Product Description

'Mapping God/Le Tracé de Dieu' is a dual-language novella whose story is set in a village on the Irish coast. The thread running through the story is an unsolved murder; but the subject of the tale is at least as much the differences between the indigenous community and the 'blow-ins', the new people from various parts of the world who have moved in to the village and whose lives interact only marginally with them. It's a tale of dislocation, of history, superstition and a new, inquiring Ireland.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3239949 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: French, English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 261 pages

From the Author
Having written a short story about the changes in small village life and the kinds of people who were making those changes, and this story had appeared in an edition of The Phoenix Book of Irish Short Stories, edited by David Marcus, I had wanted to expand the subject a little. But it was to be a small, almost minimalist work. I am interested in what some young French novelists are doing, a terse, tight yet very poetical kind of writing. Irish writing isn't like that. Therefore I was delighted, of course, to see the work in translation. I wanted to write a story that was like a Greek tragedy, that even had a 'chorus' of three women 'singing' the story out. And I was fascinated by the implications on a small society of the proximity of a place of pilgrimage, a holy mountain: places create their own, often powerful, mythologies. Irish village life is changing; yet often this is not recognised, culturally or politically. Irish life generally is becoming European life. We can no longer think merely in terms of our living on an island, though, admittedly, the resistance to change - or perhaps I should say the indifference - to outside influence on rural Ireland is still strong enough. I think the novella is about that, too.