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Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Look At You by Amanda Smyth: This autobiographical novel is a true original
Look At You Author : Amanda Smyth ISBN-13 : 978-1845235895 Publisher : Peepal Tree Guideline Price : £10.99 Look At You is a curious thing: an autobiographical novel told in short stories, each a snapshot of a moment in the narrator's life. The stories are arranged chronologically, and each is a portrait of someone in her orbit: a childhood friend, a parent, a lover. Her alcoholic father visits on Christmas and fights her mother's new boyfriend. A teenage game of cards in Trinidad ends with her friend hooking up with her brother while a hurricane rages outside. Her father is diagnosed with cancer, and she flies back to help him order the house. Through these impressions, stretching from early girlhood to middle age, we begin to sense the fullness of her life. Smyth's narrator is easy to care for because she possesses an essential joie de vivre, flinging herself toward experience with arms wide open, embracing chaos and beauty alike. Despite the originality of its form, the novel never feels experimental or self-consciously avant-garde in the way genre-bending works sometimes do (think Maggie Nelson or Anne Carson, who similarly push memoir's boundaries). In fact, the prose is traditional – simple and descriptive. READ MORE Ali Smith's cover blurb calls Smyth an heir to Jean Rhys, and the comparison is apt. Both are glamorous, hypersensitive women who grew up in the Caribbean before being dispatched to gloomy England, where their real troubles begin. But the resemblance rests somewhere deeper: in their genius for atmosphere. Beneath their apparent simplicity lies something complex and very haunting. Look At You is full of images that seem plucked from dreams: 'From there I could see the refinery, the burning lilac flame. I could see the dark green places full of clumps of bamboo. I could see the shimmering lake and the brown bank where vultures made a black crowd. Before we hit the water, we yelled out our names or the name of someone famous who we'd like to be.' These snapshots of memory illuminate brief moments, but the novel's power also lies in what Smyth leaves unspoken. Between the stories lie absences – darkened spaces where crucial events unfold in silence: deaths that alter relationships, betrayals that fracture trust, and chance couplings that reshape families and fates. Look At You captures the shadows that define a life, but also the life itself – fiercely lived and fondly remembered.
Irish Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Walking Ghosts by Mary O'Donnell: An ambitious, dystopian and horny collection
Walking Ghosts Author : Mary O'Donnell ISBN-13 : 9781917453226 Publisher : Mercier Press Guideline Price : €16.99 The opening story of Mary O'Donnell's new collection sets a pattern for what is to come by depicting the Covid-19 lockdowns as an instance of paralysis in the Joycean fashion. Its protagonist struggles to live meaningfully in a world turned upside-down by 'that microscopic ball with the little cartoon feet', and many of the characters who follow experience a similar longing to shatter the nagging stasis of their lives. On one level these are the walking ghosts of the title but, on another, they are ciphers for the old-guard tropes of Irish literary writing – the contested field, the London abortion, and so on – which O'Donnell here seeks to reanimate and, in one or two cases, cast aside entirely. No surprise, so, that many of her protagonists are survivors of Ireland's literary-industrial complex (one rather brilliant tale, The Stolen Man, concerns a writing student succumbing to the seductive creative freedoms of Galway). Yet, after several stories content to probe the margins of suburban realism, O'Donnell suddenly delivers a jolt of genre energy halfway through The Space Between Louis and Me. It is the kind of story that makes you go back and re-read it from the start (to say any more would be to ruin the surprise). READ MORE Soon after comes The Creators, the most striking story here, which offers a reflective extrapolation of our contemporary climate crisis. Set in a future of 'fear and extreme heat' where Scotland's Hebrides have been transformed into 'Garden Isles', this is a deftly sketched portrait of desperation and desire, one worthy of inclusion on the eclectic shelf of insular dystopian fiction by Irish women (think The Bray House by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne or Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff). Walking Ghosts is a work of quiet ambition rich in standout descriptions ('He looks like a horse in a cubist painting'). Moreover, this is a horny collection, one happy to linger on female desire through chances taken – or not – on lost loves or intoxicating holiday acquaintances. Yet the most intriguing flirtation here is that of O'Donnell with speculative fiction. This paradoxically both elevates and anchors the proceedings. Because, yes, the future may be dire, but its calamitous potential may yet be dampened by the choices we make now.
The National
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Heart Lamp: book of short stories featuring Indian Muslim women wins International Booker Prize
Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories about Muslim women in southern India by Banu Mushtaq, has won the coveted International Booker Prize. Deepa Bhasthi's translation of 12 of Mushtaq's tales is the first short-story collection to win the award. Lawyer and women's rights activist Mushtaq wrote the stories, originally in the Kannada language, over the course of 30 years. She is the second Indian author to win the prize. Mushtaq began writing in the 1970s and has published six short story collections, a novel and essays as well as poetry. The author was inspired to write the stories by those who came to her seeking help. 'The pain, suffering and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write,' she said, according to a press release by the prize committee. Translator Bhasthi selected and curated the stories, with the aim of preserving the multilingual nature of southern India. When the characters use Urdu or Arabic words in conversation, these are left in the original, reproducing the unique rhythms of spoken language. Heart Lamp ' is something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation [of] beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories', chairman of the 2025 panel of judges Max Porter said. 'This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading. It's been a joy to listen to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives of the jury.' The International Booker Prize recognises the vital work of translation, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
