A Link with the River

by Desmond Hogan, Louise Erdrich (Preface by)

Overview

One of Ireland's most important writers at his finest. Written over a period of twelve years, these stories seem to move nowehere with relentless, slow precision, yet each is as fulfilling and rich with suggestion as a full-scale novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374530037
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/02/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Desmond Hogan is the author of A Link with the River.

Editorial Reviews

``It had been an old custom in Ireland to drive at least one of your family out, to England, to the mental hospital, to the sea or to a bad marriage,'' says the narrator in one of the 25 stories in this stirring collection. Hogan, from the West of Ireland and just now reaching mid-career ( Children of Lir ), tells tale after tale about life in exiles both actual and imagined, and he does so in rich and supple language, unquickened by postmodern angst: ``Boris Cleary was thin, nervously thin, black-haired, a blackness smoothing the parts of his face which he'd shaved and the very first thing Magella noticed about him was a smell from the back of his neck, as from wild flowers lost in the deep woods. . . .'' Hogan is drawn to the marginal sites where crises of identity are in full flame--gypsies, gays, artists, the devout. In the book's most compelling story, ``A Poet and an Englishman,'' a tinker couple moves from ``dark and bloody'' Belfast to Kerry. She understands his wandering, his abused childhood, his bisexuality; he contains her fears with the tough confidence he has somehow mastered; both portraits are enriched with the mystery of real persons. Hogan's take on Ireland is not bitter; he doesn't forgive its parochialism but rather insists on the possibility of survival, although the links, via language and memory, to the many ``tributaries of childhood,'' remain. This is a rousing, provocative collection. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hogan has a lot of good ideas, which is not the same as having a lot of good short stories. According to the publishers' notes, ``each of his stories--a seriesof epiphanies--seems to move nowhere with relentless, slow precision, yet each is as fulfilling and rich with suggestion as a full-scale novel.'' Well, no. The suggestion is usually the best thing, and the stories often do move nowhere. And to see them as epiphanic in any Joycean way is just hyperbolic. Good ideas: one story centers on a superannuated Teddyboy, another on an unhappy woman who burns her house down with her not-loved husband, unbeknownst to her, inside. But one person's ``relentless, slow precision'' is another's semi-monotonous plodding; in sum, a few very good stories, and a bunch of others. Beware: this will probably get rave reviews elsewhere. Not here.-- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.

Library Journal