Writers aren’t continually a gift to their critics. How do we make the experience of a frame of work that stretches across the unconventional, poetry, drama, journalism, and criticism itself and repeatedly mocks the pretensions of critics to capture the anarchic variety of the individual skills? Máirtín Coilféir, on this charming, looks at one of the important residing writers within the Irish language, not only rises to the project but gives a refreshingly new take on the writing of Alan Titley. The literary experimentalism of Titley’s first novel, Meirscrí a Treibhe (1978)
The lexical exuberance of his later short story collection Eiriceachtaí Agus Scéalta Eile (1987) has often caused the writer to be typecast as a feckless literary postmodernist, playing the linguistic party but not significantly exercised via what occurs when phrases are rumbled by using awkward realities. By tracing Titley’s abiding ethical concerns, from his prose fiction to his newspaper columns,
Coilféir demonstrates how profoundly fallacious this view is. Indeed, the sheer force and continuity of Titley’s anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist polemic situates his writing inside the agency of islanders from the opposite side of the Atlantic – Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire – who inside the French Caribbean, like Titley, saw no contradiction between the reinvention of language and the warfare on complacency. Michael Cronin
The Storyteller, Pierre Jarawan’s debut novel, is simultaneously a circle of relatives drama, a thriller tale replete with secrets, and insightful engagement with the chaos of Middle Eastern politics. At the center of the narrative is a lack. Samir, the radical narrator, recollects how his father disappeared from his lifestyle, absolutely having arrived in Berlin from Lebanon in 1982 to start a new life and the mysterious telephone calls that precipitated the event that haunts him into maturity.
Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl’s translation is nuanced and intense, meaning Jarawan’s style is showcased and no longer impeded. The narrative’s non-linear nature urges the reader ahead on a journey that by no means moves in a constant route but is no less compelling because of that. The dating among time, reminiscence, and identity are explored through Samir’s memories and studies, inviting the reader to invest completely in an intuitively drawn and extremely relatable individual.
In a novel, this is complex, multi-layered, and always enticing; Jarawan skilfully negotiates the jobs of storyteller, mediator, and educator. Becky Long Oh my goodness, hats off to publishers Omnibus Press and writers Celeste Bell and Zoë Howe for this tribute to the ever-splendid, utterly original punk icon and feminist Poly Styrene. In huge format, Dayglo is a part zine, element scrapbook crammed with a medley of voices, which includes Poly’s diary entries (she died in 2011), with artwork, lyrics, and pictures.
A bi-racial youngster from a ferociously operating-elegance heritage with an Irish/Scots mum and Somalian dad, she ran away at 15 clutchings £3, bummed around festivals and squats, and “located self-assurance.” Famously grew to become on after a Sex Pistols gig – there were almost 30 people there – aged 19, she ripped into the Seventies punk scene along with her foghorn voice and bin-liner costumes.
Witty up-yours mindset. Her lyrics concern consumerism, genetic engineering, climate breakdown, and identification. Tragically, she broke down, changed into wrongly identified, joined Hare Krishna, and largely disappeared from the scene. Bell, her daughter, manages to be proud and honest: life with a manic mum changed into hell, and what shines out here is her mum’s brilliance, strength, fragility, and fearlessness. What a story. Rosita Boland
