Reviews

Some thoughtful and interrogative reviews/ blogs have been posted about Malarky.

Marcus Pactor wrote a mid-book review, which is a curious concept that I might join him in writing sometime. I like the continuum that a mid-book review gives to the act of reading. It establishes that it’s ongoing.

Some extracts from Pactor’s blog

“The personal becomes political” is  worn, too.   Schofield turns it around so that the political becomes personal.   We’re very much in the post-9/11 world, but Our Woman’s mostly absorbed by her own life.  She’s interested in Afghanistan mostly because that’s where her homosexual son Jimmy took off to.  She’s interested in Syria because that’s where her latest lover’s from.  When she and her husband watch the news and see riots on the West Bank, she comments: “’Well whether they’re nutters or not,’ I said, ‘they’re lovely looking people.  Look at the great faces on those young men, see the elasticity in their skin and the beards make them look wise when they’re all but twenty.’”  This personalization is not a reduction.  New meanings and understandings of human value are assigned.  They have little to do with neocons and their useless counterparts.

Sentence-wise, she’s also  excellent.  You can hear the Irish voice articulating lovely, inventive metaphors. “One of her fleeting Ballyhaunis Bacon moments has just scraped by her, when the pork of her husband’s action clouts her forcefully out of nowhere and she finds brief comfort in the thought of him, entering the factory to have his flesh separated from his bones for betraying her the way he has.”

Read the entire post here