Reviews

• Best book I've read for ages...

  This book was the most absorbing read I have had in a long time. I found it by chance as I'd been looking through Amazon for a recent literary novel to snuggle down with. Having started by looking at books that had been short listed or won awards I came across Eimear's debut novel, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, but decided that the subject matter would be too much to cope with. The Lesser Bohemians was due to be released a few days later, so I peeked in the Look Inside and fell in love with the writing style and the starting point and narrative of a young woman who has moved to London to study drama. I ordered it on the strength of that. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down. It was captivating, in all kinds of ways. It is written in an unusual style with lots of quirks that would ordinarily have been irritating, such as incomplete sentences, rambling thought-led prose, ad-hoc intermittent rhythm and rhyming and (oh sin of sins) speech without speech marks. But all of those things merge to convey the mood of the times, the situation, the characters' outlooks and the complexity and confusion of it all for a young woman thrown into her adult life where the only person she can rely on is herself. For all of that, I found it a charming, emotional, evocative and touching tale of human want, will and truths. It lingers on some sensitive issues when delving into the history of the main characters (how many Jeremy Kyle shows could they appear in?) and I'm not going to spoil the surprise here by telling you what they all are, but the harrowing recollections of an abusive mother's behaviour and actions are a difficult read even if they are relevant to the story. However, it is a tale of romance, lust, seduction, mutual understanding, love of all kinds, and the realisation by all involved that true love is the most beautiful gift and does not necessarily arrive swiftly, smoothly or without its own repercussions on the soul. It also tells of undiscussed decisions that are made to protect lovers and the beloved, as well as the self. It is written so that you feel you are inside someone else's head, looking out at their life and surroundings. If you read it quickly it flows like a stream of consciousness and you find you can translate it almost like when you're on holiday and a second language starts to dawn on you when you listen to it being spoken. It is a youthful, optimistic story, albeit with bravery and fragility showing as blatantly as it does when you are young and travelling without a compass or a map, or any idea of where you are heading. Quite miraculous for words printed on a page. I've sent a copy to my best friend.

• Without being prurient, it's all about sex

  Occasionally it happens that I hear an author interview on the radio or in a newspaper and am intrigues enough to order the book in response. This book is one case where the instant order provided instant reading gratification. Einear McBride describes a growing--and graphic -- sexual awareness and exploration of a young 18 year old acting student with an established actor twice her age. McBride creates her own grammar without much punctuation which is part of the initial mystery for thte reader. As the older man begins to confess a sordid childhood and turbulent life, the story and the prose style become clearer. As the veil pf the past is lifted in the narrative, so does the language become more accessible. The book is hardly prurient while at the same time being almost entirely devoted to sex. Thus the author brings us into this torrid relationship while at the same time having the focus on the spiritual growth of the two central characters admitting they are falling in love. It's a winner.

• Sob a pele

  Quando se refere a quem conta a história em uma ficção, geralmente se usa a expressão “voz narrativa”. Esse, no entanto, não é o caso nos dois romances da irlandesa Eimear McBride. Não é voz quem narra, mas uma mente. Mas nem por isso também acho que se deva chamar de fluxo de pensamento, porque é tudo tão fraturado que, em suas histórias, o pensamento nem se formou. Talvez o mais próximo da experiência de ler A girl is a half-formed thing e o novo THE LESSER BOHEMIANS é dizer que a trama é contada por uma “mente narrativa”. McBride deve muito aos modernistas – especialmente ao seu conterrâneo James Joyce – e, com seus malabarismos e pirotecnias léxicas e estruturais, encontra uma maneira de colocar no papel uma mente em “formação”. No caso do A girl... talvez a formação não seja exatamente a palavra – pois tudo parece estar se esvaindo no processo de amadurecimento da protagonista-narradora. Aqui, sim, é um romance de formação e o mediador disso é o sexo. A protagonista-narradora – cujo nome é revelado a poucas páginas do final, e isso faz sentido – é uma jovem irlandesa de 18 anos que muda-se para Londres, em meados dos de 1990, para estudar interpretação. Logo conhece um sujeito de 38 anos – idem em relação ao nome – com quem tem sua primeira relação, e entra uma jornada de descoberta não apenas sexual, mas também emocional. São duas almas em busca de compreensão. Ele, no entanto, vem repleto de feridas emocionais e físicas – tudo será revelado com o tempo –; e ela, apesar de jovem também tem lá suas marcas. McBride descreve o sexo sem meias-palavras, mas ela não está interessada em detalhes físico, isso seria fácil demais, qualquer linguagem daria conta. Ela busca a profundidade dos relacionamentos físico, emocional e espiritual, daí sua busca por uma forma de narrar. Daí também a fragmentação, o truncamento das frases. Ninguém – e aí inclui o leitor, mas provavelmente não a autora – sabe o que está acontecendo. É um mundo a ser descoberto pela narradora. É uma história de amour fou, como tantas outras que já se viu e se leu, mas, ao mesmo tempo, há um fôlego novo, cuja sintaxe transita entre o óbvio e o extraordinário. A estratégia da escritora é que entremos sob a pele da dupla de personagens, e, assim como eles, tenhamos uma experiência em primeira-mão, no momento em que acontece, sem tempo para decantar qualquer tipo de compreensão. Por isso, The Lesser Bohemians é um furacão de romance que desperta, ao longo de suas pouco mais de 300 páginas, as mais diversas reações – desde ao amor até o ódio. Mas ao final é impossível negar que estamos diante de uma grande escritora, de uma obra que talvez precise de tempo (que ironia dado tudo o que há nela!) para ser compreendida.

• Heartbreaking

  I went from struggling with the voice, the style, the ungrammatical, the spiraling maze of the words, to being overwhelmed by the life and the love of it. One of the truly memorable books.

• A Year of Drama

  He never. He really did. No teacher Never, nor anyone else. Bang out blatant about going permissive. Noting, I note another face laughing just like me. Trying not. To be mature. To keep the rict from boiling over. Of an age she also seems so I Hello when I'd not usually. Then she, sloe-eyed with slowest smiles, says Cuppa? In the Canteen? And so wriggle in. Slip in. Remember people are blind to under your skin or. Under my skin now. Irish girl on her first day at drama school in London. The teacher tells them to remember to use condoms. She, a virgin still, is both shocked and validated in her desire for new life, new experiences and, starting here, new friends. The sex part will come soon enough (together with an enormous amount of drinking, smoking, and stoning). She meets in a bar an older man, 38, twice her age, an actor too, somewhat well-known, although she does not recognize him. The novel is about that first year of hers in London, not so much about drama school (which disappointed me a little), but a lot about that relationship. As I noted in my review of McBride's first novel, A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING, the secret to her writing is hearing it aloud. Listening to a YouTube video of her reading a short excerpt unlocked the rest for me. Or more or less. It still sounded strange, though there were moments where the pain and violence of that book that could not have been written any other way. Here, the language is most appropriate for the sex. I have seldom seen so much bedroom writing in a novel outside of Henry Miller, but it did not offend me. In the earlier stages at least, she seemed very real in her discoveries of shame, pain, and soon enough eagerness. What did upset me was the amount of dissolution in between. I began to wonder how the protagonist ever had time to learn anything at that drama school, with so much of it spent on getting drunk, or stoned, or recovering from same. But alas I too recognize the craziness of that first year away from home as a fledgling adult, and McBride's fractured syntax, running the gamut from total chaos to sheer poetry,* is as good a way to capture it as any. Much as I would rather forget. Readers of A GIRL will recall that it is not until quite late in that book that the story kicks into high gear. So it is here. Both the protagonist and her actor lover (both unnamed for now), bring baggage to their relationship; being older, he carries more than her. As the novel nears its end, however, much of this back-story gets revealed, first in hints, then more completely. The characters acquire names. The jagged sentences begin to smooth out, without ever completely losing Eimear McBride's characteristic lilt; apart from that, it might almost be a different author. Whereas A GIRL used much the same language throughout, only later showing the reason for it, THE LESSER BOHEMIANS tells its story partly through the transformation of language. Is it too easy a device? Does it make for too sentimental an ending? Perhaps—if you see this as her story, which is how it starts. But having read a couple of reviews which see it more as his evolution, I am changing my tune on this one, raising my original three stars to four. There is some painful truth in here, but you do need the patience to winkle it out. ====== *I had a curious experience while reading. As it happens, I am currently writing a long poem, a parody pastoral in loose iambic pentameters, which has given me the habit of testing lines in my head for scansion. And there were times when, mentally reading McBride aloud, I heard her prose slipping into the familiar verse patterns, or variants of them. Which confirmed for me that much of what she is writing is poetry. But my tendency to regularize also made me less able to grasp the special quality of her poetry-prose, with its unpredictability of rhythm, its run-ons, sudden stops, and occasional surprise of concealed rhymes.

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