We found a nice bookshop in Kilkenny, where the saleswomen knew about books, and I asked whether they had a section of Irish fiction. I looked over it and bought a novel by Roddy Doyle, one by Flann O'Brien, and a volume of short stories by Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex.
I decided to read the stories first.
I remembered reading O'Connor when I was young, and he published regularly in The New Yorker, and I wasn't disappointed. On the contrary, I was blown away.
I liked everything: his vivid descriptions, his empathetic but objective characterization, his wry sense of humor, his understated plots, and his insightful depiction of Ireland - the way it was more than sixty years ago, when he was alive and writing.
Julian Barnes, one of the best contemporary writers in English that I know of, contributed the introduction to the book, which is available on-line. Of course, he mentioned Chekhov as a major influence on O'Connor. But he said that Turgenev was an even greater influence. O'Connor, whose real name was Michael Francis O'Donovan, taught himself Gaelic (he wasn't a native speaker of the language) and, when he was in prison for a year during the civil war between the IRA and those supporting the treaty with England, he wrote an essay about Turgenev in Irish, which was, in fact, his first published work.
So, after finishing Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry (which I liked less than O'Connor, but I have bought the sequel and intend to read it), and after reading a book called How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill, which is informative but written with far too much razzle-dazzle, I decided to fill a hole in my literary education and downloaded a free copy of Fathers and Sons to my tablet.
I just finished reading it last night and felt like saying to Turgenev, "Where have you been all my life?"
But maybe it's good to save some great books for your old age.
I just had an email exchange with Gail Hareven about D. H. Lawrence. I'm translating a novel of Gail's, and Lady Chatterley's Lover comes up in it. I said it had been ages since I read that book, and she said, yes, Lawrence is an author you should read before you're twenty (and not after that). We agreed that Turgenev is ageless.
For me, at least, fiction (including movies and TV series) only works if you can believe in the characters and care about them. The people in Fathers and Sons, mainly provincial, minor Russian nobility, could hardly be more different from the people I know and have known in my life, but, through Turgenev, I understood them, cared about them, and enjoyed hearing about them.
For a while I wasn't reading very much fiction. I've read a huge number of novels, stories, and plays in my life, and I'm sometimes jaded. But when a book really grabs me, the way Turgenev's novel grabbed me, or O'Connor's stories grabbed me, or an old book by Anita Brookner, Family and Friends, which I read recently, involved and fascinated me, I remember how important literature has been for me.
Gail Hareven's narrator and protagonist in the novel I'm translating, called Ani Leona (I am Leona) in Hebrew, is a girl who looks to books to understand life, and, as Gail told me in conversation, for certain kinds of people, books raise us. We are whom we read when we were young.
I decided to read the stories first.
I remembered reading O'Connor when I was young, and he published regularly in The New Yorker, and I wasn't disappointed. On the contrary, I was blown away.
I liked everything: his vivid descriptions, his empathetic but objective characterization, his wry sense of humor, his understated plots, and his insightful depiction of Ireland - the way it was more than sixty years ago, when he was alive and writing.
Julian Barnes, one of the best contemporary writers in English that I know of, contributed the introduction to the book, which is available on-line. Of course, he mentioned Chekhov as a major influence on O'Connor. But he said that Turgenev was an even greater influence. O'Connor, whose real name was Michael Francis O'Donovan, taught himself Gaelic (he wasn't a native speaker of the language) and, when he was in prison for a year during the civil war between the IRA and those supporting the treaty with England, he wrote an essay about Turgenev in Irish, which was, in fact, his first published work.
So, after finishing Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry (which I liked less than O'Connor, but I have bought the sequel and intend to read it), and after reading a book called How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill, which is informative but written with far too much razzle-dazzle, I decided to fill a hole in my literary education and downloaded a free copy of Fathers and Sons to my tablet.
I just finished reading it last night and felt like saying to Turgenev, "Where have you been all my life?"
But maybe it's good to save some great books for your old age.
I just had an email exchange with Gail Hareven about D. H. Lawrence. I'm translating a novel of Gail's, and Lady Chatterley's Lover comes up in it. I said it had been ages since I read that book, and she said, yes, Lawrence is an author you should read before you're twenty (and not after that). We agreed that Turgenev is ageless.
For me, at least, fiction (including movies and TV series) only works if you can believe in the characters and care about them. The people in Fathers and Sons, mainly provincial, minor Russian nobility, could hardly be more different from the people I know and have known in my life, but, through Turgenev, I understood them, cared about them, and enjoyed hearing about them.
For a while I wasn't reading very much fiction. I've read a huge number of novels, stories, and plays in my life, and I'm sometimes jaded. But when a book really grabs me, the way Turgenev's novel grabbed me, or O'Connor's stories grabbed me, or an old book by Anita Brookner, Family and Friends, which I read recently, involved and fascinated me, I remember how important literature has been for me.
Gail Hareven's narrator and protagonist in the novel I'm translating, called Ani Leona (I am Leona) in Hebrew, is a girl who looks to books to understand life, and, as Gail told me in conversation, for certain kinds of people, books raise us. We are whom we read when we were young.
