Irish Fiction: According to itself, Silenzio Press is on a mission: "to rescue literary authors who are deemed too commercially risky to be published by established publishers".
This is, in these days of the dictatorship of the bestseller list, an undeniably admirable endeavour; and this book begins in promising fashion with a crisp quote from William S. Burroughs: "Every word I write is autobiography. Every word is fiction".
There follows a meditation on the nature of experience and perception, in the course of which every novelistic convention the reader might care to expect - such as a decent plot or semi-interesting characters - is deliberately unravelled. Joyce, you will remember, did this with intimidating brilliance, as - to a lesser extent and with varying degrees of success - did Faulkner, a hatful of French nouveau romanciers, and Burroughs himself.
The trouble is, it's not terribly nouveau any more. If you're going to do it nowadays - as opposed to writing a sure-fire chick-lit success or, God help us, yet another memoir - you need to do it spectacularly well. Like Michel Houellebecq, perhaps - of whom there are distinct echoes here.
Traynor's irascible narrator devotes acres of space to graphic depictions of sex but, in a book which is ostensibly about exile and wandering, grumbles about the need to describe the cities visited by his anti-hero/alter ego/putative twin brother.
On page 263, he embarks on a series of review snippets of his own book which would be hilarious, if it didn't come after 262 pages of such brain-numbing sequences as: "The cuticle is cute, but is there anything subcutaneously? The epidermis is epideictic, but is there a dermis below? Like an onion, you can peel back layers. Like a snake, this coat can be shed . . . Deep down, I'm superficial. On the surface, I'm deep."
I know I have a small - even tiny - mind. But as I struggle to think of something constructive to say about The Myth of Exile and Return, the words "life", "too short" and "this sort of thing" keep bubbling merrily to the top of it.
The Myth of Exile and Return By Desmond Traynor Silenzio Press, 296pp. €15
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
