Skip to main content

Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle review – stories about lockdown and loss

Tender and humorous tales explore our need for connections with others in a world made strange by Covid

As a writer who has documented Ireland’s financial and social rollercoaster since the late 1980s, it’s fitting that Roddy Doyle should be among the first to record the effects of the current pandemic, the lockdown and the loss. The 10 stories in Life Without Children, mostly written in the past year, all do that. But Doyle is an author best known for easy dialogues, big, raucous families and pubs – and there have been precious few of those. How will he handle the sudden lack of conversation and company that has characterised recent times? Will there be Zoom calls?

There is one – a frustrating connection with a much-loved wife on an iPad propped up awkwardly in her hospital bed. It’s one of many images that would have seemed nonsensical two years ago but are uncomfortably familiar now: discarded surgical masks stuck to wet pavements; the “new language” of statistics on the radio; “the zip on a body bag”. In this strange new world, “social distancing is a phrase that everyone understands. It’s like gender fluidity and sustainable development. They’re using the words like they’ve been translated from Irish, in the air since before the English invaded.” But what feels most familiar is the sense of absence that fills every story, of voices and bodies and people who are missed.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BhICMJ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more