Tag: #Ireland

  • Short Story Review: “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett

    (The short story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane: by Colin Barrett appeared in the December 13th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    This was a good, old school, short story. “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett even starts off with a good title. A shooting is dramatic; what happens?

    Not making lite of the story, but to sum up – The local police are called when a shooting happens on a remote farm in the Irish countryside. The police and an ambulance arrive at the farm, and then there is the fall out of all of these actions.

    Yet, what really happens is this story is seeing characters unfold. Our protagonist is Sargent Jackie Noonan, a forty-five-year-old police woman, and I liked how Barrett kept dropping these little nuggets of her personality as the story developed. The way she drank her coffee, took notes, talked to other officers. And though the story clearly was meant to stick with her, the other characters who came along were all given depth, and actions that fit accordingly to their characters. I also appreciated that the solving of the shooting wasn’t the point of this story. That the shooting was the starting off point to watch how these characters interacted and dealt with the situation. The story also did a very good job of avoiding cliché traps, that I think lesser writers would have fallen for. The caveat to that statement was I found the run in with the local teenagers predictable, but that is a minor critique.

    And when I said old school before, this story reminded me of the short fiction that was assigned to read in high school, like in a Sherwood Anderson ilk. Not that Anderson ever wrote like this, and I can also say that Anderson is the wrong author to compare Barrett to. (Go with me on this…) It’s the feeling that both authors created characters in rural places that were compelling, and you wanted to know what they are going to do tomorrow because you felt you knew them. As “A Shooting in Rathreedane” concluded, I wanted to know, what is tomorrow going to be like for Sgt. Noonan?

  • Personal Review: “Desire” by Esther Freud

    (The short story “Desire” by Esther Freud, was featured in the September 27th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    A long time ago, when I was in college, I would join writers’ groups, and share short stories, and get and give feedback. I went to three universities and a junior college, and every group behaved pretty much the same. At some point someone would bring in a story that was… well… odd. Not good nor bad, strange but familiar, off kilter but still normal. There was no way to put a finger on what it is, but it was normal. But also, not normal.

    That is what I felt while reading Esther Freud’s “Desire.” The story, set in Ireland, somewhere around 1976, and the Bob Dylan album of the same name plays a part of the story as well. In short, the story is about a family; Mum, older sister and middle sister from one relationship, and a younger brother from a current marriage, who have left this current husband. The narrator of the story is the middle sister, and she refers to the stepfather as someone who needs to be left, but no other information is given. The family moves from the mother’s parent’s home to two additional homes for a stay or holiday or escape, and then return back to England.

    And as I said earlier, something was off with this story. The story kept referring back to songs off the Dylan album, but I wasn’t sure what the connection to the story was. I wasn’t sure what the narrator felt about what was happening. The way this family moved from place to place, by hitchhiking, and lots of waiting, which made the story feel isolated and disconnected, but I couldn’t tell you what that had to do with anything. It was just events happening. The aging parents are upset with the life decisions the Mum has made, and then the family is back off to England, and I don’t know how these disparate things are meant to work thematically. I was left feeling that I had missed something. And I don’t think that was the point.