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Solar Bones

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Solar Bones

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Overview

why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium

Marcus Conway has come home to his kitchen in Louisburgh, Co. Mayo,. Everything seems normal, yet he is haunted by the feeling that nothing is quite right. Poring obsessively over the details of his relationships, his world and his work as an engineer brings him closer to an understanding of how the things and people he loves have come together, and how they have and must inevitably come apart.

Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2018, Solar Bones is Mike McCormack's multi-award-winning elegy to the merits of an ordinary life.

This adaptation was first presented at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and subsequently at the Abbey Theatre. The production won Best Actor for Stanley Townsend and Best Director for Lynne Parker at the Irish Times Theatre Awards.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350372528
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/27/2022
Series:	Modern Plays
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.12(d)

About the Author

Michael West has written several plays in collaboration with Annie Ryan and The Corn Exchange including Man Of Valour, Freefall (Best New Play at the Irish Theatre Awards and at the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild) and the world premiere adaptation of James Joyce's Dubliners presented in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival 2012. Other work for The Corn Exchange includes EVERYDAY, Dublin By Lamplight, Foley, an adaptation of Lolita (in a co-production with the Abbey) and The Seagull which will premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2016. He has translated or adapted many texts, among them The Marriage of Figaro for the Abbey; a version of Death and the Ploughman by the Bohemian 14th century writer Johannes Von Saaz for Christian Schiaretti of the TNP in Lyon and produced by SITI company and directed by Anne Bogart in the USA; and plays by Molière, Marivaux, Calderón and the contemporary French poet, Jean-Pierre Siméon. His latest translation, Forever Yours, Mary-Lou by Michel Tremblay premiered at the Theatre Royal in Bath in March 2016.

Read an Excerpt

the bell
(Continues…)

Excerpted from "Solar Bones"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mike McCormack.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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...reminds you why you love theatre” —Sunday Times

“It is spellbinding and compelling...hopefully a wider audience will get a chance to see this tremendous piece” —Sunday Business Post

“This is a profound engagement with death, but also with life” —The Independent

From the Publisher

…when I tell you that a contemporary Irishman has just written a novel with minimal punctuation, recording the stream of consciousness of a man sitting for a few hours at his kitchen table in western Ireland, you might be forgiven for assuming that we are back at the feet of James Joyce, brought here by a modernist apostle, and that you'd do well to wait for the annotated edition. But Mike McCormack's Solar Bones…is a wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary book, with a debt to modernism but up to something all its own…The roughly 200 pages…draw together memories of family and work struggles, local and national politics, public works projects, medical crises, art, travel—in short, a life—all of it delivered in lucid, lyrical prose, with line breaks that rarely disrupt but act more like breaths, as if spoken by a friend across the table…For all its apparent stylistic complexity, Solar Bones is a beautifully simple book…Where modernism took a world that appeared to be whole and showed it to be broken, Solar Bones takes a world that can't stop talking about how broken it is, and suggests it might possibly be whole.

The New York Times Book Review - Martin Riker

★ 07/10/2017
The latest from McCormack (Notes from a Coma) is a beautifully constructed novel that blends Beckett’s torrential monologues with a realist portrait of small-town Ireland. The book opens with short, fragmented descriptions of the “systolic thump” of a church bell heard by a man, Marcus Conway, standing in his kitchen. He is a civil engineer and a one-time seminary student who lives on the west coast of Ireland, at “the edge of this known world.” Waiting for his wife and children to return home, Marcus is struck by the “twitchy energy in the ether,” mystified at being “swept up on a rush of words” and bombarded with “a hail of images.” Free of periods, the one-sentence novel is comprised of Marcus’s unceasing reflections and recollections, some lyrical and tender, others caustic, on his childhood, family, politics, and local building projects. He marvels at the miraculous construction of the world while feeling a sense of foreboding at its imminent unravelling. Bodies, minds, buildings, financial systems, the civic order, and the universe itself—“the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations”—all seem poised of the brink of collapse. As Marcus waxes eloquent on everything from tractor parts to concrete foundations, the novel’s suspense derives from the mystery of why this “strange” day—All Souls’ Day, as it happens—occasions such an “unspooling” of the mind. This is an intelligent, striking work. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/01/2017
As the Angelus tolls on All Soul's Day, Marcus Conway's ghost visits the house that he shared with his family in Louisburgh, County Mayo, Ireland. There, he reassembles the facts of his earthly existence from memory. An engineer in life, Marcus delights in the forms and structures, both natural and human made, that shape our existence. For our protagonist, life's dark comedy arises from the habit of being mystified by existence despite being defined by structure, from the stunning natural features of County Mayo's coastlines and hills, Louisburgh's buildings and thoroughfares, to the bones, tissues, and fluids that to varying degrees make up earthly life. The arrangement of a sandwich on a plate delights Marcus as much as a wind turbine does, and much of his afterlife musings consider how human factors such as politics and property compromise potentially perfect designs. McCormack's third novel (after Notes from a Coma, short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award) exhibits his startling imagination and humor as well as a measured narrative style that departs from the more rapid delivery characteristic of his earlier prose. VERDICT Widely praised, this book is a brilliant tour de force. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Library Journal

★ 2017-07-17
In this one-of-a-kind Irish novel, consisting of a single sentence à la Molly Bloom's interior monologue in Ulysses, a middle-aged man reflects on his life.Alone in his kitchen on All Souls' Day, Marcus Conway free-associates on everything from his pained family history to his physical surroundings in rural County Mayo to local politics to an unspeakable health crisis that hits home. And then there is the role he may have played as a civil engineer in the local building boom gone bust. For all his high artistic aims, McCormack is a wonderfully accessible, quick-witted writer—and, with references to Radiohead, Mad Max, and the post-millennial Battlestar Galactica, a smartly contemporary one. The book is alive with startling connections between the exterior and interior worlds (a dismantled wind turbine being hauled down the main drag "might well have been God himself") and Marcus' former and current selves. He is inspired to reappraise himself as a man and a father by the "inner harrowing" he experiences at his artist daughter's first solo exhibition, for which she duplicated, in the medium of her own blood, court reports from local newspapers. Had he failed her? McCormack breaks up his nonstop sentence with brief poetic spurts ("who made the world/God made the world/and who is God/God is our father in heaven/and so on and so on/to infinity") that give the book an irresistible driving rhythm. It's a book that demands a second reading and readings of the author's other books, including Getting it in the Head (1998) and Notes from a Coma (20013). This transcendent novel should expand McCormack's following on this side of the Atlantic and further establish him as a heavyweight of contemporary Irish fiction along with the likes of Anne Enright and Kevin Barry.

Kirkus Reviews