Post 2500 on The Reading Life. - Some Observations on this Occasion

This is the 2500th post on The Reading Life.  When I began my blog 5.5 years ago, I never dreamed I would push on to post 2500.  If you asked my wife and family they would have said, and I would have agreed, it will be amazing if he does 25 posts.   Everyone once and a while I have found it useful to reflect on what I am doing and hope to do.    So I will just indulge in some observations.

My Reviews

Of my posts, probably at most fifty are negative, most are very positive.  Part of the reason for this is I don't read a book or a story  without assuming I will like it.  If I don't like a book, I normally abandon it. Life is to short to read bad books and  I don't do bad reviews just to appear tough.  When I read something, I look for the good in it, true reading is not a passive activity.   

Free Books and Reviews

I like free books!  I pretty much only E Read so publishers and authors do not occur much expense in sending me a book.  I look at everything I am sent but a free book is not a guarantee of a review.  If I have explicitly told you I will post on your book I will.

Short Stories

I now have 91 collections of short stories on my E Reader, easy 2000 stories.   Some I bought but most were gifts from publishers.   There is great literature in these collections.  In March I will hopefully post on at least thirty Irish short stories, during Irish Short Story Month Year Five.  I have seven collections of short stories by authors from the Indian Subcontinent.  There are at least 100 new to me writers in these collections.  At some point I will begin reading them in a fairly systematic way.  The biggest reader draw to my blog is pre-WW II short stories from the Philippines.  I will keep reading them.  I will continue to seek out and read the stories of developing writers.  

Reading Plans

Near term I Will push on with Balzac's Comedie Humaine, I am almost half done.  I hope to reread Proust this year,  more European classics, I hope to read Faust, Part One, translated by David Constantine.  I will hopefully read a few American classics.  In a world wide literary shoot out,  The Reading Life will stand with the Irish.  

I will keep doing Q and A sessions.  I am close to 100 now.  I very much appreciate the writers who have  kindly done a session.  Doing a good author interview is not easy, at least for me.   If anything is of lasting value on my blog, it is the Q and A sessions.  

I am looking for more authors to do sessions with.  If you are interested, contact me.  I have 100,000 plus visits a month from serious readers of quality literature.  I have found sessions being regularly read years on.  

Mel u

Faust by Ivan Turgenev (1855, translated by Constance Garnett, 1899)

Recently I read Ivan Turgenev's beautiful novella, King Lear of the Steppes.  Yesterday I read another of his novellas, also echoing  on one of the great works of world literature, his Faust.  I don't want to try to decide which is better, both are more than worth your time.  I am sure Faust will be more meaningful to you, I have not, if you have read Goethe's Faust, Part One but maybe in a fabulous bonus it will motivate you to read Goethe.  

The basic plot is elegantly simple.  A man has been away for a long time.  He returns and a young girl has been transformed into a  young woman, now at seventeen married to one of his friends.  She has never read any literary works, her father did not belief they were suitable for girls.  The narrator gives her Faust and it very much changes how she sees the world.  The man falls in love with her but he does not pursue any dishonorable connections.  There are many wonderful descriptions of the Russian countryside.  This is a sublime  work.

As we read older works, we must accept that a seventeen year old girl is considered a grown woman and there seems to be no impropriety in a much older man being interested in or married to what we see as a girl.  There are a lot of reasons for these alterations in attitude.  Part of it is related to longer life expectancy producing fewer widowers and young widows.

                      Constance Garnett 

I will soon begin Turgenev's most famous novella, First Love.

I really enjoyed reading Faust.

Mel u

In Another Country - Selected Stories by David Constantine (forthcoming May 2015)

"Always in the short story there is a sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo-Christ, Socrates, Moses"-Frank O'Connor

I find posting on short story collections more challenging that posting on novels.  Many people who do post on short story collections write a line or two on a couple of the stories then generalize about the collection.  My procedure is to post at some length about enough of the stories to give a potential reader or buyer a feel for the collection and in the process I find my understanding of the collection is often increased and I am better able to recall it.   Each of the stories in this collection is a perfectly crafted work of art, product of an exquisite sensibility and shows a deeply rooted drive to produce near perfect beauty. 

"Tea at Midland"

"And the surfers skied like angels
enjoying the feel of the waters of the earth, they skimmed, at
times they lifted off and flew, they landed with a dash of spray.
She watched till the light began to fail and one by one the
strange black figures paddled ashore with their boards and
sails packed small and weighing next to nothing"

This story is set in the dining room of the Midlands Hotel on the coast of England.  It is a place of opulence with its beauty enhanced by its view of the ocean and by a frieze done by the artist Eric Gill. (I admit I did not know who Eric Gill was or why he is a controversial figure until I Googled him.)
A man and a woman, having an affair, are having tea.  The woman is fixated on the almost transcendent beauty of the vista of the ocean and the surfers. Suddenly this conversation occurs:

"So he said again, A pedophile is a
pedophile. That’s all there is to it.

She suffered a jolt, hearing him. And that itself, her
being startled, annoyed him more. She had been so intact and
absent."

 I admit I am confused but that was part of the artistry of this story, to make one wait to understand what the couple isfighting about.  I realize now much of the original audience for this BBC prize winning story story would have known they were talking about Eric Gill (1882 to 1940), the artist whose work famously decorated the Midlands Hotel as well as numerous other public buildings.  He was given the highest possible awards for an artist.  He became controversial after  death when it was revealed he had sexually molested his own children and was the worst sort of serial pedophile.  The man cannot respect Gill's  work, he cannot see beauty for its own sake.  There is so much in this five page work.  It is a coda on the nature of beauty and art and deals the liberating and escapist aspects of the pursuit of artistic perfection.  The quarrel between the man and woman is perfect.  At first I am tempted to think the man is just some kind of philistine but I think that is underestimating this story.  In a deeper way Eric Gill is almost like Poseidon or even John Bull reincarnated as a capricious cruel God destroying anything that gets in the way of imperial pleasure.  Maybe the man sees this and the woman is seduced by beauty and the need to feel  clever.  It would be hard to find a richer five pages than these.


"Strong Enough to Help"


"So he sat at the polished black table in the dining room,
among furnishings he had not chosen but had merely gone
on living with, and loneliness, hopelessness, deep deep sadness
possessed him utterly, froze him, the pen still in his hand, and
he seemed to be seeing the opposite wall and his father’s
copied painting of a painting of Wastwater, not just through
tears but through ice.
Then the doorbell rang.
The bell frightened him, it made no sense. In his own
house he was elsewhere, facing something he did not feel
equal to."

"Strong Enough to Help" is an amazingly profound story about a very lonely 55 year old man, living with the memories of his grandmother, mother and aunt.  He has always lived in his parents'i house.  He works as a file clerk in a hospital.  Every Saturday morning he gets up at 600 AM to write poetry for two hours.  His house is full of books of poems, he has been reading them all his life.  If ever a man lived the reading life it is him.  This Saturday morning he finds his mind is being inundated with the sayings of the women of the house, all deceased now.  Their words of wisdom and their homilies are overwhelming him.  He feels compelled to write them down.  Then Gladys from the Department of Culture is at his door and she wants to ask him some questions about his sports and cultural activities.  She has a lovely Caribbean accent.  She begins to ask him her questions. Do you do any sports?  Do you go to the  opera, the movies, musical shows, concerts or watch sporting events.  Everything is no.  Then she asks him if he uses the public library and yes he does it is central to his life.  (I felt more than a little sadness in this as I live in a city of ten million with no public libraries).  He loves reading poetry.  His reading is really his life.  You can tell he has been lonely so long he no longer even knows it.  In a way it is also a story about living among barbarians, among brutal fools who have never gotten up early on their day off to read, who look upon the reading of poetry as something for homosexuals, among morons.  I felt his deep pain and we know by now there is a man-child like quality to him when he told Gladys that once he liked a woman at work.  He gave her a book of poetry he had written and she told him to stop bothering her and he ended up being written up by the management.  

I have just touched the surface of this amazing story.  It is a classic reading life short story. This is the kind of story that keeps me blogging and reading on hoping to discover one more story that far transcends my ability to explain why it is so wonderful.  The ending of the story opens up some hope for the man.  I hope it happens for him.  As I read what his neighbors did to him when he asked them to just close their door as the noise they were making was making it hard for them to read, I wanted to get a bulldozer and flatten their house for their attack on a man I do feel a deep kinship for.  He is 55, he will always read and maybe as the story ends he will enter another phase of his life.  




"Mr. Carlton"

As the story opens Mr. Carlton is in his house in the company of his two adult daughters.  They have just returned from the cremation of his wife, their mother.  He tells them he is OK and they can go home.  Shortly after that he packs up his car, he notices a neighbor woman has seen him and he thinks "only one witness".  He send his daughters text messages, one at a time as he does not know how to send a group message saying he will be out of touch for a few days and not to worry.  That he did not know how to send a group message is a wonderful detail of a man trying to cope with a new world.  This is a strange and mysterious story. On his road trip, on a major highway, traffic is blocked in both directions and it looks like it is going to be a long time.  He decides to go for a walk.  Now this is for sure odd behavior for this very cautious man.  He comes upon an old house, he meets a pregnant woman and a heavy man.  He observes the garden like setting of the house and the old couple who live there.  He tries to reassure the pregnant woman.  Then it looks like traffic is moving again.  I like this story and am a bit baffled by the close so I will resist any facile conclusions other than to say this is a wonderful story about a lonely old man trying to deal with his fate.


"Ev's Garden"

"Ev's Garden" is another very interesting story that focuses on an isolated person.  Ev has been alone so long she does not even known she is lonely as she has never really experienced an alternative.  There maybe something wrong with her learning capacity or maybe because of the way she was moved around from one foster home to another she never received any real education.  When we first meet her she is working in a slaughter house.   Then the slaughterhouse closes down but in time a vegetable and fruit coop sets up shop there and Ev goes to work for them.  From there she moves on to running a garden with the help of people required to work for the government in projects because of petty crimes they have committed.  So we go from slaughter house to vegetable coop to a garden, in a cemetery with law breakers helping Ev produce a beautiful garden. She is expelled from the garden.  The symbolism of the story is very powerful.  It is another case where a marginal figure in a story appears in a role that echoes the a central character of history, Eve.   There are many wonderful details in this story, what we learn about the people who help Ev in the garden is truly masterful.  This also is a great short story.

"Asylum"

"Asylum" is another great story about isolates, people who somehow lack  the capacity to live in what some like to call the real world.  As the story opens Mr Kramer is visiting Madeleine in a confinement ward of a mental hospital.  She has been judged a possible danger to herself and others and a nurse is always present when they visit.   We never learn who Mr.  Kramer is to her-if he is an attorney, a social worker or there for his own reasons.  I have written quite a bit about the previous stories so I will just endorse this story as very high level work as are all the others.  Madeleine is somehow supposed to write as part of her therapy.  About half the story is taken up with a story she is writing about pirates that is a comment on her life and the nature of asylums.  When is an asylum a haven and when is it a prison?


"Alphonse"

     In "Alphonse" a man has been placed in an old people's home.  We feel his anxiety and his hatred of the place, to lose his life time of autonomy is a terrible end game.  He cannot act or talk as a rational adult, he is forced back into the role of child.   Something fabulous and wonderful happens in this story.   If you want to experience it, then read this story.

"Goat"


"Goat" is a simply amazing story, incredibly creative.  The plot can be told in a few lines.  A Canon (a vicar) is on his way to distribute free soup to a homeless man living in an abandoned, soon to be demolished school.  The man is called "Goat" because he has two bumps on his head that look like they might be the start of horns.   The canon meets a woman named Fay and takes her with him to meet Goat.  When they arrive, he has taken up residence in the headmaster's old room, Goat screams out not to come in unless it is Fay.   Goat is filthy dirty, his feet are black.
Constantine is his magnificent prose makes us feel we are entering the underworld.  

"But so too was the river under its casing of ice, he felt
the sluggish flood still moving underneath over the ooze, the
mud and all the deposits of bikes and trolleys, bottles, knives,
angry women’s rings and bombs from the last war. All that
and more, but not just that, also the gnarled streams in the
frozen hills to the west, hardened, silenced, clamped into
inertia, set there waiting under the sheer ice of the milky way
and billions of sharp points of unimaginable cold".

There are at least six myths and religious overtures one can easily find here and I am sure others could find many more.  The structure of the story is the creation of a master of the art.  I really want you to read this incredibly powerful story. It will stay in my mind for a very long time, I hope forever.  


Obviously I greatly admire this collection of short stories.  These stories are finely crafted works of art of the highest quality, they are exquisite.  I know nothing of the work or writing habits of the author but if these stories took twenty years to write, they are a very noble use of that time.  

I urge anyone who loves the short story to read this collection.  There are sixteen stories in all in the collection.  I read all of them.  If I must pick favorites I would say "Goat" for its perfect structure, its amazing recreation of old myths, its account of the forces that push people over the edge.  I also very much loved, and I admit it is because but for the grace of God I could see myself in the central character in "Strong Enough to Help".

Author Data

From the publisher

"I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started re-reading them again and again. They are gripping tales, but what is startling is the quality of the writing. Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be."-A.S. Byatt, The Guardian

"Rich and allusive and unashamedly moving."-The Independent

"Spellbinding."-The Irish Times

"An uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday . . . the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable . . . intelligent and well-turned."-The Times Literary Supplement

"Perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form."-The Reader

The first American publication by one of the greatest living fiction masters, In Another Country spans David Constantine's remarkable thirty-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare but intensely evocative dialogue, and their fearless exposures of the heart in moments of defiance, change, resistance, flight, isolation, and redemption, these stories demonstrate again and again Constantine's timeless and enduring appeal.

David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and translator. His collections of poetry includeThe Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Nine Fathom Deep, and Elder. He is the author of one novel, Davies, and has published four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, including the winner of the 2013 Frank O'Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. He lives in Oxford, where, until 2012, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

Mel u

"Domestic Peace" by Honore de Balzac (1830, a short story, a component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

"Domestic Peace" is set at a high society Paris party in 1810. The aristocrats of Paris, those who survived the terror, are all in a flutter waiting for Napolean to arrive.  A quarrel with Josephine has delayed him. There is a great depth of irony in the aristocrats all waiting for Napolean, an ex-corporal from Corsica, a man many at the party probably privately thought was not fit to work in their stables.

The best thing about the party is Balzac's masterful descriptions of the clothing and the elegant toilette of the women.  Of course everyone is evaluating the probable wealth of other party goers and the parents of marriage age children have their eyes open for prospects.  There is an interesting revenge plot on a cheating spouse.  

I want to briefly talk about the two English women who first made Balzac's Comedie Humaine available in English in reasonable translations.  I will talk more in another post on how the first English edition was published.

Clara Bell (1835 to 1927) was fluent in French, English, German, Russian, Dutch and Spainish.  

Ellen Marriage (1865 to 1946) was also a polyglot.  Eleven works in the comedy were considered too risqué for a woman to translate and for those she used the name "James Waring".  

Just like Constance Garnett, these two very hard working translators had a big behind the scene impact on the Anglophone literary world.  

40/91

Mel u

Aiden O'Reilly - A Question and Answer Session with the author of Greetings, Hero

Today I am very proud to be able to share with my readers a Q and A session with Aiden O'Reilly.  His debut collection of short stories, Greetings, Hero is receiving very good reviews.  I recently read and posted on his prize winning story, "To the Trade" (there is a link to the story in my post).  I will soon be doing a major post on his collection.

Greetings, Hero  was launched in London on Sept 1st, and given a Dublin launch in Hodges Figgis on Nov 12th with guest speaker Kevin Barry. 

If anything on my blog is of lasting value, it is my Q and A sessions.   They afford me the opportunity to ask people who know more than I do questions on topics that interest me. Some of the nearly 100 writers I have interviewed will one day be very famous writers, others will stay "hobby authors". In fact a number of the writers I have featured are beginning to take their place on the world stage. There are many factors other than literary talent that make one writer become famous and another give up or write in total obscurity.  I am hoping a picture of 21th century literary culture can be drawn from the Q and A Sessions.  

Author Bio

-- 
Aiden O’Reilly lived for nine years in Eastern Europe and is now based mainly in Dublin. He studied mathematics and did research into a quantum mechanical dynamical system. He has worked variously as a mathematics lecturer, translator, building-site worker, and property magazine editor. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Prairie Schooner, The Irish Times, and The Dublin Review. In November 2008 he won the biannual McLaverty Prize for short stories. 
He received an Arts Council bursary for 2012.
His short fiction collection "Greetings Hero" was published by Honest Publishing in September 2014.
http://bit.ly/bpvC84

www.aidenoreilly.com

My Post on "To the Trade" by Aiden O'Reilly

1.  "It is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art" - from  "Against Interpetation" by Susan Sontag

As a writer, how do you feel when people Interpet your work, attribute meaning to it?, see things in it you never thought about?  

Who is your ideal reader?  

Right up until the first reviews I had very little experience of people’s reactions to my work. I have had helpful feedback in an informal writing group, but that was generally about the prose and plot mechanics, not a holistic interpretation.Actually one friend did ask me, after reading one of my pieces, “Why do you wanna write a story about that?”  

However one of the first public reactions to my work, from writer and Colin Wilson specialist Geoff Ward, described it thus: “Greetings, Hero presents a rather pessimistic view of life and existence, often portraying wasted rather than realised, or even partially realised, human potential.”

This kind of reaction is more interesting to me than an analysis of prose style and structure. Some of my stories are finely balanced, presenting a situation or moment of decisionbut not nudging the reader into taking sides. Some of them were written some time ago, and since that time I have in effect taken sides on the dilemma presented.

Getting back to what Sontag says, it’s a good point (though I haven’t read her essay). But actually my own fiction, or at least some of it, does indeed have a core idea driving it.People are welcome to interpret my stories, I don’t dismiss it as a pointless activity. My ideal reader is someone who is trying to make sense things - someone maybe in their early twenties, maybe any age, who is still absorbing fiction anddipping into it as a kind of toolbox for living, someone who has not yet decided what the answers are.

2.  It seems more and more writers have MAs in creative writing, some PhDs.  Education is a great thing but is there a negative side to this, will it produce in few years a literary culture where lacking this degree will make it hard to get published?. Is it homogenizing writing styles? Will the day of the amateur writer who comes from nowhere and changes everything be over because of this?  Does it give you pause to know the University of Iowa M A in writing scholarships for students from outside the USA, were for years funded by the C. I. A? 

A friend in the states who is a professor of English literature at CUA cut out that article by Eric Bennett and posted it to me here in Dublin. From that you can guess he’s a bit older, or he would have checked and found that it’s online.

The mention of the CIA in the subheadline made me think it might be some sort of conspiracy theory, but it’s actually a well-researched very reasonable article. 
There are all sorts of forces which are eroding the vitality of writing and fiction and making it modest in scope. As Bennett puts it: ‘reduced intellectual engagement and a narrow definition of what is considered literary’. He talks about writing that gets you seeing and tasting and touching but never gets you thinking. I think these trends have happened in Ireland and the UK too, where the influence of writing MAs is less. So I reckon something other than Iowa (and the CIA) is to blame.

Personally I love the idea of writers emerging from outside what you might call the main track of Eng lit / journalism. Itgets my interest if I hear a writer has worked in the post office or manual labour, or as a scientist or philosopher.

3.   Where can we find you online?

www.aidenoreilly.com and Facebook

4. Besides reading and writing, what are some of your hobbies or interests. ?

Cycling, playing go, walking along deserted roads or to places people don’t normally walk to. I walked out of London a long time ago, and recently I heard Will Self has the same habit.

5.   how and when did you begin to write? 

I read the notebooks of Dylan Thomas in the local library.They were published in book form, but with scored lines and edits retained. They had long rambling poems with short lines.Dylan used to write them every single day. I thought to myself, “My god, he was writing such good stuff at fifteen, a whole year younger than me”.

6.  How impacted is your creativity by the cycles of the seasons?

The cold and damp bothers me now. I used to be invulnerable. Itend to agree with Heraclitus, that the dry soul is the wisest and best.  

7.   Who are some of your favorite contemporary short story writers, poets or novelists?  What classic writers do you find your self drawn to reread.  If a neophyte writer in your primary focus were to ask you who to read, what might you suggest?

I love Philip O Ceallaigh’s work, and Mike McCormack’s stories. Adam Marek’s stories are always fascinating. I was impressed more recently with Jennifer Egan’s prose, both the stories and her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, it really took me by surprise. I’ve always admired the depth of Joyce Carol Oates’ vision and the range of her skills. I’m beginning to read Michel Faber now.

As regards the classic, I read William Blake’s poetry again and again. I’m also starting Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Gameagain. It’s been a while since I read Dostoyevsky and I’m going to get around to reading him again. He’s one of only a few writers of whom I can say I’ve read most of their work.I’ve read a lot of Joyce Carol Oates, but I still don’t think I’ve reached the half way mark.

To the neophyte writer, I’d say read Goethe. He’s a massive cultural icon but nobody seems to read him much in English.

8.   Frank  O'Connor in The Lonely Voice:  A Study of the Short Story said short stories seem to be about marginalized people, the lonely, those with little voice in society.   Do you think he is on to something illuminating about the format?  Why is there so much loneliness in the short story?

Interesting question, I have to agree there are more marginalised and lonely people in short stories. I suppose a whole novel about the powerless is harder to sustain. Chekov in one of his stories has a character say that the peasants in the olden days used to be happy and have a great dignity to them. Now they had become poor and deprived citizens. In other words, you are not marginalized until you become life could be otherwise.

Yes, short stories are certainly a great tool for shining a light into the life of someone who is chiefly defined (or self-defined) by what they are not, or have not achieved.

If little happens in a person’s life, it’s a bigger challenge to make a novel out of it.

9.  I sometimes wonder why such a disproportionate amount of the regarded as great literature of the world is written in the colder temperate zones rather than in the tropics.   How big a factor do you think the Irish Weather is in shaping the literary output of itswriters.?   I cannot imagine The Brothers Karamazov being written on tropical island, for example. 

Maybe it’s simply because the wealthier, more powerful countries are better at drawing attention to their writers and providing the conditions for them to write and be read. Back in ancient times the greatest writers were – naturally enough – in Greece and Rome. You say you can’t imagine The Brothers Karamazov being written on a tropical island. But think of the Southern Gothic genre for example, with Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, and the grotesque / spooky / magical realist elements to that style. And then think that this stuff was written in a subtropical zone of brilliant sunshine and wide open spaces.
So I’m not convinced that the Irish weather has any direct influence, attractive as it may be to speculate about the capricious changes of wind, precious moments of sunshine amongdays of gloom, and relate these to supposed characteristics ofthe Irish soul.

10.   Many cultures are permeated with references to seemingly supernatural creatures, some kind some manavolent.  Do you feel any sense of these entities in the world you look out on in your daily life or in your writings?  Do you sense a continuity between the natural and supernatural worlds.  Is a belief in the supernatural just escapism and wishful thinking?  Is the believe in occult systems the refuge of the powerless?

For me the world is bizarre and unfinished and baffling enough without any need of supernatural elements to spice it up.Realism is maybe not enough to understand the world. And if you think things through rigorously, if there is a supernatural realm and you find out the rules that govern it, then it becomes just an extra part of the ordinary world. Each decision at any moment of the day is an intrusion of what is beyond the natural. The concepts we use to make sense of the world were created by the imagination of others.
No, I’m not attracted to occult systems. They were in vogue in the early 20th century. Maybe they reappear in modern form asconspiracy theories and cults, and as political extremism.

11.   These are loaded question coming from me, but with the decline of print reviews, are book blogs becoming more important?  Professional critics have denigrated book bloggers as reviewers without credentials,book bloggers have replied professional reviewers just don't like bloggers doing for free what they ask money for doing? Reviewers do it for money, bloggers for love.  What is your reaction to this?  Do you join book tours or send bulk mailings out asking for reviews?  

I’m a big fan of book review websites, particularly those that have built up a reputation for being independent. I read them and rely on them far more than on print reviews. Part of the reason is simply that it’s harder to access print reviews online, you might have to pay etc. I guess print reviews still have more prestige, though I can’t say I’ve noticed a higher standard of professionalism. A lot of print reviews are by writers themselves, and not by the professional reviewers you mention. The independence of the reviewer is to me more important than the expertise or the reputation of the publication. Yes, I sent out emails to six or seven of my favourite review sites, letting them know I have a book out. I have reviews at Quadrapheme and at Bookmunch.

12.  When you write, do you picture an audience or do you just write?  

No audience. Just a disembodied listener who might interrupt every so often and say ‘that doesn’t make sense’.

13.  What are the last three novels you read?  Last three movies?  do you have any favoriteTV shows?  Are there literary works you find reverberate in your mind in happy or in dark times?

Last 3 novels were Banville’s Book of Evidence (for the second time), Mysteries by Knut Hamsun, and Miss Garnet’s Angel

by Salley Vickers. That last was one I bought at the Cork short story festival. But actually most of the books I’ve been reading recently have been short story collections. 
I don’t have a television. The licence man used to come by every year, and then he gave up and I never saw him again.

14.  Amazon - as a reader I like it a lot-  but is it a monster slowly taking down small publishers and independent book stores, controlling what books succeed? Is it bad for authors?

Very few things in the world are black and white. Every change brings both benefits and drawbacks, and there are always going to be those who fear change. But one thing is clear: the concentration of such power by a single organisation is bad, particularly in the arts.

15.Are you open to  e mail, Facebook or Twitter, contact with your readers or do you fear stalkers or don't want to be bothered?

Back six or seven or nine years ago I used to post my stories on my website, because there was nowhere to publish them. (Many were too long for magazines.)  My email address was on the page. Nobody ever contacted me, though the stories werethere for years. Aliens now, I worry about them, and zombies,there could be a zombie around the next corner. But I haven’t worried about stalkers.

Update some weeks later: At a literary event a month after the book launch a guy approached me in the pub and said he was impressed by my writing and looked forward to reading the book. This puzzled me. He explained he’d read the online stuff. I was still puzzled - I had never thought of people reading them.

16.  Have you attended creative writing workshops and if you have share your experiences a bit please.  

They are great, particularly if you begin one with few expectations. It’s surprising what you might learn, a new appreciation for a type of fiction you don’t normally read, or simply to realise the vast range of reasons why people write and what they hope to achieve. They don’t always make you a better writer, but it won’t kill you to try one.

17. Not long ago I was sent several very hostile messages from Irish writers demanding to know why I had posted on the works of other writers and not them.  Some suggested I had been influenced  by some sort of shadowy group to ignore their work. I was informed there is a small elite group who decides who gets reviewed, published or receives grants and it was also  suggested they had sent me negative feedback on writers I should ignore. What is mentally behind this?  Is there anything like a Literary Mafia within your area.?

Well, if I choose not to answer this one it could be because I’m afraid of the Literary Mafia, No, there is no such circle of influence I am aware of. I’m actually amazed you got messages like that. Did they sign their names? Maybe they know something I don’t know. I got an Arts Council bursary in 2012– maybe I’m in the mafia and don’t know it? And a week ago the Irish Times reviewed my book. How did I arrange for that to happen?

18.  Quick Pick Questions

A.  tablets or laptops or smart phones?

Smart phones

B.  E readers or traditional books?

E-readers

C.  American Fast Food- love it, hate it, or once and a while?

Once in a while.

D.  Cats or dogs?

Dogs

E.  best city to inspire a writer- Paris, London, Dublin, or?  

Barcelona

F.  Walt Whitman or Willam Butler Yeats?   

Yeats

G.  Roberto Bolano or Gabriel Cruz Marquez ?

Marquez

K.  Winter or Summer? Day or Night?

Summer nights

I.  Would you rather witness opening night for Waiting for Godot, King Lear, Playboy of the Western World or Ubo Roi?

King Lear

19,How important is it to you to have readers?  Does it matter. ?

I’ve got used to not having readers. At this stage I wouldn’t know what to say to a reader of my work.

20.  Is the notion that someone is a writer of "Women's" literature just one step above calling their work chic lit?  Statistics show that women read much more fiction then men, why is this so?  Is it patronizing to refer to a work as a great work of literature by a woman, a gay, a person of color as no one ever seems to say War and Peace is a great white men's work?

Yes, “women’s literature” sounds bizarre and potentially demeaning to me. The more so because you don’t hear of ‘men’s’ literature. I am surprised to see that some bookshops have a separate section for ‘women’s literature’.

As regards women reading more than men, I can well believe it. I don’t think there’s any innate reason for this, that it means women are more attuned to language or anything like that.

Yes, it is patronising to refer to a work as a great novel by a woman etc. but seriously, does anybody actually do that?  

21.If you found out that a favorite writer of yours was grossly bigoted would you lose interest in them?

Interesting question. I might not lose interest, but I think Iwould read their work in a different way. I tend to go for writers who have something driving them, some world-view they are trying to convey through their writing, or something biting them. I used to read the likes of Hemingway, Hesse, Camus, and with such writers their work evolves but keeps coming back to tackle the same issues, the same search for truth or expression. On the other hand if the author of a cold war thriller turned out to be a notorious misogynistic homophobe it probably wouldn’t bother me much. I probably wouldn’t be reading that kind of book in the first place.

22. Is the large number of pedagological professionals involved in literary reviewing a limiting thing, with the reviewers stuck at the intellectual, cultural and emotional level of their pupils? Does the need to "teach" literature force interpretations and paraphrasing as the standard modes to view literature? Or worst yet, political interpretations based on biographical data?

The strange thing about literature as an academic subject is that the object of study is not the same as what the writerwas concerned with. If you study philosophy or physics, you are following the same thought processes as Kant or Landau. But the problems that the writer wished to tackle or portrayin his/her writing, these might not be addressed at all in an academic study. For example the writer might be confronting a crisis of lack of faith, or trying to make sense of sudden change, or just trying to drag people down to his/her own pessimistic view.

However I didn’t study English lit at college, so I’m not too familiar with how it’s done. I have tried the odd time to tackle books on critical theory, and it’s fascinating stuff in small doses. 

End

I offer my great thanks to Aiden O'Reilly for his very interesting carefully considered responses. I hope to be able to follow his writings in the coming years.  

Mel u

Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (2014, a novella, science fiction )

Prior to reading Karen Russell's science fiction novella Sleep Donation I read and posted on four of her short stories.  I liked them all very much.  I was a little disappointed in Sleep Donation, I did not enjoy it as much as the short stories but I am still glad I took the time (about 1.5 hours) to read it. 

It is about a future, not to distant, where many people have terrible insomnia,  when they do sleep they are unable to dream.  As this gets more and more wide spread, how this is done is never made, a method is found which allows those who can sleep to donate deep sleep to others.  The protagonist works for a nonprofit agency that connects those who can sleep with those who no longer can.  It all gets complicated and political.  I just found it hard to believe in the world of Sleep Donation.  I did not find characters of much interest.  

I read this solely because Karen Russell wrote it and that is what pushed me on to finish it.  It is not terrible and the description of the environmental corruption that might be at the root of the sleep is very good.  

Such Good Girls - The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R. D. Rosen (2014)

Such Good Girls - The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R. D. Rosen is an important addition to holocaust literature from which all but experts will learn a lot. Not long ago I read and posted on a very interesting book, The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross in which he told us that of the 1000 or so Jews who lived and survived all of the Nazi era in Berlin, each one depended on the help of Gentile  Germans to survive.  Some hid in plain sight, passing as Christian, others spent the years hidden in houses by hosts risking their own lives to help Jews.

In Such Good Girls we learn that while 70% of adult European Jews were killed during the holocaust, 90% of Jewish children were killed by the Germans.  In one horrific scene, we learn Germans drained the blood from Jewish children for transfusion into German soldiers, thus reversing the facts in a leading anti-Semetic myth.  

Anne Frank is the image that first comes to mind when one thinks of children hidden from the Germans.  Of course she did not survive.  Such Good Girls centers on three Jewish girls that survived.  We follow them from the hiding years up to their mid-seventies, living in America.

Sophia's mother, when she was five, totally induced her daughter to believe she was a Catholic from a family that hated Jews.   Her family did not at all "look Jewish" so this passing strategy worked, but Sophia had to totally be made to hate Jews for it to work, to avoid a fatal slip of the tongue.  After the war, in a very poignant scene, her mother tells her of her real identity.  It is very hard for her to accept it but in time she does.  She eventually emigrated to New York City and became a highly regarded radiology oncologist physician.  

Flora and her family were protected and sheltered by a Christian family.  She stayed hidden through the Nazi years.  She also moved to America and became a psychologist, pioneering in the study of hidden child survivors.  All of her family but her died in the holocaust.  

Carla lived through the war years hidden by a Dutch family.  Also moving to New York City, she became a psychologist and helped found an international organization of hidden child survivors.

Rosen does a very good job of letting us see the long lasting impacts their childhood experienced had on the three women.  We follow their lives from terrified and bewildered young girls to imminent professionals.  All worked in professions dedicated to helping others.  

One of the many fascinating elements in the book was the first large meetings of child survivors.  It was deeply moving to me to read of these meetings.  

This is a very good book, there is much in it I have left out about the years in hiding, the immediate post war period, the horrors of the Germans, and the common psychological traits of child survivors grown into adults. 

Biography Of Author 

R. D. Rosen has written or co-authored numerous books spanning different genres—from Edgar Award-winning mystery novels to bestselling humor books to narrative nonfiction, including Psychobabble (a word he coined in 1975) and A Buffalo in the House. He has appeared as a humorist and satirist on PBS, HBO, and NPR's All Things Considered.  (From Harper Collins)

As I read of the life lasting impact on the psyche of the child survivors I was brought strongly to mind the experiences of another survivor of a holocaust, Dana Hui Liu who spent five years in a labor camp during the years of the killing fields of Cambodia.  After posting on her very powerful memoir of these times, My Mother and the Tiger - A Memoir of the Killing Fields I was privileged to do a Q and A session with her and much of her thinking mirrors that of that of the survivors talked about in Rosen's book.

My Q and A Session with Dana Liu, a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields 

I strongly urge anyone interested in holocaust related issues to read this interview.  

Mel u