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I Could Read the Sky
With a foreword by John Berger I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields and on the building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the seascapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played, and the woman he loved. This elegiac narrative is accompanied by a succession of photographs taken by Pyke during his travels in Ireland – from starkly beautiful landscapes to unforgettable portraits and scenes from everyday life – which in their counterpoint with the text produce a powerful evocation of the Irish emigrant experience.
176 pages, Paperback
First published September 18, 1997
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April 2, 2023
"It’s a long long way from Clare to here"--Ralph McTell
Sometimes I hear the fiddles play, maybe it’s just a notion
I dream I see white horses dance, on that other ocean.
It’s a long way from Clare to here, it’s a long, long way from Clare to here
It’s a long, long way, gets further by the day, it’s a long way from Clare to here.
This song by Ralph McTell for me gets at the sad, sad beauty of this book and of the Irish emigrant story and maybe evoking the emigrant story generally, sung here by Nanci Griffith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rchmQ...
Before I really begin I’ll just say the review to read on this one is the one that got me to read this book, Ted’s amazing review.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In it he has some of the photographs from the book, more actual sections from the writing, things I myself would have marked to include in a review. Sometimes a review is just like that. We heard the same songs in our heads when we were reading and viewing this book!
Maybe this book is mostly music, really, at the intersection of image and word, where neither expresses adequately the other. Da’s flute music, our main character’s accordion music, the music that sustains. Poetry. Lyrical prose. Evocations of time and place that have less to do with plot and facts about life than tones and echoes and loss, always loss.
I have been reading a lot of graphic novels and looking at a lot of photography books lately, but I’m most interested in the intersection of the written and the visual. Multiple genres, mixed media. How they come together to tell multi-levelled stories. I’m less interested in picturebooks and graphic novels where the images are just illustrations of the words. They should be doing different things, contributing to different dimensions of the overall project. Complementary storytelling forms, in collaboration. That happens here.
Which is one reason I do not like the Goodreads description of the book: “Accompanied by photographs, this novel tells the story of a man's journey from the West of Ireland to the fields/boxing-booths/building sites of England”. The unique thing about this book is that it is not just a novel accompanied by photographs, it is a collaborative storytelling venture. The words and photographs talk together. They interanimate each other. And O’Grady based his novel on dozens of oral history interviews he did, as well. The language is here, their stories are in here. It’s a kind of pastiche telling of fiction, oral history, and on-site photography. The language is lovely, poetic, devastatingly sad, heartrending at times.
The photographer/philosopher John Berger nurtured this project and you can see him in this work throughout. He also wrote the lyrical introduction to it. Read Berger (Ways of Seeing, Pig Earth) for loss and poetry and photography about the fading cultural traditions in rural France.
This is a book about leaving home and never leaving home, about leaving Ireland to work in England and about missing a girl and your family and your father’s music and dancing and about the persistence of memory, every day a deepening sadness, drinking away the lonely evenings for some pleasure after backbreakingly long days in the fields and factories. It’s about the aching loneliness of not knowing how to talk to people, not knowing how to find the words. It’s about watching the curve of a girl’s leg under her skirt as she walks ahead and wanting to talk to her and just be with her and imagining she may want the same, she knowing you are walking behind her, hoping you will speak to her, and decades later, being alone without the words, all longing. It’s about time and how the past is always present--in this novel, you don’t always know when the particular anecdote you are reading is taking place and this is also true for the main character, he doesn't always know when things are happening, vivid memories of long ago are happening now in his head. It’s about your father and mother dying when you are away and not being able to afford to get home for the funeral. It’s about the madness of grief. I Could Read the Sky is essentially lyrical prose portraits of the soul, about the heart, and for the family, and with love, finally. And so devastatingly sad and beautiful you can only weep on some pages.
Endless graveyards and strong wrecked and resilient Irish faces and family and music. The memory of joy and love.
Here’s a few lines, but truly, if I were to highlight all the passages and sentences and images for you that I love, I would have to share with you much of the book (which, of course, I want to do; I want you to find this book and read it now):
*Eileen gets me out for a reel before the thick air closes in again and when I look up with her spinning me round it seems the whole galaxy is whirling above me.
*What I could do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket with reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. . . I could read the sky.
*What I could not do. Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. . . Not remember.
*The way Maggie was. She could place a hat on her head at a perfect angle. She knew the names of trees. . . She could fill an emptiness even when silent. . . She was like a forest. The light never stopped moving.
*What I could do then [after his father was buried]. I could forget my name. I could lie in my bed for a week. I could seek the darkness. . . I could walk without knowing it.
*Ma is looking at the priest like she can see the future in his face. . . He is gone from this world, we are thinking. I think too as I sit beside his coffin that I will never again have such respect for a living person and now that he is no longer here I will not be able to stop things falling from their places. A sadness reaches like a clawed hand into my bones and organs. It fills the spaces between. It is heavy and strong. I believe this sadness can never leave me.
I had to order the hardcover version of this book online. No library system in Chicago had it, which is sad in itself. But buy this book right now, because even if you were to get it from your library, you would have to own it, anyway, so save yourself the time.
Here's more Irish music to listen to, to get you in the mood as you read or consider reading, from the wonderful Sinead O'Connor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XoZ...
Listen to Sinead O’Connor’s version of this 16th century Irish classic, once a love song, Róisín Dubh, now a kind of metaphor for Ireland itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YmmA...
Sometimes I hear the fiddles play, maybe it’s just a notion
I dream I see white horses dance, on that other ocean.
It’s a long way from Clare to here, it’s a long, long way from Clare to here
It’s a long, long way, gets further by the day, it’s a long way from Clare to here.
This song by Ralph McTell for me gets at the sad, sad beauty of this book and of the Irish emigrant story and maybe evoking the emigrant story generally, sung here by Nanci Griffith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rchmQ...
Before I really begin I’ll just say the review to read on this one is the one that got me to read this book, Ted’s amazing review.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In it he has some of the photographs from the book, more actual sections from the writing, things I myself would have marked to include in a review. Sometimes a review is just like that. We heard the same songs in our heads when we were reading and viewing this book!
Maybe this book is mostly music, really, at the intersection of image and word, where neither expresses adequately the other. Da’s flute music, our main character’s accordion music, the music that sustains. Poetry. Lyrical prose. Evocations of time and place that have less to do with plot and facts about life than tones and echoes and loss, always loss.
I have been reading a lot of graphic novels and looking at a lot of photography books lately, but I’m most interested in the intersection of the written and the visual. Multiple genres, mixed media. How they come together to tell multi-levelled stories. I’m less interested in picturebooks and graphic novels where the images are just illustrations of the words. They should be doing different things, contributing to different dimensions of the overall project. Complementary storytelling forms, in collaboration. That happens here.
Which is one reason I do not like the Goodreads description of the book: “Accompanied by photographs, this novel tells the story of a man's journey from the West of Ireland to the fields/boxing-booths/building sites of England”. The unique thing about this book is that it is not just a novel accompanied by photographs, it is a collaborative storytelling venture. The words and photographs talk together. They interanimate each other. And O’Grady based his novel on dozens of oral history interviews he did, as well. The language is here, their stories are in here. It’s a kind of pastiche telling of fiction, oral history, and on-site photography. The language is lovely, poetic, devastatingly sad, heartrending at times.
The photographer/philosopher John Berger nurtured this project and you can see him in this work throughout. He also wrote the lyrical introduction to it. Read Berger (Ways of Seeing, Pig Earth) for loss and poetry and photography about the fading cultural traditions in rural France.
This is a book about leaving home and never leaving home, about leaving Ireland to work in England and about missing a girl and your family and your father’s music and dancing and about the persistence of memory, every day a deepening sadness, drinking away the lonely evenings for some pleasure after backbreakingly long days in the fields and factories. It’s about the aching loneliness of not knowing how to talk to people, not knowing how to find the words. It’s about watching the curve of a girl’s leg under her skirt as she walks ahead and wanting to talk to her and just be with her and imagining she may want the same, she knowing you are walking behind her, hoping you will speak to her, and decades later, being alone without the words, all longing. It’s about time and how the past is always present--in this novel, you don’t always know when the particular anecdote you are reading is taking place and this is also true for the main character, he doesn't always know when things are happening, vivid memories of long ago are happening now in his head. It’s about your father and mother dying when you are away and not being able to afford to get home for the funeral. It’s about the madness of grief. I Could Read the Sky is essentially lyrical prose portraits of the soul, about the heart, and for the family, and with love, finally. And so devastatingly sad and beautiful you can only weep on some pages.
Endless graveyards and strong wrecked and resilient Irish faces and family and music. The memory of joy and love.
Here’s a few lines, but truly, if I were to highlight all the passages and sentences and images for you that I love, I would have to share with you much of the book (which, of course, I want to do; I want you to find this book and read it now):
*Eileen gets me out for a reel before the thick air closes in again and when I look up with her spinning me round it seems the whole galaxy is whirling above me.
*What I could do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket with reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. . . I could read the sky.
*What I could not do. Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. . . Not remember.
*The way Maggie was. She could place a hat on her head at a perfect angle. She knew the names of trees. . . She could fill an emptiness even when silent. . . She was like a forest. The light never stopped moving.
*What I could do then [after his father was buried]. I could forget my name. I could lie in my bed for a week. I could seek the darkness. . . I could walk without knowing it.
*Ma is looking at the priest like she can see the future in his face. . . He is gone from this world, we are thinking. I think too as I sit beside his coffin that I will never again have such respect for a living person and now that he is no longer here I will not be able to stop things falling from their places. A sadness reaches like a clawed hand into my bones and organs. It fills the spaces between. It is heavy and strong. I believe this sadness can never leave me.
I had to order the hardcover version of this book online. No library system in Chicago had it, which is sad in itself. But buy this book right now, because even if you were to get it from your library, you would have to own it, anyway, so save yourself the time.
Here's more Irish music to listen to, to get you in the mood as you read or consider reading, from the wonderful Sinead O'Connor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XoZ...
Listen to Sinead O’Connor’s version of this 16th century Irish classic, once a love song, Róisín Dubh, now a kind of metaphor for Ireland itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YmmA...
November 11, 2017
EXILE is not a word
It is a sound
The rending of skin
A fistful of clay on top of a coffin
Exile is not a word
It is shaving against
A photograph not a mirror
Exile is not a word
It is hands joined in supplication
In an empty cathedral
It is writing your own hagiography
It is a continuing atrocity
It is the purgatorial
Triumph of memory over topography
Exile is not a word
Exile is not a word
Peter Woods
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
This book is one of the most moving short novels I’ve ever read. How short is the novel? The book is 170 pages. 98 of those pages have no words, just photographs. These are interspersed with Timothy O’Grady’s text.
O’Grady researched this book. It is not simply a fiction, rather a fictional compendium of stories he was told by many Irish who had left Ireland to work in England.
The black and white photographs, by Steve Pyke, make the story a dual media experience of the highest order. Many of the photos are very moving, and many will stay with readers for a long time. I’ve selected seven to intersperse in the review. These were among the ones that I found most striking and memorable. But there were many others, and other readers would no doubt chose differently.
The photos do not necessarily illustrate adjacent text. Sometime they seem to, at other times a reader might find text far away from a photo that will strike him as tied to the photo.
The sections of the text, the longest 3-4 pages, the shortest a paragraph, have no names or chapter number, they begin with a large capital letter. That’s all you need.
The story is told through the memories of an Irish man who has worked most of his life in England, like his father and many of his friends. They have been exiles, from country, family, and home. They return at intervals of months, even years, for weddings, funerals, “vacations” (when they can’t find work), sometimes to heal from injuries, sometimes to die. Sending money home to parents, wives, families; trying to save money to buy a suit, for a gift for a loved one, to get married; sometimes drinking it up, starting over again with the saving, or not.
The people the man remembers wander in and out of his memories.
The flow of memory is what makes the story, and what makes the book memorable.
A movie was made in 2000, directed by Nicola Bruce. It got mixed reviews in the popular press, not everybody’s cup of tea. But neither is the book under review. Quoting from a movie review by David Wood (http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2000/10/23...), “Taken from the photographic novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke, Nicola Bruce's innovative, melancholic, and deeply moving film is a small gem, as much informed by literature as it is by cinema. Made on the smallest of budgets, Bruce utilises her visionary skills to profound effect, creating a narrative which skillfully weaves between past and present, charting the correlation between each and raising spectral observations about the unforgiving nature of memory.”
I would dearly love to acquire the DVD for the movie, but it is only available in Region 2 (European) format. However I understand that there are ways of getting around the area format codes, so I may order the DVD anyway.
The soundtrack from the movie is also available on CD. This I do have, and recommend it. The outstanding track here is Sinead O’Connor’s version of Roisin Dubh. There is a YouTube link to this song in the main review, Music section.
So, a multi-media extravaganza. I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in Ireland, or in a beautiful, lyrical account of how our memories tug at us, and perhaps become more and more what we are as we grow older.
Follow the following link to the “main” review, which consists of a synopsis or retelling of the man’s memories through quotations and photographs from the novel. (It was too long to fit in Goodreads’ review space.)
Link to "main" review.
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Update: Walking yesterday with my iPod, this song came up. 5-star song, one of the saddest I've heard. Another take on Irish exile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVFJ0Z...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: State of the World 2013
Random review: We Were the Mulvaneys
Next review: The Tales of Hoffman The trial of the Chicago eight – or was it seven?
Previous library review: Cloud Atlas
Next library review: Nineteen Seventy-Four
It is a sound
The rending of skin
A fistful of clay on top of a coffin
Exile is not a word
It is shaving against
A photograph not a mirror
Exile is not a word
It is hands joined in supplication
In an empty cathedral
It is writing your own hagiography
It is a continuing atrocity
It is the purgatorial
Triumph of memory over topography
Exile is not a word
Exile is not a word
Peter Woods
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
This book is one of the most moving short novels I’ve ever read. How short is the novel? The book is 170 pages. 98 of those pages have no words, just photographs. These are interspersed with Timothy O’Grady’s text.
O’Grady researched this book. It is not simply a fiction, rather a fictional compendium of stories he was told by many Irish who had left Ireland to work in England.
The black and white photographs, by Steve Pyke, make the story a dual media experience of the highest order. Many of the photos are very moving, and many will stay with readers for a long time. I’ve selected seven to intersperse in the review. These were among the ones that I found most striking and memorable. But there were many others, and other readers would no doubt chose differently.
The photos do not necessarily illustrate adjacent text. Sometime they seem to, at other times a reader might find text far away from a photo that will strike him as tied to the photo.
The sections of the text, the longest 3-4 pages, the shortest a paragraph, have no names or chapter number, they begin with a large capital letter. That’s all you need.
The story is told through the memories of an Irish man who has worked most of his life in England, like his father and many of his friends. They have been exiles, from country, family, and home. They return at intervals of months, even years, for weddings, funerals, “vacations” (when they can’t find work), sometimes to heal from injuries, sometimes to die. Sending money home to parents, wives, families; trying to save money to buy a suit, for a gift for a loved one, to get married; sometimes drinking it up, starting over again with the saving, or not.
The people the man remembers wander in and out of his memories.
The flow of memory is what makes the story, and what makes the book memorable.
A movie was made in 2000, directed by Nicola Bruce. It got mixed reviews in the popular press, not everybody’s cup of tea. But neither is the book under review. Quoting from a movie review by David Wood (http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2000/10/23...), “Taken from the photographic novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke, Nicola Bruce's innovative, melancholic, and deeply moving film is a small gem, as much informed by literature as it is by cinema. Made on the smallest of budgets, Bruce utilises her visionary skills to profound effect, creating a narrative which skillfully weaves between past and present, charting the correlation between each and raising spectral observations about the unforgiving nature of memory.”
I would dearly love to acquire the DVD for the movie, but it is only available in Region 2 (European) format. However I understand that there are ways of getting around the area format codes, so I may order the DVD anyway.
The soundtrack from the movie is also available on CD. This I do have, and recommend it. The outstanding track here is Sinead O’Connor’s version of Roisin Dubh. There is a YouTube link to this song in the main review, Music section.
So, a multi-media extravaganza. I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in Ireland, or in a beautiful, lyrical account of how our memories tug at us, and perhaps become more and more what we are as we grow older.
Follow the following link to the “main” review, which consists of a synopsis or retelling of the man’s memories through quotations and photographs from the novel. (It was too long to fit in Goodreads’ review space.)
Link to "main" review.
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Update: Walking yesterday with my iPod, this song came up. 5-star song, one of the saddest I've heard. Another take on Irish exile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVFJ0Z...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: State of the World 2013
Random review: We Were the Mulvaneys
Next review: The Tales of Hoffman The trial of the Chicago eight – or was it seven?
Previous library review: Cloud Atlas
Next library review: Nineteen Seventy-Four
September 3, 2013
This took me awhile to read for two reasons. The first is mundane: library on-hold books and group reads intruding. But this book is small, so I carried it with me to appointments, to read in waiting rooms, which, as it turned out, it was perfect for, which leads to my second reason: I read it like I do poetry, stopping after each mostly very short section, to savor and even reread some of the sentences.
The narrative is lyrical, but the most impressive element to me was its masterful handling of time. The thoughts and memories of one man take us through a merging of the past and the present, sometimes in the space of one sentence. At times there seems to be no distinction for the narrator; the past is present, because it is what he is.
I've had a recent run of finding inscriptions in books that I've bought used. (See the first paragraph of my review of John Ed Bradley's Restoration) but this time upon opening I found a small card (used as a bookmark?) titled Irish Blessing that starts May there always be work for your hands to do... After reading this book, you will understand the sadness, the loneliness and even the irony of that blessing.
I feel like I haven't done this book justice, not even in my reading of it, as it most certainly deserves a reread.
The narrative is lyrical, but the most impressive element to me was its masterful handling of time. The thoughts and memories of one man take us through a merging of the past and the present, sometimes in the space of one sentence. At times there seems to be no distinction for the narrator; the past is present, because it is what he is.
I've had a recent run of finding inscriptions in books that I've bought used. (See the first paragraph of my review of John Ed Bradley's Restoration) but this time upon opening I found a small card (used as a bookmark?) titled Irish Blessing that starts May there always be work for your hands to do... After reading this book, you will understand the sadness, the loneliness and even the irony of that blessing.
I feel like I haven't done this book justice, not even in my reading of it, as it most certainly deserves a reread.
August 30, 2011
The author, Timothy O'Grady, gathered testaments from many Irish emigrants, and combined the material into this novel, with photographs throughout by Steve Pyke. In the Preface John Berger calls it a bastard of a book, partly a joking allusion to O'Grady's acknowledgement to Berger's fathering the book through his collaboration with Jean Mohr. It's a bastard in another way.Berger begins, "I dare not go deeply into this book, for if I did, I would stay with it forever and I wouldn't return."
I saw the film version a couple of weeks, starring Dermot Healy no less. Now I'd like to see the film again: I think it's better to see and hold the book first.
The narrator moves through a lifetime; much of that life is spent on English farms or building, with lonely sundays remembering. The faculty itself of memory grows with age, and not only because there is more to remember. With it grows loss, and with loss grows longing. There is a yearning to belong, something that is sharply recalled in vivid celebrations, beautiful descriptions of a newly wed, and family, place. Yearning is never specific. Dirty work takes precedence, temporary returns home and meeting up with neighbours working in England; yearning has no focus; the narrator has grown a past but not a future until one day he meets someone, and for a brief time the light and airy texture (incidentally, O'Grady's great on landscapes and weather) teases through the rain, black fog, walls closing in, tunnels, endless potato fields in November.
There is a sense of emotions and feelings being mixed too, of suffering, say, but something more. The something more's an undertow - those sundays mentioned: "On Sunday it's Mass and the Crown and after two o'clock it's murder. I lean on the railings smoking cigarettes I don't like. I read the paper but fail to reach the end of the story. I put on the radio but the words get lost. We have a clock and I look at it. The minutes go by like water dripping from a tap. Some time around six the walls seem to move in on me."
The writing is very musical and music is central to the book on an obvious level that music is important to the emigrant life; more deeply, it's used as a textual tool, as the expression of those mixed feelings, uniting longing, sorrow and joy, and being one occasional moment of joy, light in the darkness. "I have a sound in the accordion I know is mine but that I can't ye reach. It seems red and gold and full of light. It's fast and sure..... I can feel the tune spilling itself out inside me.I can see all the notes like they're small coloured stones you'd find on the strand. I can look at all sides of them and find the right place for them to go....Da is watching my hands. I could keep them flying for a month.I finish the tune and put the accordion down onto the floor....(Da) looks like he's just had another child. 'You've passed me now,' he says."
It's a full-bodied read, although it's sparsely written and short it seems to have more weight and humanity than books ten times its length.
I saw the film version a couple of weeks, starring Dermot Healy no less. Now I'd like to see the film again: I think it's better to see and hold the book first.
The narrator moves through a lifetime; much of that life is spent on English farms or building, with lonely sundays remembering. The faculty itself of memory grows with age, and not only because there is more to remember. With it grows loss, and with loss grows longing. There is a yearning to belong, something that is sharply recalled in vivid celebrations, beautiful descriptions of a newly wed, and family, place. Yearning is never specific. Dirty work takes precedence, temporary returns home and meeting up with neighbours working in England; yearning has no focus; the narrator has grown a past but not a future until one day he meets someone, and for a brief time the light and airy texture (incidentally, O'Grady's great on landscapes and weather) teases through the rain, black fog, walls closing in, tunnels, endless potato fields in November.
There is a sense of emotions and feelings being mixed too, of suffering, say, but something more. The something more's an undertow - those sundays mentioned: "On Sunday it's Mass and the Crown and after two o'clock it's murder. I lean on the railings smoking cigarettes I don't like. I read the paper but fail to reach the end of the story. I put on the radio but the words get lost. We have a clock and I look at it. The minutes go by like water dripping from a tap. Some time around six the walls seem to move in on me."
The writing is very musical and music is central to the book on an obvious level that music is important to the emigrant life; more deeply, it's used as a textual tool, as the expression of those mixed feelings, uniting longing, sorrow and joy, and being one occasional moment of joy, light in the darkness. "I have a sound in the accordion I know is mine but that I can't ye reach. It seems red and gold and full of light. It's fast and sure..... I can feel the tune spilling itself out inside me.I can see all the notes like they're small coloured stones you'd find on the strand. I can look at all sides of them and find the right place for them to go....Da is watching my hands. I could keep them flying for a month.I finish the tune and put the accordion down onto the floor....(Da) looks like he's just had another child. 'You've passed me now,' he says."
It's a full-bodied read, although it's sparsely written and short it seems to have more weight and humanity than books ten times its length.
December 6, 2013
This is a spare novel about a spare way of life, Irish migrant workers in England. It's spare at 161 pages, and it's double-edged in that it's filled with 81 photos complementing the text. It's a brilliant elegiac combination. O'Grady's fictional voice beautifully describes the protagonist's experiences growing up in rural Ireland and his life working as a laborer in England. That voice is melancholic in reflecting on exile, solitude, and the loss of a world without ever writing about them as such. The book is appropriately prefaced by John Berger, whose work, especially his novels about French peasantry, this novel resembles. Berger writes: "The silence of the unsaid is always working surreptitiously with another silence, which is that of the unsayable," which captures the leanness of O'Grady's prose but even more so Steven Pyke's stark, melancholic black and white images of the land and people which form the other side of O'Grady's text. This is a profound, moving novel. It's a somber work full of depths and yet the reader is likely to be amazed by how nimbly O'Grady can capture a moment, such as these sentences about a wedding feast: "We pass the dancers, flashes of white and red from their clothes, breezes blowing, John Conneely charges through a gap with his wife, his bad knees springing him forward." It's a way of life presented in 161 pages and 81 photographs.
August 19, 2024
This was a short fictional novel of an older man reminiscing about his life in Ireland and then in
England. The novel is illustrated with photographs throughout, which was a unique aspect to this book.
England. The novel is illustrated with photographs throughout, which was a unique aspect to this book.
September 13, 2020
3.5, maybe? Elegaic, lyrical prose poem in which an old Irishman remembers all sorts of things from his childhood in rural Ireland and his adulthood as a migrant worker doing menial labor in England. Text is accompanied by unrelated black-and-white photos which I guess are “artistic” but which do nothing for me. (I kept thinking of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” another book about poor migrant workers (with relevant and beautiful black-and-white photos) which I read more than 40 years ago... And I thought of Joyce, living abroad in poverty and thinking constantly of Dublin. And of Thomas Wolfe (the “prose poem” writing style).
February 5, 2024
Just wrench my heart out and beat it with a stick. Another Irish masterpiece of storytelling
March 2, 2024
„It is like something is covering me that threatens my breath. It is like something is moving that will break things inside me.“
„The meaning of a thing that brings you pleasure can come slowly but I got the fullness of this picture just when I saw it.“
„Over everything I see there is the colour of her death.“
„The meaning of a thing that brings you pleasure can come slowly but I got the fullness of this picture just when I saw it.“
„Over everything I see there is the colour of her death.“
November 2, 2023
I listened to the audible version of this with music from Martin Hayes. Melancholic, haunting, powerful. I’m really glad somebody took the time to tell this story of an Irish emigrant and in such a stark way.
May 31, 2025
“What is it to miss someone? It is not the throbbing ache of a wound. It is not the pain you get under your ribs from running[…]It is forgetfulness, the inability to move, the inability to connect. It is a sentence you must serve and if the person you miss is dead your sentence is long”
September 3, 2016
Los irlandeses siempre pierden y al final se mueren, pero entre medias tocan el acordeón y comen patatas.
May 5, 2015
The book is written the way memory works. Sometimes the narrator looks back to the past and sometimes he is there, in the past, telling us about events and people as if they’re happening now – he’s lost in his memories, or maybe that’s where he finds himself. As a result this is not a linear story. There are moments when it was completely unclear to me whether we were in the past or the present but overall that didn’t make a difference.
While this book tells the story, as described in the blurb, of a man forced to move from the West of Ireland to England for work and does have a clear beginning and a powerful end – In the morning light I let go – there is no real story to summarize. This is a reflection on a life. A patchwork of memories and impressions – a lot of them bleak but a few so bright they almost light up the page. I won’t attempt to write my normal review. Instead I’ve collected thoughts and quotes as I read which I’ll share below and use as a tool to remember the book and the feelings it created in me, by.
I could read the sky: One of the things the narrator lists as what he could do (Chapter 9).
“What I could do.
I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field. Work the swarth turner, the float and the thresher. I could read the sea. Shoot straight. Make a shoe. Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes. Plough and harrow. Read the wind. Tend bees. Bind wyndes. Make a coffin. Take a drink. I could frighten you with stories. I knew a song to sing to a cow when milking. I could play twenty-seven tunes on my accordion.”
He could do so much, and yet it seems to amount to so very little in practical terms.
This book was at times rather devastating, like when I read the narrator’s thoughts and feelings on his first night in England.
“I feel in my pockets. I wonder have I the fare home and if I can find the way. I think of the bed I left in Labasheeda. Outside it is dark and the road full of twists I know nothing of. There is no way back now. I am to pick potatoes and lie down at night in this loft. I am to be in England living with pigs.”
Or when the narrator asks another Irish man in England what it’s like working there.
“It’s like you’re trying to talk to somebody out of a deep black hole, he says.”
The following sounds like the lament of an exile and especially the last one – stop remembering – breaks my heart.
“What I couldn’t do.
Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Work with drains or with objects smaller than a nail. Drive a motor car. Eat tomatoes. Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort. Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen. Abide loud voices. Perform the manners of greeting and leaving. Save money. Take pleasure in work carried out in a factory. Drink coffee. Look into a wound. Follow cricket. Understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. Wear shoes or boots made from rubber. Best P.J. in an argument. Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.”
Memories, they are such fickle things. It’s not always the big momentous events that stay with us. All too often the small details – insignificant at the time – are the ones which come back in glorious detail years later.
“I’m walking behind a red-haired man with mud on his boots, the trousers falling off him, the paper rolled up in his jacket pocket and him taking the two sides of the pavement from all the drink and I know it is me. I know it is all of us.”
Lines like the one quoted above broke my heart. How lonely the life of many exiled Irish men in England was.
“I read a book once, he says. I read many one time. The thing about a book is that the man who is writing it brings all the lives from all the different places and makes them flow together in the same stream. As they move down towards the end it’s like they have loops and holes and shapes that all fit together just nicely so that they’re just one big piece really. You can look back and see how all of them got where they are. That’s the time the writer brings the book to an end and there’s no seeing past it. I’d like to meet the man who wrote a book like that so I could ask him where he got those lives.”
“(...)I can see as I look from the side at the arrangement of brow and nose something of what she was when she was a girl and nothing had disappointed her.” – The narrator about a sister he hasn’t seen in years.
These thoughts about music rang true for me; music can indeed do all these things.
“Music happens inside you. It moves the things that are there from place to place. It can make them fly. It can bring you the past. It can bring you things that you do not know. It can bring you into the moment that is happening. It can bring you a cure.”
The time the narrator knows love with his Maggie seems all too short in the full tale of his life. His thoughts about going on without the one you’ve loved with all your heart are both eloquent and heartbreaking.
“What is it to miss someone? (...)It is the feeling of being in a strange place and losing direction. It is the feeling of looking without seeing and eating without tasting. It is forgetfulness, the inability to move, the inability to connect. It is a sentence you must serve and if the person you miss is dead your sentence is long.”
This is a short book containing a lot of beautiful black and white photographs. And yet the words tell the complete story of the life forced away from everything it knew and the near impossibility of finding home again. These words will stay with me for a long time.
While this book tells the story, as described in the blurb, of a man forced to move from the West of Ireland to England for work and does have a clear beginning and a powerful end – In the morning light I let go – there is no real story to summarize. This is a reflection on a life. A patchwork of memories and impressions – a lot of them bleak but a few so bright they almost light up the page. I won’t attempt to write my normal review. Instead I’ve collected thoughts and quotes as I read which I’ll share below and use as a tool to remember the book and the feelings it created in me, by.
I could read the sky: One of the things the narrator lists as what he could do (Chapter 9).
“What I could do.
I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field. Work the swarth turner, the float and the thresher. I could read the sea. Shoot straight. Make a shoe. Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes. Plough and harrow. Read the wind. Tend bees. Bind wyndes. Make a coffin. Take a drink. I could frighten you with stories. I knew a song to sing to a cow when milking. I could play twenty-seven tunes on my accordion.”
He could do so much, and yet it seems to amount to so very little in practical terms.
This book was at times rather devastating, like when I read the narrator’s thoughts and feelings on his first night in England.
“I feel in my pockets. I wonder have I the fare home and if I can find the way. I think of the bed I left in Labasheeda. Outside it is dark and the road full of twists I know nothing of. There is no way back now. I am to pick potatoes and lie down at night in this loft. I am to be in England living with pigs.”
Or when the narrator asks another Irish man in England what it’s like working there.
“It’s like you’re trying to talk to somebody out of a deep black hole, he says.”
The following sounds like the lament of an exile and especially the last one – stop remembering – breaks my heart.
“What I couldn’t do.
Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Work with drains or with objects smaller than a nail. Drive a motor car. Eat tomatoes. Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort. Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen. Abide loud voices. Perform the manners of greeting and leaving. Save money. Take pleasure in work carried out in a factory. Drink coffee. Look into a wound. Follow cricket. Understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. Wear shoes or boots made from rubber. Best P.J. in an argument. Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.”
Memories, they are such fickle things. It’s not always the big momentous events that stay with us. All too often the small details – insignificant at the time – are the ones which come back in glorious detail years later.
“I’m walking behind a red-haired man with mud on his boots, the trousers falling off him, the paper rolled up in his jacket pocket and him taking the two sides of the pavement from all the drink and I know it is me. I know it is all of us.”
Lines like the one quoted above broke my heart. How lonely the life of many exiled Irish men in England was.
“I read a book once, he says. I read many one time. The thing about a book is that the man who is writing it brings all the lives from all the different places and makes them flow together in the same stream. As they move down towards the end it’s like they have loops and holes and shapes that all fit together just nicely so that they’re just one big piece really. You can look back and see how all of them got where they are. That’s the time the writer brings the book to an end and there’s no seeing past it. I’d like to meet the man who wrote a book like that so I could ask him where he got those lives.”
“(...)I can see as I look from the side at the arrangement of brow and nose something of what she was when she was a girl and nothing had disappointed her.” – The narrator about a sister he hasn’t seen in years.
These thoughts about music rang true for me; music can indeed do all these things.
“Music happens inside you. It moves the things that are there from place to place. It can make them fly. It can bring you the past. It can bring you things that you do not know. It can bring you into the moment that is happening. It can bring you a cure.”
The time the narrator knows love with his Maggie seems all too short in the full tale of his life. His thoughts about going on without the one you’ve loved with all your heart are both eloquent and heartbreaking.
“What is it to miss someone? (...)It is the feeling of being in a strange place and losing direction. It is the feeling of looking without seeing and eating without tasting. It is forgetfulness, the inability to move, the inability to connect. It is a sentence you must serve and if the person you miss is dead your sentence is long.”
This is a short book containing a lot of beautiful black and white photographs. And yet the words tell the complete story of the life forced away from everything it knew and the near impossibility of finding home again. These words will stay with me for a long time.
November 23, 2020
Mesmeric stream-of-consciousness prose poetry creates an idiosyncratic portrait of the lives of emigrant rural Irishmen scraping out a living in industrial England, as the unnamed narrator looks back on his experiences at the close of his days. Occasionally quite moving and brought to life by Steve Pyke's stark black-and-white photographs of everyday Irish working-class life.
August 23, 2024
⭐ 3'5/5
Sense acabar de ser una biografia a l'ús, explica la història de moltíssimes persones que van haver d'emigrar d'Irlanda i què van trobar allà on van anar. També podrien ser les vides de tants altres migrants de tants altres països...
És un llibre que commou, però a vegades es fa difícil seguir un fil fet de tants retalls a la vegada.
Sense acabar de ser una biografia a l'ús, explica la història de moltíssimes persones que van haver d'emigrar d'Irlanda i què van trobar allà on van anar. També podrien ser les vides de tants altres migrants de tants altres països...
És un llibre que commou, però a vegades es fa difícil seguir un fil fet de tants retalls a la vegada.
August 1, 2024
A beautifully poetic and lyrical story told by an Irish migrant who finds work in English towns in the mid-20th Century.
There is a sadness and loneliness throughout, punctuated only by the drink and music. And love.
The striking photography adds to the poignance.
There is a sadness and loneliness throughout, punctuated only by the drink and music. And love.
The striking photography adds to the poignance.
abandoned
October 4, 2023I don't get this. I don't see what the pictures have to do with the text and I found the prose (what I read of it) affectless and uninvolving.
January 9, 2024
4.5 if I could - very very good
July 26, 2020
It seems crass to class this wonderfully observed book as fiction when it’s pages are full of the poignant lilt of the old ways in rural Ireland and of lives cheaply brutalised in the mail of England. However even the brutality of the conditions that Irish migrants faced in the potato farms, the railways, the underground tunnels and the piggeries did not silence their music, or their dancing or their telling of tales. The book is enhanced by beautiful pictures of a vanished place and its peoples and introduced by Jon Berger
August 19, 2025
Millor lectura de l'estiu.
Escriptura molt poètica.
Quina manera més bonica d'explicar la música i l'amor.
Quines descripcions tan físiques.
I quant de dolor i de misèria ("exili no és una paraula").
"A la llum del capvespre, el verd de l'herba es torna més profund, es pot veure un cosit de plata sobre les pedres, el daurat s'escampa, es capbussa i brilla a l'aigua, i les ombres de les tombes són llargues. Hi ha de tot, a les tombes. Sabates de nen, jerseis a mig teixir, flors, monedes, fotografies, una harmònica i una boina. Hi ha un missatge embolicat dins del coll d'una ampolla de stout. L'enterramorts amb els cabells rossos i les dents de sota que li surten per sobre del llavi va amunt i avall escombrant allà on pot. «Traient la mala sort de les tombes», repeteix una vegada i una altra."
Escriptura molt poètica.
Quina manera més bonica d'explicar la música i l'amor.
Quines descripcions tan físiques.
I quant de dolor i de misèria ("exili no és una paraula").
"A la llum del capvespre, el verd de l'herba es torna més profund, es pot veure un cosit de plata sobre les pedres, el daurat s'escampa, es capbussa i brilla a l'aigua, i les ombres de les tombes són llargues. Hi ha de tot, a les tombes. Sabates de nen, jerseis a mig teixir, flors, monedes, fotografies, una harmònica i una boina. Hi ha un missatge embolicat dins del coll d'una ampolla de stout. L'enterramorts amb els cabells rossos i les dents de sota que li surten per sobre del llavi va amunt i avall escombrant allà on pot. «Traient la mala sort de les tombes», repeteix una vegada i una altra."
September 16, 2007
This cathartic, haunting, and beautifully photographed book is told from the point of view of an Irishman in England looking at mental snapshots of his life and the people and circumstances most influential to him.
It is a series of vignettes, some funny, some desperate, about his life, and reads like a poetic road map chronicling the lives of the thousands who left Ireland to do industrial and farm labor in England in the 20th century.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
It is a series of vignettes, some funny, some desperate, about his life, and reads like a poetic road map chronicling the lives of the thousands who left Ireland to do industrial and farm labor in England in the 20th century.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
October 17, 2023
What caught my eye was the blurb from Studs Terkel (author of “Working”) on the back of the book. The. I peered inside and saw the photos. And I was hooked.
The storytelling is almost impressionistic, as if you’re only getting glimpses and fragments of a life here and there. The almost-poetic language, combined with the photos, makes for a very compelling book if like to savor again.
The storytelling is almost impressionistic, as if you’re only getting glimpses and fragments of a life here and there. The almost-poetic language, combined with the photos, makes for a very compelling book if like to savor again.
June 3, 2008
Spawned a great film, and a greater soundtrack. O'Grady's previous book was decent, but in no way prepared me for this quantum leap. Old age, the exhaustion of an exiled life, and loss in stellar prose. Steve Pyke photos don't hurt either. Short, sweet, and sumptuous.
November 9, 2023
This was super evocative, rich in description. You can smell and hear it. The audiobook has irish music to set the mood. It's balanced precisely. Just a bit more sentimentality and it would all collapse. The sadness is palpable.
January 17, 2025
“Music happens inside you. It moves the things that are there from place to place. It can make them fly. It can bring you the past. It can bring you things that you do not know. It can bring you into the moment that is happening. It can bring you a cure.”
Een Iers pareltje 🎻🎼
Een Iers pareltje 🎻🎼
February 27, 2020
“In the rain the land seems to let go of what it carries”
May 14, 2020
Is e an leabhar is fearr dar leigh me riamh
February 1, 2024
There is a brilliant scene in "Mad Men" when Don Draper is pitching Kodak Execs with a proposal to name their new slide viewer the "Carousel" and he opines:
"Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."
The pain of time bites deeply. That girl, that night, that smell, that stream can exit time itself, the memory deeply embedded in our body and our bones. There are places where returning is overwhelming, where time is twisted and gnarled in our hearts, where she is still there, and still 16, and still beautiful. Places where a 50-year-old echo of pain and loving and loss can be felt more deeply than anything near, now, and present.
Timothy O'Grady's "I Could Read the Sky" is a novel (perhaps a meditation) on the power of moment and place and time. It spans a lifetime in 160 pages, 1/2 of which hold gorgeous photos. It is a prose poem that builds a life through clipped moments of description that trap time like a pinned butterfly, then move on. O'Grady's style is spare, every sentence simply describes what is at that time, some two words long, some a bit longer, but none longer than the moment's observation would bear. The narrative spools like oral history, 50 years in the present tense, an accumulation of successive, ceaseless "now" that, like Mary Poppins' purse (or perhaps Hermione Grainger's), holds much more than it appears it should be able.
The "story" here is not a great narrative arc. There are no moments of grandeur or conflict. It describes, and I cannot emphasize enough the ceaselessness of description it contains, the life of a poor Irish man, from boyhood to the end, as a series of short, descriptive vignettes. It is a 160-page book that tells a 350-page story by allowing each of its tiny prose pictures to bear far more than it seems likely it should. It achieves depth through hint and suggestion, not explication, and the depth is real.
But perhaps I undersell it, as it is a tragedy. Not the grand, Aristotelian sort, with a great man making lousy choices, but the very modern tragedy of human life in the grinding anomie of industrial capitalism. Our protagonist is forced off the land as a boy and emigrates to England, where he makes his life digging trenches and building walls. He is the worker ant in the colony, faceless and nameless (literally, he randomly chooses different names at one point in the story). His life doesn't matter, even if the rich society above him depends on the tunnels and brickwork he and his irrelevant friends labor to create.
It is tragic when a lover falls. It is tragic when the keening love of adolescence is unfulfilled. It is tragic when an accordion falls silent. Tragedy is in the loss of moments, and it is no less tragic that the victim (participant?) is a person of no stature.
"I Could Read the Sky" is magnificent because with spare, unsentimental prose it creates a deeply sentimental novel. It makes us feel a life, in time, with all of its pain and beauty and loss. It reminds us of the power of memory even in the story of an eminently forgettable person. It says so much less than it conveys, and perhaps that is the rarest treat these days.
"Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."
The pain of time bites deeply. That girl, that night, that smell, that stream can exit time itself, the memory deeply embedded in our body and our bones. There are places where returning is overwhelming, where time is twisted and gnarled in our hearts, where she is still there, and still 16, and still beautiful. Places where a 50-year-old echo of pain and loving and loss can be felt more deeply than anything near, now, and present.
Timothy O'Grady's "I Could Read the Sky" is a novel (perhaps a meditation) on the power of moment and place and time. It spans a lifetime in 160 pages, 1/2 of which hold gorgeous photos. It is a prose poem that builds a life through clipped moments of description that trap time like a pinned butterfly, then move on. O'Grady's style is spare, every sentence simply describes what is at that time, some two words long, some a bit longer, but none longer than the moment's observation would bear. The narrative spools like oral history, 50 years in the present tense, an accumulation of successive, ceaseless "now" that, like Mary Poppins' purse (or perhaps Hermione Grainger's), holds much more than it appears it should be able.
The "story" here is not a great narrative arc. There are no moments of grandeur or conflict. It describes, and I cannot emphasize enough the ceaselessness of description it contains, the life of a poor Irish man, from boyhood to the end, as a series of short, descriptive vignettes. It is a 160-page book that tells a 350-page story by allowing each of its tiny prose pictures to bear far more than it seems likely it should. It achieves depth through hint and suggestion, not explication, and the depth is real.
But perhaps I undersell it, as it is a tragedy. Not the grand, Aristotelian sort, with a great man making lousy choices, but the very modern tragedy of human life in the grinding anomie of industrial capitalism. Our protagonist is forced off the land as a boy and emigrates to England, where he makes his life digging trenches and building walls. He is the worker ant in the colony, faceless and nameless (literally, he randomly chooses different names at one point in the story). His life doesn't matter, even if the rich society above him depends on the tunnels and brickwork he and his irrelevant friends labor to create.
It is tragic when a lover falls. It is tragic when the keening love of adolescence is unfulfilled. It is tragic when an accordion falls silent. Tragedy is in the loss of moments, and it is no less tragic that the victim (participant?) is a person of no stature.
"I Could Read the Sky" is magnificent because with spare, unsentimental prose it creates a deeply sentimental novel. It makes us feel a life, in time, with all of its pain and beauty and loss. It reminds us of the power of memory even in the story of an eminently forgettable person. It says so much less than it conveys, and perhaps that is the rarest treat these days.
February 14, 2023
Lo compré en El péndulo de la colonia Roma, mientras asistía a un concierto de Miguel Inzunza y esperaba la hora de entrar, por uno de esos impulsos que uno siente cuando ve una portada interesante y una contraportada que promete poesía a raudales. No cumplió del todo mis expectativas y realmente no trataba de lo que imaginaba (poesía), sino de algo completamente diferente.
Es una historia ficticia circunscrita en la experiencia de los emigrantes irlandeses de la segunda mitad del siglo XX en Inglaterra. Son como los recuerdos de un migrante, que evoca su pasado con una profunda y muy palpable melancolía. Como decía, no habla abiertamente de temas políticos ni de travesías, penurias y cosas así, que son el tipo de cosas que uno esperaría encontrar, por prejuicio, si hubiera sabido que trataba del tema de los migrantes. No, en realidad el libro se lee bastante bien, tranquilamente, es ligero y relativamente breve, además va acompañado de fotografías en blanco y negro de Steve Pyke, un fotógrafo de famosos, famoso, cuyo trabajo desconozco por completo, pero dicen que ha fotografiado a personajes como Kurt Cobain y Woody Allen. Se supone que el libro surgió originalmente a partir de las fotografías, y a Tymothy sólo le pidieron escribir los pies de foto, pero al final fue más allá y terminó en esta historia breve, acompañada de las fotos que no siempre están relacionadas con el texto, pero sí con la atmósfera que se desprende de él, lo que resulta en una obra bastante interesante. Me gusta la fotografía y me gustan las letras, así que la combinación me agradó mucho.
Hay una melancolía muy palpable en todas sus páginas. La presencia de la muerte, entierros, ataúdes, pensamientos respecto a personas que ya no están, recuerdos. Se habla de música de acordeón y de canciones tradicionales irlandesas. Busqué algunas y encontré una que otra, muy diferentes a lo que oímos en Latinoamérica, pues nuestras canciones tristes a veces resultan demasiado alegres, por fuerza de nuestra propia naturaleza jacarandosa, como decía Cri Cri. Pero las canciones, cuyo nombre no recuerdo, y que alguien tocaba en un entierro, sí que son tristes.
La historia es fragmentaria, como flashazos, precisamente como lo hacen las fotos. Capturan un momento, lo congelan para siempre. Y de algún modo, es lo que busca hacer también el texto. No describe, narra un momento.
Encontré algunos fragmentos interesantes, pongo ejemplos:
“Las fotografías son un recuerdo de todo lo que escapa al poder de las palabras.”
“¿Tendré bastante para volver a casa? ¿Sabré encontrar el camino? Pienso en la cama que he dejado en Labasheeda. Afuera está oscuro y el camino lleno de recodos que no conozco. Ahora ya no hay vuelta atrás. Voy a recoger patatas y a dormir por la noche en este altillo. Voy a vivir con cerdos en Inglaterra.”
Es una historia ficticia circunscrita en la experiencia de los emigrantes irlandeses de la segunda mitad del siglo XX en Inglaterra. Son como los recuerdos de un migrante, que evoca su pasado con una profunda y muy palpable melancolía. Como decía, no habla abiertamente de temas políticos ni de travesías, penurias y cosas así, que son el tipo de cosas que uno esperaría encontrar, por prejuicio, si hubiera sabido que trataba del tema de los migrantes. No, en realidad el libro se lee bastante bien, tranquilamente, es ligero y relativamente breve, además va acompañado de fotografías en blanco y negro de Steve Pyke, un fotógrafo de famosos, famoso, cuyo trabajo desconozco por completo, pero dicen que ha fotografiado a personajes como Kurt Cobain y Woody Allen. Se supone que el libro surgió originalmente a partir de las fotografías, y a Tymothy sólo le pidieron escribir los pies de foto, pero al final fue más allá y terminó en esta historia breve, acompañada de las fotos que no siempre están relacionadas con el texto, pero sí con la atmósfera que se desprende de él, lo que resulta en una obra bastante interesante. Me gusta la fotografía y me gustan las letras, así que la combinación me agradó mucho.
Hay una melancolía muy palpable en todas sus páginas. La presencia de la muerte, entierros, ataúdes, pensamientos respecto a personas que ya no están, recuerdos. Se habla de música de acordeón y de canciones tradicionales irlandesas. Busqué algunas y encontré una que otra, muy diferentes a lo que oímos en Latinoamérica, pues nuestras canciones tristes a veces resultan demasiado alegres, por fuerza de nuestra propia naturaleza jacarandosa, como decía Cri Cri. Pero las canciones, cuyo nombre no recuerdo, y que alguien tocaba en un entierro, sí que son tristes.
La historia es fragmentaria, como flashazos, precisamente como lo hacen las fotos. Capturan un momento, lo congelan para siempre. Y de algún modo, es lo que busca hacer también el texto. No describe, narra un momento.
Encontré algunos fragmentos interesantes, pongo ejemplos:
“Las fotografías son un recuerdo de todo lo que escapa al poder de las palabras.”
“¿Tendré bastante para volver a casa? ¿Sabré encontrar el camino? Pienso en la cama que he dejado en Labasheeda. Afuera está oscuro y el camino lleno de recodos que no conozco. Ahora ya no hay vuelta atrás. Voy a recoger patatas y a dormir por la noche en este altillo. Voy a vivir con cerdos en Inglaterra.”
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