The writing was going tremendously. I was due to deliver my third novel. The central philosophy underpinning all of my work to date was that places exerted their own feelings — nonsense, of course, half-thought-out old guff that sounded okay at literary events but now, here in Aldo’s cottage, there was incontrovertible evidence that it was the case. In this place I was calm, lucid, settled in my skin, and apparently ravishing. Elsewhere I was, as ever, a bag of spanners.~ Old Stock
This idea that “places exerted their own feelings” does seem to be a recurring theme in Kevin Barry’s work, and to the extent that I have long had a fondness for Irish storytellers writing about their narrow, oppressed lives in mouldering pebbledash cabins under depressing, grey skies, I was delighted to find that the majority of the short stories in That Old Country Music are set in and around Barry’s west coast hometown of Sligo, in the shadow of Ox Mountain, weedy with unlucky whitethorn. For the most part, these stories are melancholic and haunting — exploring loneliness, death, and the yearning for love — and the only thing keeping most of these characters out of the bughouse is their ability to find release in moments of dark humour. This is a truly strong collection of engaging stories and I’ll let Barry speak for himself from here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Coast of Leitrim
Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome.
Deer Season
It was the idea of him rather than the fact — the idea of a long, thin, sombre man, in a soak of noble depression, smelling of lentils, in a damp pebbledash bungalow, amid a scrabble of the whitethorn trees, a man ragged in the province of Connacht and alone at all seasons, perhaps already betrothed to a glamorous early death, and under some especially mischievous arrayment of the stars he was all that a girl could ask for.
Ox Mountain Death Song
The Canavans — they had for decades and centuries brought to the Ox elements that were by turn very complicated and very simple: occult nous and racy semen.
Saint Catherine of the Fields
Love, we are reminded, yet again, is not about staring into each other’s eyes; love is about staring out together in the same direction, even if the gaze has menace or badness underlain.
Toronto and the State of Grace
The moving sea gleamed; it moved its lights in a black glister; it moved rustily on its cables.
Who’s Dead McCarthy
Why are you so drawn to it? To death? Why are you always the first with the bad news? Do you not realise, Con, that people cross the road when they see you coming? You put the hearts sideways in us. Oh Jesus Christ, here he comes, we think, here comes Who’s-Dead McCarthy. Who has he put in the ground for us today?
Roma Kid
There were times of great change beyond the woods, but it did not matter, and the noises of the towns sometimes grew frantic — it did not matter; she read her books — and there were times of mobbed voices and great migrations — it did not matter — and there was the time of the fires across the lakes — it did not matter — and the gaseous blue of their after-glare, but all of it soon faded again and passed, and did not matter.
Extremadura (Until Night Falls)
I used to be afraid of the dogs but they got used to me. Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and notes of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places. My once reddish hair has turned a kind of old-man’s green tinge with the years and this is more of it. What the ramifications have been for my stomach you’re as well not to know. I have very little of the language, even after all this time, but the solution to this is straightforward — I don’t talk to people. This arrangement I have found satisfactory enough, as does the rest of humanity, apparently, or what’s to be met of it in the clear blue mornings, in the endless afternoons.
That Old Country Music
She looked out across the high fields. Just now as the cloudbank shifted to let the sun break through the whitethorn blossom was tipping; the strange vibrancy of its bloom would not tomorrow be so ghostly nor at the same time so vivid; by tacit agreement with our mountain the year already was turning. The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the tune’s circle and turn — it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.
Roethke in the Bughouse
By the time they get you in the bughouse, usually, the worst of it is over. His left hand rests on his fat belly to feel out each breath as it moves through his ribs and eases him. His right hand lies limply by his side but the index finger is busy and scratches quick patterns on the grey starched sheet — it makes words.
