The recent deaths of Umberto Eco and Harper Lee throw into contrast the modern literatures of Europe and the United States in an interesting way. Umberto Eco (84) made his name overnight as a novelist with the publications in 1980 of The Name of the Rose, a sort of medieval Sherlock Holmes tale, which carried…
My Indian Journal: Exploring Interfaith Connections by Catherine McCann (ISPCK, €8.00; ISBN 978-81-8465-529-2; available from Veritas, Dubray and Easons) They say that there are two ways to get to know the heart of a country: either make a brief intense visit, or spend a lifetime there. Anything in between may well leave one confused about the…
My Other Self: Conversations with Christ on Living Your Faith by Clarence J. Enzler (Christian Classics Ave Maria Press, $13.95 / £8.99; e-book £8.54; ISBN: 978-0870612480) Donal Anthony Foley This book comes with high praise from figures including the late Fr Benedict Groeschel (who also wrote the foreword to this edition), in which he argues that “trust” is…
Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair by Anne Lamont (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this wise little book, popular writer Anne Lamont draws on the now almost lost art of make and mend which our grandmothers so firmly believed in. A stitch in time can save not only that favourite garment, but also, she…
The Book of Margery Kempe translated and edited by Anthony Bale (Oxford World’s Classics, £8.99) In 1934 an extraordinary literary discovery was made in the library of an Old Catholic family in England. It was a medieval manuscript that had escaped the dissolution of the monasteries. Found in the Derbyshire home of the Butler-Bowdons, it had…
T. J. Morrissey Big Jim Larkin: Hero or Wrecker? by Emmet O’Connor (UCD Press, €40.00) This is an important book by a historian who follows the evidence where it leads, ‘let the chips fall where they may’. The work is marked by extensive research. It benefits from fresh evidence: from the Russian State Archives, from police files on…
The White Heat: My Autobiography by Tomás Ó Sé (Gill & Macmillan 2015) The narrative in this autobiography is simple and direct, the way Tomás played his football: An Módh Díreach, as he himself would put it. Another refreshing aspect of it is the paucity of expletives. Notoriously his uncle Páidí’s autobiography was vitiated by an overload…
Ireland’s troubles in fact and fiction It is inevitable that the flood of books about 1916 should include some novels. But the precedents for such fictions are not good, as I know from reading many of them while writing my account of the literary revival and the Irish revolution, The Heart Grown Brutal (1977). There…
Truce: Murder, myth and the last days of the Irish war of independence by Padráig Óg Ó Ruairc (Mercier Press, Cork, €17.99) Ian D’Alton The Irish Revolution industry marches on. This book is somewhat ahead of the centenary of the events it chronicles, so it is almost a welcome diversion from the veritable tsunami of books about…
Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, €31.50 hb) John Wyse Jackson The two most important early works of modernist literature were published in the same year, 1922: Ulysses, by James Joyce, and The Waste Land, by T S Eliot. Both writers are still widely read and studied, and…
Peter Costello