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The Wake: And What Jeremiah Did Next
The year is 1968. Jeremiah Coffey is a twenty-seven-year-old teacher -- Catholic, conservative and plagued by guilt on account of his relationship with a beautiful bisexual called Aisling O'Connor.Aisling is everything that Jeremiah is not -- feisty and radical, angry and committed. She is a leading figure in the Irish civil rights movement and is planning to help organize a potentially explosive protest march inspired by the US black civil rights activists' Selma to Montgomery marches of three years before. The scene is set for a brutal confrontation to match the 1965 Bloody Sunday in Romance, Literary, Civil Rights, LGBT, Irish Troubles, Religion, Humor
230 pages, Paperback
Published July 8, 2019
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About the author
Colm Herron
9 books28 followersColm Herron is the author of five novels, including For I Have Sinned and Further Adventures of James Joyce. All received high acclaim. Further Adventures of James Joyce for example was described by Morris Beja in James Joyce Quarterly as “a totally comic novel.” Mr Beja, who is professor Emeritus of literature at Ohio State University, went on to compare Colm’s writing to that of both James Joyce and Irish comic genius Flann O’Brien.
On 2 February 2011 Joyce scholar Doctor Jonathan McCreedy delivered a paper at the Joyce birthday conference in Roma Tre University. His paper was entitled Further Adventures of James Joyce: the crossroads of two reading publics [the two publics being the Joyce aficionado and what Flann O’Brien might have called the plain person out for a good read].
On 16 June 2010 as part of a weeklong Bloomsday festival Colm shared the platform with actor Barry McGovern where for six hours under a midsummer sun they did readings alternately, he from Ulysses and Colm from his own novel.
In April 2011 Colm received an invitation from Professor Anne Fogarty of UCD to attend the National Library, Dublin, on the occasion of the annual Joyce Colloquium. Here he discovered that he had two thrilling admirers, namely Fritz Senn, father figure of Joyce scholars worldwide, and Jean-Michel Rabaté the renowned, perhaps unequalled, authority on Joyce, Beckett and a host of other writers and subjects.
Colm’s novel “The Wake” is a comic/serious novel which recalls Samuel Beckett at his most seminal. It opens with an unbroken sequence lasting 22 000 words which uses the setting of a traditional Irish wake to explore the destitution of man and transform it into something like his ennoblement.
The title of Colm's latest novel "A Maiden So Bewitching" is taken from the words of an old Irish song - Courting in the Kitchen - and it tells the story of a boy called Alexis who is brought up as a girl by a deranged mother and makes his way to to manhood in a state of sexual confusion. The same kind of upbringing had befallen the great writer Ernest Hemingway who reacted by living a macho lifestyle and taking out his hatred of his mother by ill-treating most of the women in his life. Alexis reacts in very different ways, sometimes comic, sometimes sad, always appealing - and these ways often land him in serious difficulties.
From the time he sat down to write his first novel Colm has lived by the motto ‘Non-fiction tries to use fact to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.’ He later found that he was putting into practice what Nobel prize-winning South African author Nadine Gordimer called “witness literature”. In a Pen lecture given by Gordimer for International Writers' Day in 2002 Gordimer talked of the felling of the twin towers on 11 September 2001."Terror pounced from the sky and the world made witness to it," she said. She then went on to consider the media coverage of that terrible day and examined the difference between the reporter's job, the pundit's job and that of the writer. "Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy of the image, the description of the sequence of events, the methodologies of expert analysis,” she said. “Kafka says the writer sees among the ruins different (and more) things than others … it [witness literature] is seeing what is really taking place."
On 2 February 2011 Joyce scholar Doctor Jonathan McCreedy delivered a paper at the Joyce birthday conference in Roma Tre University. His paper was entitled Further Adventures of James Joyce: the crossroads of two reading publics [the two publics being the Joyce aficionado and what Flann O’Brien might have called the plain person out for a good read].
On 16 June 2010 as part of a weeklong Bloomsday festival Colm shared the platform with actor Barry McGovern where for six hours under a midsummer sun they did readings alternately, he from Ulysses and Colm from his own novel.
In April 2011 Colm received an invitation from Professor Anne Fogarty of UCD to attend the National Library, Dublin, on the occasion of the annual Joyce Colloquium. Here he discovered that he had two thrilling admirers, namely Fritz Senn, father figure of Joyce scholars worldwide, and Jean-Michel Rabaté the renowned, perhaps unequalled, authority on Joyce, Beckett and a host of other writers and subjects.
Colm’s novel “The Wake” is a comic/serious novel which recalls Samuel Beckett at his most seminal. It opens with an unbroken sequence lasting 22 000 words which uses the setting of a traditional Irish wake to explore the destitution of man and transform it into something like his ennoblement.
The title of Colm's latest novel "A Maiden So Bewitching" is taken from the words of an old Irish song - Courting in the Kitchen - and it tells the story of a boy called Alexis who is brought up as a girl by a deranged mother and makes his way to to manhood in a state of sexual confusion. The same kind of upbringing had befallen the great writer Ernest Hemingway who reacted by living a macho lifestyle and taking out his hatred of his mother by ill-treating most of the women in his life. Alexis reacts in very different ways, sometimes comic, sometimes sad, always appealing - and these ways often land him in serious difficulties.
From the time he sat down to write his first novel Colm has lived by the motto ‘Non-fiction tries to use fact to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.’ He later found that he was putting into practice what Nobel prize-winning South African author Nadine Gordimer called “witness literature”. In a Pen lecture given by Gordimer for International Writers' Day in 2002 Gordimer talked of the felling of the twin towers on 11 September 2001."Terror pounced from the sky and the world made witness to it," she said. She then went on to consider the media coverage of that terrible day and examined the difference between the reporter's job, the pundit's job and that of the writer. "Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy of the image, the description of the sequence of events, the methodologies of expert analysis,” she said. “Kafka says the writer sees among the ruins different (and more) things than others … it [witness literature] is seeing what is really taking place."
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