To The World of Men, Welcome by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

To The World of Men, Welcome by Nuala Ní Chonchúir   (2011, 160 pages, a collection of short stories)

Irish Short Story Month

March 1 to March 31

Nuala Ní Chonchúir 

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is one of my favorite contemporary short story writers.  I have previously posted on two of her collections of short stories, Nude and Mother America.   Additionally I have had the privledge of interviewing her in conjuction with a post on her award winning collection of poetry, The Juno Charm.


To The World of Men, Welcome is a powerful collection of short stories dealing with the pains and pleasures of love, in many forms.  Obviously I like and greatly admire the work of the author, given that this will be the forth book by her on which I have posted.

As I have said before, in posting on collections of short stories I like to first talk about a representative number of stories and then go back and generalize about the collection and say who I think might like it.  In this case I will say who just want the bottom line that I endorse this book for anyone who relishes a good short story and is interested in love, sexual and otherwise.  



"The Last Man" 

"The last man she tumbled with was special:  the whole of his body was made up of a tattoo of our Lady of Guadalupe".

"The Last Man" starts us off with a very intriguing story about adultery  from the point of view of the woman.   The married woman is in bed with a man with a tattoo of a saint, The Lady of Guadalupe.  She loves pictures of saints, they have always made her feel safe.   She enjoys looks at all of the tattoos of religious icons on the body of the man.  Ever since Francine got married she has felt invisible.  Her husband's work takes him away for long periods and they have no children but he does not want her to work.  She is so bored she starts going out to clubs at night when he is not home.  Drink and loneliness lead her to a series of very short affairs, one night stands mostly.  Her husband finds her out and a terrible rue occurs.  I do not want to spoil any of the conclusions to this story, but I will say the phrase "The Last Man" has a wonderfully ironic meaning in this story.  "The Last Man" for sure makes you want to read the rest of the collection.



"The Trip"

"Edward was a raw open wound of a man, hurt oozed out of every part of him."

Edward and Patrick had been friends for a long time even though Patrick's wife really did not like him, nor did any other women according to Edward.   Edward has just broken up with yet another woman because like all the others, she was a horrible bitch that treated him like dirt.  All of his conversations are full of anger at women.  Patrick tells him he just needs to get away for the weekend and proposes they go on a boys only trip over the protests of his wife.  They go to a small rural hotel and check in with the lady receptionist.  Edward, of course, does not like her.  Latter they go back to the office and ask her where the nearest pub is and they end up there.  They see some women but things don't work out.  Of course.  The end to the story is simply amazing with his power to devastate three, at least lives in just a moment.   I never saw it  coming. 


"Foal"

"Foal" is a very sensitively realized story about the relationship of a farmer to his very old mare and her new born sure to die before the next day foal.   Farmers, rangers and such have in many cases a forced paradox in their relationship to their animals.  They love them but they must be hard and practical and they also sell them to be eaten.  "Foal" does a brilliant job of bringing these forces to the surface for us.


"Isa and Clovis"

"Isa and Clovis" is set in rural Ireland.  Isa is a fifteen year old girl.  Her mother has recently died and her father has withdrawn into himself.   She has taken over managing the family poultry business, feeding the chickens, collecting the eggs and selling them.   You can tell doing this means a lot to her and gives her a source of pride.   One day her father is found dead, face down in a pond.  Isa is now the sole owner and proprietor of the land.    There is a neighboring boy, not much older than she, that has been asking about her.  It was interesting to see how a match was made between them.  There are beautiful images from the Irish country side in this story and the ending is really well done.    You have to admire and believe in the strength of Isa.

"I, Caroline"

"I, Caroline" is told in the first person by a woman who never gets taller than one foot seven inches.  When she was just a young girl her parents sold her for twenty pounds to a man who planned to exhibit her in a traveling show.  In one very sad scene a man who is making new clothes for her undresses her and appears to fondle her.   The story is told by her but it after he death.  We see the kind of terribly lonely life she had being basically part of a show of human oddities.  When she dies while barely out of her teens her owner sells her body to a museum for much more than he paid for her.  They dissect her and then boil her body to get just the skeleton and exhibit her for all to see next to the skeleton of a man over seven foot tall.  This is a brilliant very moving story.  

"To The World of Men, Welcome"

The title story of the collection centers on an Irish woman working on a bar in Switzerland.   She is always being asked out by the patrons and their are lots of tourists.   She has a kind of boyfriend, a Turkish man but she has told him she does not want to get serious with anyone.  She also meets a Swiss soldier.  She ends up in bed with him also.  Of course this leads to lots of drama.  The ending of this story, like that of the others, is really moving and I wondered how it left the woman feeling.

"The Ouse's Call"

The Ouse is a river in the North Yorkshire region of England.  It took a lot, I think, of daring on the author's part, to write this story centering on the last days of Virginia Woolf.  It took me until I saw her husband was named "Leonard" to realize who the story was about.  We see Woolf's fears that she has lost her ability to write, lost her creativity and no longer had a feeling of connection to the life forces that once propelled her onward.  It was very moving to me when she began to speak of the death of her father.  Nuala Ní Chonchúir does not try to explain why Woolf choose to drown herself she just lets us enter at least the margins of her mind.



There are nine-teen stories in the collection.  I enjoyed everyone of them.   The author does a wonderful job letting us see the pains and the pleasures of different kind of loves.  Many of the stories deal with the loss of a love or the hope that a new lasting one has begun.   They are beautifully written and are a worthy contribution to the glorious tradition of the Irish short story.


Author Data

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet, living in Galway county. She has published four collections of short fiction, three poetry collections - one in an anthology, and one novel. Nuala holds a BA in Irish from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in Translation Studies (Irish/English) from Dublin City University. She has worked as an arts administrator in theatre and in a writers' centre; as a translator, as a bookseller and also in a university library. Nuala teaches creative writing on a part-time basis.

You can learn more about the author and her work at her very well done website.