bloomsbury, £7.99
This novel moves effortlessly between the lives of four drama students in their pursuit of acting success. Nell, homely and self-deprecating, struggles to regain her confidence after being thrown out of drama school. Ambitious Dan wrestles to balance his career and family life with the rebellious and overlooked Jemma, and Charlie painfully discovers that her confidence and beauty aren’t everything. Freud pitches her narrative with acuity and zing, following the characters through humiliating screen tests, lonely LA film sets and dismal regional tours. The self-obsessiveness could be irritating (without irony, Dan asks if it’s possible “to be a great actor and still be loyal to your wife”) but Freud undercuts the navel-gazing with real compassion and humour, and exposes the central conundrum: how can a business that purports to understand and illuminate the human condition so demoralise the very people who create it? “No thanks,” Dan tells his agent when he is offered a theatre job, “I can’t afford it.”
Michèle Forbes
The Flame and the Candle: War in Mayo 1919-1924
Dominic Price
Collins Press, €14.99
The increasing number of studies of the experiences of individual counties is greatly broadening our understanding of those pivotal events in Irish history, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Dominic Price’s claim in his introduction that his book “dispels forever the myth that little or nothing happened in Mayo” during those fateful years is fully justified. He examines the structures and personnel of the RIC and IRA in the county, the success of the republican courts, and provides eyewitness accounts of Black-and-Tan and British military atrocities. Detailed descriptions of IRA ambushes are provided, with shortages of weapons and ammunition being a constant problem. A majority of Mayo TDs voted against the Treaty and the county council and local IRA were also mostly anti-Treaty, so the county saw much action during the Civil War. Price draws particular attention to some National Army indiscipline throughout that tragic time. This meticulously researched and well-written book is a welcome addition to studies of the period.
Brian Maye
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
Lev Loseff, translated by Jane Ann Miller
Yale University Press, £18
The academic and poet Lev Loseff takes the reader through the fascinating life and work of his fellow Russian poet and friend Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). As a child, Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad; he then opted to be an itinerant worker under the Soviet system, found himself regarded as a “parasite” by the state, became a poet and cause célèbre, and ended up as an exile in the US and a recipient of the Nobel prize for literature. Loseff provides much insight into Brodsky’s personal and literary life under Stalin and Khrushchev, as well as detailed commentary on the development of Brodsky’s poetry and people’s reaction to it, not all of which was complimentary. The pace of the narrative is quite fast and Brodsky’s transformation from would-be poet to world-renowned poet is startling.
Our own Seamus Heaney pops up, described oddly as “Anglo-Irish”: rural Derry meets Russia. It is indeed a small, poetic world.
Pól Ó Muirí
