- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Anansi (Sep 1 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0887846920
- ISBN-13: 978-0887846922
- Product Dimensions: 2.2 x 1.4 x 0.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 386 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,370,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
A freewheeling combination of memoir, history, and travelogue, Mark Anthony Jarman's Ireland's Eye is rooted in two long-ago events. On August 28, 1922, thousands of Dubliners came out to pay respects to Michael Collins, the martyred Irish revolutionary who was buried that day. Elsewhere in the same city on the same afternoon, Michael Lyons, a cooper who worked for Guinness and Jarman's grandfather, inexplicably drowned in the Grand Canal. Though the death of this other Michael attracted much less attention, it became the seed for this fascinating if frustrating book. The Edmonton-bred, Fredericton-based author of several books--including the superb short-story collection 19 Knives--Jarman is a formidable literary stylist who belongs in the first rank of Canadian writers. Here, he poses himself the challenge of writing of not just one country, but several versions of the same one, relating the events of his visits there, his recent investigations into his family's past, and a century's worth of bloody political history. As he says, "I want to compare the Ireland living in my head with the real one under my running shoes." The author proves equally skilled at conjuring the Dublin of his grandfather and depicting the bustling capital of today's "Celtic Tiger," where "disposable Detroit techno pumps in your less-than-innocent ears, and no more doloroso 'bedads' and 'begobs' from the drunken jarvey driving your jitney, your open hack, your spider phaeton."
Ireland's Eye is bound to be derided as an outsider's view, but the author is anything but a dispassionate observer. Instead, his tone is often argumentative and dyspeptic (his Joycean ranting and raving is truly a thing to behold). The writing can also be honest and wise, especially when Jarman illustrates the depth of our involvement with the places that create us, and how we uproot ourselves in the name of global commerce at our own peril. Yet the past can be just as dangerous and unstable as the present, and it's little surprise that Jarman fails to arrange his clashing Irelands into a harmonious whole. Luckily, his struggle makes for compelling reading. --Jason Anderson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Creative non-fiction about one man's changing "motherland", Dec 16 2005
By John L Murphy "Fionnchú" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Ireland's Eye: Travels (Paperback)
A brisk overview of a changing Ireland from a perspective of a Canadian son of an English father and Irish mother. Under the guise of finding out how his grandfather died in a Dublin canal the same August day that Michael Collins was buried, Jarman combines a search for the juxtaposition with his own meditation on how strong and how weak family ties can bind sons of emigrants. Jarman combines "creative nonfiction" perhaps less sucessfully here as he intersperses dramatizations of his own experiences in the North into his relatively more linear recollections of encounters with his relatives and others he meets in both Dublin and Killarney--the latter's particularly well-evoked in his description of his old family house now ruined. Jarman contrasts his two uncles, gay Padraig and policeman Sharkey, effectively, and sees how disorienting relations can be when one is put back in the "motherland" only to find that he feels estranged as often as welcomed by distant cousins and the like.He contemplates how, if one's parents have chosen as his did to emigrate in the post-WWII period, those like himself can never be accepted upon their return, having been by the Irish "written out of their will," and therefore disinherited. Although sections on climbing the "Reek," Croagh Patrick, and venturing into the North on a previous trip in 1981 perhaps, his summing up of an Ireland suddenly cash-rich and spending it all makes for sobering and thoughtful reading. I especially liked his interspersed, often deadpan, jingles, snippets of punk and new-wave and Beatles lyrics, and asides to Shakespeare and high culture and low all blended into his own unpredictable prose style, deceptively simple and casual but belying careful construction and arrangement of incident. Not perfect, but a cut above the usual misty-eyed or morally stern travelogue.
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