Eoin Lane's Blog

That They May Face the Rising Sun by the great John McGahern stands head and shoulders over so much that I have read in recent years. An exquisitely tender and human and sensitive book. Never sentimental. Timeless. I did not want to leave the world of the lake. I did not want to finish the last page. I did not want to say goodbye. So powerful a portrait of quiet lives set against the backdrop of the shifting patterns of the natural world. This book moved me so much that I can still feel it beating softly inside me like a breath of wind on the lake or the ticking of those clocks in Mary and Jaimsie's cottage. I will be returning though. In the meantime, I can't recommend it highly enough. Would remind me in some ways of Kent Haruf's Benediction Trilogy.

This Booker Winner from 1984 has just reminded me of how much I admire and relish Anita Brookner's gifted prose. Clean, cool, assured and at times acerbic writing. The setting and characters are effortlessly and mercilessly rendered in all their full excruciating glory. The mountain and the lake cast the perfect mercurial backdrop of haze and mystery with their slow changing patterns of light and grey reflecting the pall that seems to surround the central character Edith Hope with a debilitating and almost anesthetic, albeit self consciously aware sense of sadness. Loved this. Love Anita Brookner.

Ashes in My Mouth , Sand in My Shoes is Per Petterson's first book - a delicate and sensitively woven collection of joyous vignettes introducing the observant and headstrong Arvid Jansen (Per Petterson's main future protagonist in many of his novels) to the world for the first time as a young boy. Whimsical fun and so interesting and rewarding to read coming to it as I have after reading the later longer novels featuring Arvid as an older man. It's a little gem of a book to read again at any time because the writer's prose is as sharp as ever and as clear cut as the sun on a winter's morning. One of my favourite authors.

As is the Australian author Favel Parrett whose first two novels the brilliant and haunting Past the Shallows and the ethereal and atmospheric When the Night Comes are a real treat with those tragic and memorable tales brought to us through the unknowing eyes of children. Parrett's third book There was still Love is an eloquent and warmhearted story of two sisters separated by the long shadow of WWII and their delightful grandchildren years later whom have never met but have heard of each other, Ludek in Prague, city of pigeons and statues and bridges and Mala Liska in Melbourne who's pet name is Little Fox. Sensitive and poignant in the author's trademark, pared back style.

Two writers who share a real narrative gift for honest and down to earth storytelling.

We all Die in the End
by Elizabeth Merry
A collection of interlinking short stories from Northern Ireland

Sardonic, dry, edgy tales from the streets of a small seaside town

"There were in fact a lot of wasps about and I was going to say we should go home but I thought that if we stayed Jennifer might get stung on the tongue and choke to death, or maybe she would really get sunstroke. I waved my hand over the food and fussed around but Jennifer didn't stop. "
Page 24
'Carmel'

A collection of offbeat and at times rather shadowy stories peppered with emotionally dysfunctional characters. In the manner of a roving camera, Merry slowly and steadily peels back the layers of her small-town protagonists to reveal their most innermost flaws.

"Even with the lights on in the church there was a darkness, especially before the altar where the coffin rested on a trestle. The stained-glass windows were grey with rain; candle flames smoked in the draughts and threw shadows. If Angela closed her eyes she could imagine that the shadows were rows of nuns and whispering girls and that Isabel and herself were back in the school chapel, shivering in the cold half-dark at early mass."
Page 170,
'Angela'

A quirky, wry and deadpan collection full of tragicomic tales

Sometimes a book just finds you at the right moment. Like a friend returning from somewhere faraway, someone you thought you'd never see again. And that's often the case when you rediscover a book and return to it years later in a different time and place ad setting. I could Read the Sky by Timothy O'Grady is one such example of a book that has returned to me and found me at just the right time. Reading this book is like being fully alert and attuned on the soft grass of a field in summer looking up at the light in the sky. The words embrace you like sun from the blue sky. I read this little gem of a book years ago not long after it was first published, but over time (as you do) I duly forgot about it until this summer when it sort of came back into my head and I thought what was that book I read once - something to do about the sky? And so on a trip home to see my mum in Dublin this 'corona' July I had a look on the bookshelves in my old bedroom and sure enough there it was and I fished it out and brought it back with me to read it again and it now has pride of place in my studio and rightly so. I have to say I COULD READ THE SKY is probably the most beautiful and bittersweet novel I have read this year and probably for some time. It's short, a novella and comes with a portfolio of accompanying black and white photographs. An old Irish, emigrant man living on his own in England is looking back at his life with a mix of joy, laughter, sadness and regret from his time growing up in his home village of Labasheeda ('the bed of silk') in Ireland to the building sites and streets and smoky pubs of numerous English towns and cities where he laboured for years to the love that he eventually found one day in Kate Creevy. "When I lie in bed in the evening I think ever and ever of money and Kate Creevy."The prose sings, the sentences dance, they lilt and flow, at times slow then fast like the reels and ballads he spent his life like his father before him playing with flying fingers of skill on his accordian. This is not just a book, it's a piece of music singing with feelings of resignation, loneliness, great pride with a profound sense of place and a trembling recollection of moments long gone of sheer happiness. It's all the more powerful for being so taut, dense, short and for what it leaves out as for what it includes. I loved every page, every sentence (and every photograph) of this powerful, tragic, beautiful book.

I have just finished the extraordinarily beautiful 'if nobody speaks of remarkable things' by Jon McGregor and have now switched to The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both are re reads - Sky in 1991 and Remarkable in 2004. And it is astonishing to think of this long passage of time and yet how the years seem to have passed so quickly. I knew I had Remarkable somewhere and I got it into my head that I wanted it to read it - I had recently read Reservoir 13 and The Reservoir Tapes (both by McGregor) - before and after last Christmas and in the end I fished it out from an old suitcase tucked away in the attic where I found it neatly packed away with a little load of other gems from the past including The Waves by Virginia Woolf (another definite must reread - when the time is right). McGregor's debut novel 'if nobody speaks of remarkable things' had stayed with me in my head all these years but it was a bit like a dream that I couldn't quite remember and so it was a real thrill to rediscover this lyrical, visual, tender and utterly spellbinding jewel of a novel. Five stars all the way.

Just before we went into lockdown, I was reading To Siberia by Per Petterson, undisputed master of the long, intricate interweaving sentence and a true painter of atmospheric Nordic bleak landscapes. In classic Petterson fashion, this is a mesmerising and haunting book set in Danish Jutland at the time of the second world war, a book of winter and ice and snow and dark freezing nights where a young girl dreams of adventures far away in the land of Siberia and her brother Jasper longs for the warm exotic air and sounds and scents of Morocco. To Siberia is a poignant, beautiful and ultimately heart-breaking tale off rural isolation and the ties that bind in the shadow and aftermath of war. I can still feel it in my bones.

I have never used this colour before in my painting and have to keep practising saying the name - Phthalocyanine Blue - (never mind just trying to spell it) but I've just ordered my first tube and can't wait to try it! This deep intense blue seems to be somewhere in tone between Ultramarine and the precious and madly expensive Lapis Lazuli, the treasured pigment made from the gemstones mined in the mountains of Afghanistan, beloved of the old masters including of course the golden Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and having never actually read Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier before and with all of our art galleries and wonderful bookshops closed at the moment I've just discovered that there was no better time than now. I didn't even know we had it - found it on a bookshelf upstairs and out of the blue (!) began to read it and I'm really glad I did. It was an immersive and visually evocative piece of time travel that transported me to Delft in the 1660s, along the Oude Langendijck to the house, the front door with the bench outside, the hallway and the narrow stairs taking me up and inside the studio of Vermeer to the setting for all those extraordinary domestic scenes which he painted where the figures are bathed in that beautiful glowing light that streams in through the open window. A really memorable experience indeed and I just didn't want it to end!

So time for my first blog on a quiet day when I'm not painting or writing just clearing some space in my head, on my desk and my easel and in the studio so that I can start again afresh so here we go. I have to say I was very taken with the cool, calm collected prose in this quiet and gentle and poignant novel. Ireland 1990s. Three generations of women from the same family gather together in the grandmother's crumbling old house on the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. Though not close to each other for years they have been brought together now out of the blue by the illness of the grandson Declan. They are joined by two of his friends. Thrust together by these unwanted and unforeseen circumstances, they must all find their own ways of coping with the reality of illness first hand and of learning to deal with each other's widely varying personalities and emotional needs. It's a slow, delicate story filled with undercurrents of tension and dislike that inevitably draws these people closer to each other as the waves crash in on the strand down below and the lighthouse flashes its beacon across the darkening sky. A beautiful, powerful,tender story in controlled, measured prose that pulls you in to that house on the cliff until you too are reluctant to leave at the end.