I finally finished this. It’s a slow-moving meditation on a life lived on the river. Or, a sort of half-life. It was first published in 1962; this translation from Spanish is by Jon Lindsay Miles (he writes about the experience here). I loved the Argentinian setting, and the language, and the strangeness, all of which are bound up with the river, yet it kept me at arms length, and took me ages to finish.

The distance was created by Conti’s nearly all-male cast, all men of mystery, all men of few words. It irked me that the only two women in the book were an ‘old woman’ and a ‘whore’, both downtrodden/barefoot/pregnant. It didn’t help that one of these inscrutable men (‘the man’)

‘was always maddened by this willingness of whores. There’s nothing quite so chilly nor more distant than a whore.’

Quite.

I’m looking forward to my next read.

This time two years ago, between drafts of my then Work In Progress, I wrote a very fast 80,000 word draft of a thing. I put it aside, following best practice—in a cool, but not too cool, damp-free space, away from light, and, of course, sideways—and went back to the second half of what would become Generation.

It’s been a busy two years, and now, returning to that draft, I find that, unlike fine wine, it did not improve in the interim. I must have been going through a Big American Novel phase, because it looks as if everything that entered my head, ever, went onto the page. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t rotate a half-turn every few weeks. But at least it’s In Progress, even if droves of darlings are scattered, maimed and dying, around the desktop floor.

… by Harriet Sleigh’s fabulous cover. GENERATION is rightly included here in Book Covers of Note.

If you’ve ever wondered about researching a novel, here is one example. Not necessarily a good one…

It may not look like much, but this is the ‘after’ pic following a mammoth admin clearance, all the way down to dusting and polishing. Nothing can stop the work-in-progress now, right?

Here’s me answering some great questions posed by David Ewald for Eclectica Magazine’s tumblr. Back in 2013, Eclectica published my short story, “Yehudit”,  which later developed into GENERATION. They also published my essay, The Influence of Edna O’Brien. I’m very grateful to editors Tom Dooley and David Ewald for their support then and now.

A tweet from @blackbirdbks reminded me that the summer I was 18 I read these two, thinking I ought, because everyone else starting English at Trinity was sure to have done so. They hadn’t, and much of both went over my head, but it was a summer I remember fondly. (Apropos of nothing, it was also the summer I chamber-maided at the Shelbourne.)

Reading fat books in the summer seems to be a habit that has stuck. In the early days it was the novels from the curriculum I hadn’t managed to finish: Don Quixoto, Tom Jones, Vanity Fair. Later, it was A Suitable Boy. Another year it was The Corrections; another, a stab at Proust (no, I didn’t manage all seven volumes). One year it was Foucault’s Pendulum; last year it was The Goldfinch. This year A Little Life filled the slot.

Almost without exception I wonder/ed why great swathes weren’t cut by author or editor. . .

Picnic on mossy stones. No phone reception. Didn’t even crack open A Little Life. Book-free, internet-free Mount Leinster: good for the post-launch soul.