ELLEN SAYS: I'm already wearing the green and hoping for the luck o' the Irish (or is that said in irony, as the Irish have had such little luck in their long history??). With St. Patrick's Day just around the corner, let's celebrate the wonderful literary heritage produced by the land of leprechauns. I'm not talking James Joyce, Yeats or Sean O'Casey, great as those writers may be. I'm thinking about contemporary writers, from Seamus Heaney ("Beowulf" translation; poet extraordinaire) to Edna O'Brien ("Light in the Evening") to Colm Toibin ("The Master") to John Mcgahern ("All Will Be Well")... and those are just the first names and books that come to mind.
This doesn't include all the American crossovers, transplants such as Frank McCourt ("Angela's Ashes") or homegrown chroniclers of the Irish-American story such as Alice McDermott ("Charming Billy"). I could spend the rest of my life on an Irish-only diet of books and authors and barely know I was deprived.
This week on KATU-TV in Portland I made some suggestions of new or nearly new books that readers ought to consider as they contemplate the blarney stone. All would make great gifts for St. Patrick's Day, guaranteeing that you'd have more than a hangover as a souvenir for your revelry!
1. "Heart and Soul," by Maeve Binchey. Heartfelt is the word for this latest novel from a phenomenal bestselling novelist who always gives you a sense of her characters' humanity. Here she focuses on the outpatient clinic a Dublin hospital creates and the people who inhabit it, both as staffers and clients. I don't want to spill the beans about what happens to the newly divorced cardiologist who's chosen to run the place, but the ending confirms how each of us has the capacity to change.
2. "Shannon," by Frank Delaney. The American-born Delaney sets this latest work of historical fiction in the 1920s along the Shannon River, which is to Ireland what the Mississippi is to us Americans. A priest named Robert Shannon (as in the river -- his people came from its shores) is suffering from shell shock after World War I. He's sent to Ireland to explore his roots (and to keep him out of the hair of his bosses in the Boston diocese, which is up to some mischief). There's a method to Delaney's madness in choosing this setting, putting his recovering priest in the midst of civil war. This is good stuff that helps you understand both the land and its politics.
3. "The Secret Scripture," by Barry Sebastian. This novel almost won the coveted Man Booker Prize, and it would have been my pick. The setting is the recent present, as a hospital psychiatrist takes on the task of moving a 100-year-old patient who has been incarcerated in a mental institution since she was a young woman. But the catalyst for the story -- her commitment -- occurred at roughly the same time as the Delaney novel, after World War I. The doctor begins to suspect fishy business, and he is right. Here you get a picture of the collusion between church and state that served its masters but gave women no voice.
4. "The Gathering," by Anne Enright. An acute intelligence and sense of resignation color this fiction work about a large Irish-Catholic family and its past. The narrator is a woman who has gone to retrieve the body of her dead brother, whose tragic life is tied to a secret that only she knows. This is a subtle story that explores the source of melancholy and love that binds together the Hegarty clan -- and maybe your own. The critics liked it: Enright's novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2007.
5. "A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub," by Bill Barich. Barich, a Dublin-based American who writes for The New Yorker, fuses the story of the neighborhood "public house" -- a.k.a. pub -- into a wider explanation of how Ireland is changing in the face of globalization. If you don't know ale from stout, not to worry: This book is crammed with tasty tidbits about the Irish and their customs. It may be worth the price of admission just to learn how many different terms they have for getting sloshed. My favorite euphemism for saying someone was drunk as a skunk: He was just "taking a ride on the bingo bus."
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