James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
Langrishe, Go Down (Dalkey Archive Essentials)
A novel set against the decline of an Irish family, following the youngest daughter Imogen and the emotional fault lines running through the household.
Work Information
The collapse of a household and the desires of its members meet in quiet but persistent tension.
Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down traces the slow transformation of family relationships, class feeling, and private desire against the backdrop of an old house in decline. Its restrained prose carries a lingering unease and sadness.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Dalkey Archive Press
- Published
- 2022-12-27
- Pages
- 254 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.91 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781628973921
- ISBN-10
- 1628973927
- Price
- 3419 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Women's Fiction/Domestic Life
An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) traces the fall of the Langrishes―a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family―through the lives of their four daughters, especially the youngest, Imogen, whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down , which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."
Aidan Higgins has written short stories, novels, travel pieces, radio plays, and a large body of criticism. A consummate stylist, his writing is lush and complex. His books include Scenes from a Receding Past , Bornholm Night-Ferry , Balcony of Europe , and Langrishe, Go Down , which was adapted for television by Harold Pinter.
Reviews
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doom and gloom in style. This is a very sad story, but he telling is marvellous. Short staccato sentences, disregard for continuity, and a mixture of Gaeltacht and atmospheric, classic English. You must be charmed, unless you refuse the whole beverage. Gallons are drunk, plenty of tears are shed, lies are shamelessly told and sometimes believed. Gentlewomen in distress are not a new subject, but Aidan Higgins is not interested in tradition, except to rummage in forgotten drawers full of trinkets. The man is afraid of nothing, and can "do" burials and visits to graves like no other, the life of humble persons and devotion of same to past lore, cows and heifers wandering along , the drenched fields of Ireland. All this material, so well trod in past and present Irish literature, is reworked in a high modernist garb, All things are the same, made new by a very personal attitude.
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A new(2016) edition with the bonus of an insightful afterword from John Banville. The blurb tells you all you need to know as far as plot - "the youngest of the four sisters embarks on a reckless love affair, set against the backdrop of a crumbling 1930's Europe" - and there are no surprises along the way. The predictability, though, doesn't matter, I didn't read this to find out what happened next. Higgins constructs, or recreates, his atmospheric world and that is enough. 'Evening.Steam on the surface by the far bank. Cattle come to drink. House-flies. Dragon-flies. Carried down. Winding river. Its bends. Overhanging foliage. Ash. Elm. Beech. Ash. A cat on the river wall. Black cat. Washing itself. Complacent. River wall. Endless river. Tireless river. Bats fly at night. Meadows full of white daisies and buttercups. Swallows darting over the hedge. The currant bushes in Springfield garden. Dry fumes of their musty branches. Otto favours blackcurrant jam.' Banville tells us that Beckett declared it to be 'literary s***' but also told Higgins that 'in you, together with the beginner, is the old hand'. 'Ending, ending. -That monotonous condition of the soul, Otto said, halfway between fulfilment and futility, which comes with living in the country. Futility, futility. - Among bats, Otto said, which have connection in the autumn, the sperms can remain dormant in the uterus throughout the whole of winter and impregnate the ova in the spring. Ended. Two springs, two summers, three autumns and two winters. That was all; and now all over'
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I havent finished the book yet but the purchase process went well. arrived within a week, fair price & in condition described
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If I hadn't seen the movie first with Judi Dench I never would have gotten through it. DULL.
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This might be a great book for those who adore Irish literature and it may have qualities I didn't appreciate, however, I found it really dreary and fairly pointless.