chat with Father Nugent (“And semen is the Latin for seed. There are some terrifically funny incidents in Reading in the Dark, like the individual sex ed. The one force doesn’t negate the other, but the juxtaposition reminds you that life isn’t all gloom or laughs. The Irish have such a knack for holding humor and tragedy up side by side – think John Boyne, James Joyce and Frank McCourt. The short chapters take place between 19: starting when the boy is five years old and encountering a household ghost on the stairs and ending as, in his early thirties, he lays his father to rest in the midst of the Troubles. The narrator also learns a family secret from his dying maternal grandfather that at first thrills him – he knows something his father doesn’t! – but later serves to drive him away from his parents. Ireland’s internecine violence is the sinister backdrop to this family’s everyday sorrows, including the death of a child and the mother’s shaky mental health. Indeed, this debut novel has generally been interpreted as heavily autobiographical, with the anonymous narrator, the third of seven children born to Catholic parents in Derry, Northern Ireland, taken to be a stand-in for Deane.
(4.5) These vivid vignettes of childhood and young adulthood are so convincing that I could have been fooled into believing I was reading a memoir. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up-in Ireland or anywhere-that has ever been written. Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it." And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend-the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly-reveals its transfixing reality.
As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. Winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International Award
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