Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1013232 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Briliant short fiction
"I was given the dead girl's toys." A first sentence guaranteed to hijack the reader's imagination. It proposes the obvious question: what dead girl? As well as the more truthful question: why give a dead girl's toys to another woman's daughter? Short stories exist almost as a freeze-frame method of capturing moments in characters' lives. They serve to elaborate these moments, investing a sheer fragility into what is told there.
In her second collection of short stories, Ní Chonchúir, establishes herself as a writer who is committed to peeling back the veneer of ordinary lives to display the sometimes unfathomable choices people make and the collaborative cruelty in love relationships. In the story "Pascha's War"- a young man's war traumatised childhood is mined for artistic truth by his older lover. There is rancid betrayal in this story, made more disturbing by the fact that there is real love between the two men.
"The Trip" guides the reader into a bleak, senseless murder scene in a B&B, setting it up as an epilogue to a banal drinking session in a pub. It is the juxtaposition of such normality and abnormality that makes Ní Chonchúir an unsettling and sensual writer. Murder is ordinary after all. It is as human as a love sold short between lovers and those secrets, which are hidden between adults but rarely fool children.
Ní Chonchúir's gift with story-telling goes beyond the flat visuals of words on paper and describes an individual world in each story. A dead girl's doll ("Toys") has "pen mark squiggles on her rubber belly". Such an image conjures up the dead girl's presence, her hand making that mark on the doll and the doll now belonging to another little girl.
In the story "I, Caroline", we are witness to the previous life of a tiny skeleton held in a glass box in a museum in London. The story is delicate and matter-of-fact, structured in as detailed a way as the skeleton itself. "Little people are better than big people. They take up less room," Caroline Crachami says, as she tells her contained narrative. Yet, behind her words, is the life of a young woman quite used up by big people and then finally put on display.
To The World Of Men, Welcome, is the work of a writer who knows how to write. She knows the exquisite necessity of ordinary details yet weaves them into the darker sides of human nature, hence forcing the reader to witness how much is at stake beneath the veneer of everyday life.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir is an ambitious writer. Her stories are not constrained by a sole sense of "Irishness". She reveres the first rule of story telling: tell a story and make it real. She achieves this by instilling life into her characters and their surroundings. Whether it is a woman's final one night stand in "The Last Man", or the detritus of a young man's childhood in "Pascha's War", or the sly realisation of a love affair's death knell in Paris in the story "Well Met, Well Met" - this collection of short stories is testament to Nuala Ní Chonchúir's talent as a real, original and challenging writer.