Mary Kenny
In Death As In Life
Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans
By Thomas Lynch
Jonathan Cape 301pp £12.99
No one does death as gracefully as the Irish. Truly. It is a subject handled with the greatest openness and lack of inhibition – rather as the sex educationalists say we ought to be about sexual matters. I met a young woman from Kerry recently – in her early twenties – who had lost her mother about a year ago. ‘I am sorry for your bereavement,’ I said, as you must always say in Ireland to anyone, stranger or friend, who has had such a loss. ‘Oh, ’tis sad all right,’ she said cheerily. ‘But sure, ’tis nature.’ A strangely sane attitude, I thought. She went on to tell me about her mother’s wake, with the coffin in the living room and all the relations quarrelling the while. ‘Sure, my Ma was the most alive person in the room.’
But perhaps this open, friendly relationship with death is only possible where there are large extended families (the Kerry girl was one of eight) to provide that sense of inevitable human continuity, and an innate religious instinct, which remains extraordinarily tenacious in the rural Irish. Every conversation, even amongst blatant
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk