Fiction in translation: The strange workings of myth and history, a work of limpid beauty set in the Bosnian countryside, and more
Hunter
(Granta Magazine Editions, £12.99, in a vivid translation by Jeremy Tiang), Chinese author Shuang Xuetao has said: 'I tried to write about things historical as well as contemporary, realistic as well as not quite realistic'.
In Shuang's work, ostensibly about the harsh, often callously wrought facts of life, there is a bold contention with the strange workings of myth and history. In Premonition, science-fiction writer Xiaobing, happily married with a young son, makes an unusual request to his wife that they sleep separately; what he does not tell her is that he has been subject since childhood to dark, shadowy premonitions that ultimately come true.
To slake his insomnia, he drives to his favourite night fishing spot, where he meets a screwdriver-wielding nemesis from outer space, a man somewhat prosaically named Andrew, who accuses Xiaobing and his ancestors of 'stealing a sentence': an encounter replete with wit and pathos.
An ambulance rushes through the night in Heart, one of the collection's most powerful stories, and its opener: an old man in a family with a history of hereditary heart problems is rushed to a hospital in Beijing, accompanied by his adult son and a young female doctor. As the surreal journey unfolds, the son relays his father's history to the doctor, but the occupants of the ambulance, including the driver, intermittently fall asleep, while the patient blooms once more into a vivid, pre-death life.
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At the centre of the story is the woodworker ancestor 'who could make anything from a coffin to a comb'. On his unexpected death he is found to have 'a heart full of tiny wood-shavings, enough to build a foot-high pagoda'.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. Photograph: Alejandra López
'The first day in the jungle, the day he fled, he still didn't know how to see. Now he does. It's nearly impossible in this world of plants. But he sees it. A tender vine-shoot veers around itself until it meets another, intertwining myriad.' Although set in the 17th century, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's rich, baroque
We Are Green and Trembling
(Harvill Secker, £18.99, sumptuously translated by Robin Myers) is strikingly relevant to the present day.
Cabezón Cámara uses history to illuminate and interrogate current threats to trans representation and, in parallel, to interrogate the enduring, dehumanising effects of colonisation. Her epic in miniature is that of Antonio de Erauso, born a woman, Catalina, in Spain around 1592. Wikipedia lists him as 'Basque nun and explorer', a mere indication of de Erauso's extraordinary life. Escaping, aged 15, from the convent in which he was virtually jailed by his aunt, its prioress (to whom, in the novel, Antonio addresses letters) Catalina adopted men's attire as disguise, eventually journeying to the New World, first as a cabin boy, then as secretary to a particularly unpleasant conquistador, becoming part pf the violent, buccaneering conquest of Peru, Chile and Bolivia by Spain. But as told here, he also protected and championed two young indigenous girls, rescuing them from enslavement. De Erauso's shape-shifting is a mercurial tale for all time. The image of death hangs over all in the shape of a buzzard: an unforgettable image of perpetuated abominations.
Heuijung Hur; Photograph: Studio mulight
Summer is the perfect time for discovery, drama and unexpectedness. Heuijung Hur's deliciously unsettling
Failed Summer Vacation
(Scratch Books, £10.99, nimbly translated by Paige Aniyah Morris) crosses genres in a collection riddled with unsentimental yearning and emptiness. 'I've long been obsessed with the idea that I was pretending to be someone else,' confides the title story's anonymous narrator. In a small room at a beach resort, the speaker addresses a 'you' who may or may not be present. 'The cramped room. My alibi. Our freshly made beds'.
What is actually going on? Has a crime been committed, or is it all in the mind? The prose is chilling and sensuous, the denouement ominous. This theme of entrapment haunts the collection. 'Paper Cut' begins simply: 'A wanted to run away.'
A is stuck in his room, with an omnipresent feeling of guilt for a crime he cannot remember committing – or is he about to carry one out? He is awaiting his regular visit from a person he describes simply as 'that man. The visit had been prearranged.'
The man, who is made entirely from paper, each time demands 'a statement' from A. What ensues is a wildly funny, Kafkaesque battle of wills – either bureaucracy gone mad, or perhaps just A's own frantic imagination. Each one of these breezily disturbing short fictions is a small marvel of originality.
Compared by its publisher to Elena Ferrante, but more in debt to the simplicity of Georges Simenon (alluded to in the author's afterword), Charia Valerio's
The Little I knew
(Foundry Editions, £13.99, with a cool, confident translation by Ailsa Wood complementing Valerio's style) is no crime procedural, though it revolves around the hushed-up death of a woman at home inher bath.
A bestseller in Italy, it was shortlisted for the Strega Prize. The setting is Scauri, an out-of-the-way seaside town between Rome and Naples. Vittoria, who had mysteriously arrived there some 30 years before, and whom everyone knows but yet does not know, has an 'accident' in her bath at the home she shares with her partner Mara.
A veil of silence falls over the townspeople as Lea, the local lawyer, fed up with dealing with the petty crimes and disputes that are the routine of her work, decides to investigate the woman she had always been fascinated by, the first woman to have her own boat space at a club dominated by men.
'The hatred I'd always felt for Scauri as a girl was back. The feeling of airlessness.' What follows is a thrilling examination of the black hole of society and the secrets people keep from each other and themselves.
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Fiction in translation (May 2025): The Deserters traverses 20th century and brims with interesting ideas
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In
Late Summer
, by Croatian writer Magdalena Blaźević (Linden Editions, £12, translated with verve and sensitivity by Andelka Raguž), is a work of limpid beauty drenched in sorrow. A massacre takes place in a quiet village in the Bosnian countryside one hot August day; the events leading up to that and after are narrated by a chatty, confiding young girl, Ivana, aged 14.
'Old, hanging faces are already lined up on the road, their hands behind their heads.' Yet Ivana is also dead, shot in front of her mother and brother outside their house. Ivana should be hanging out with her cousin Dunja, picking blackberries for jam, helping her mother. But she is 'hit by one spark ... my camomile hair spread out on the road, its light extinguished ... the sky is the last thing I see, poisoned by smoke and unknown voices'.
The figure of Death (in Ivana's capitals) stalks the book, and yet it is also a work of grace and joy, a testament to the lives of generations of Bosnians until the horrific genocide of the early 1990s. Above all it stands as a memorial to, as Blaźević's dedication states, 'the citizens of Kiseljak, in memory of 16 August 1993'.
War dominates
The World We Saw Burning
, an uncompromising novel from Peruvian journalist and writer Renato Cisneros (Charco Press, £11.99, in a fine translation by Fionn Petch). Cisneros pulls together differing, stirring strands, effortlessly switching between the past and present day, yet never loses sight of his goal or his grip on the story.
'Certain tragedies devour the memories of their victims, imposing a point zero from which everything has to begin again. The mistake ... is to look back.' Matías Roeder, son of an Italian father and German mother, immigrates at the age of 19 from Peru to New York. It is 1939. Eventually he will join the US Air Force, his whole raison d'être called into question when he finds himself involved in the bombing of Hamburg, his grandfather's city. Cisneros skilfully intersperses his narrative with that of two Peruvians living in contemporary Madrid, in a rousing story of migration and identity.
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Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
This summer I'm taking a Maga approach to reading: self-serving and isolationist
July means one certain thing. Summer reading lists are upon us – magazine and newspaper editors sit around and, with some effort, dash together a 20-or-so long list of the books you should bring on holiday. The lists usually look like some combination of the following: an obscure new novel, authored by a friend in need of a favour; the second book of the most recently zeitgeisty novelist – quality of these vary; something from the 'smart thinking' or popular science category (designed to make you feel clever, actually makes you dumber); a history tome so dense and unfriendly it is hard to imagine any normal person wanting to read it, let alone on a beach; a blandly feminist pamphlet titled something glib such as Women Are Powerful; a crime thriller, ordained to be on every popular reading list by some unknown force of the universe. The publishing houses are happy, the featured writers too. Meanwhile, the newspaper believes it has paid a service to its reader – but of course it has done the opposite. Because it is abjectly implausible that even five of the books on these lists will stand any kind of longevity test, let alone all 20 (how many books are there are in total from, say, 2002 that have had lasting impact on the culture?). The summer reading list necessarily emphasises the new. This comes at the cost of recommending the quality. And so the likelihood that these lists are stuffed with duds and wastes-of-times is so strong it is approaching inevitability. READ MORE In a bid to avoid gutting but predictable disappointment, this summer – with the exception of the books I am lucky enough to read for work – I have committed myself to the act of rereading. Why risk something untested when I know for sure that most of Hemingway 's are pretty good? I will have a good time with Cormac McCarthy , I always do. If you're an Austen fan, check out Pride and Prejudice again, you'll love it. This is an obvious and dishonourably parochial instinct. There is a whole world out there I am cutting off from myself: what about the great Malay playwrights (I assume there are some); or Danish masters of genre fiction (Danes, enlighten me); or Afrikaans poets; or the next VS Naipaul surely hovering somewhere on the horizon waiting to be plucked from obscurity and rocketed to fame one summer reading list at a time? What secrets of the universe am I wilfully keeping from myself? Well, I'm contented with not knowing for now. This is the ultra-Maga approach to reading: self-serving, isolationist, retreating from all those cosmopolitan obligations somehow acquired over the years, harking after an imagined halcyon past when books were good (and jobs were American!). Hell, I might even buy a red hat. Or maybe we needn't be so cynical. The art of rereading is a romantic pursuit, too. The Italian writer Italo Calvino describes 'a classic' as a book that never finishes saying what it has to say. Twee, maybe. But it's a good test. Every reread of your favourite story will bring you something new. I am not the same person as I was at 24, mid-pandemic, reading The Secret History for the first time. I should try it again – there may be as many more secrets of the universe to discover in that activity as there will be in an attempt to develop a hinterland with those Danish genre-fiction writers. 'You can't step in the same river twice,' said some zany Presocratic philosopher a very long time ago. I suspect this is true of reading books too. Time for a hard-pivot to the doldrums of low culture (where I am, to be frank, more comfortable dwelling), because this is not a feature limited to the written word. I suppose it was on my fourth rewatch of Gossip Girl that I truly came to understand myself; the monorail episode of The Simpsons on the fifth go taught me something ineffable about humanity's unquenchable optimism; and that same tomato pasta I have been making for 15 years now is not boring, thank you very much, it's a paean to nostalgia and memory, or something like that. In search of a truly balanced life, I should teach myself how to do both. But for now, which is more important? Possessing the bravery to face the new, so we don't confine ourselves unnecessarily? It is perhaps too obvious to point out the virtue in that. But what of being too insecure to sit with the familiar? Could that be just as limiting? What's left of that instinct is a Sisyphean project of casting around the artistic realm trying to keep up with every trend and development, never satisfied because the work will never be done. And all the while there are expansive universes still undiscovered in whatever your favourite novel was when you were 26. I am not sure of the answer. Let me consult Gossip Girl, or Cormac McCarthy, just one more time.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
Translated fiction: convincing first-person narration, personal stories through political turmoil, and sharp but subtle humour
In When The Cranes Fly South (Doubleday, 308pp, £14.99), translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies, the author Lisa Ridzén, a woman in her 30s, inhabits the mind of an 89-year-old man, through a convincingly rendered first-person narration. Thus she demonstrates how wrong it is to advise writers to only draw on their own experience and identity. Details of the daily humiliations wrought by age mix with recollections of his work at sawmills with a cruel father, or his friend Ture, who is also enduring the torments of old age. Such moments of memory are often visited through dreams, which linger briefly in the disconcerting juncture of waking. Bo's wife is in a nursing home and can no longer recognise him or their son, Hans, who provides the main tension of the novel, attempting to assuage his self-doubt by issuing ultimatums about his father's supposed inability to manage his dog, Sixten. Through lucid, observant writing, Ridzén conveys the lack of autonomy allowed to elderly people in a heartfelt novel that gives voice to a sensitively realised old man. In Omerta: A Book of Silences by Andrea Tompa (Seagull Books, 718pp, £22.99), translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams, the author creates four separate first-person narrators, to outstanding effect. Kali's tale is told in an accented translation, which is sometimes confusing ('they'd just got two or three 'old an' wouldn't let go of it'), but her voice soon becomes persuasive, especially when indulging her propensity for telling folk tales. READ MORE After a brutal marriage - violence and suicide appear as natural as the wind - she eventually finds work with Vilmo, a rose breeder who is preoccupied with creating blossoms that will rival those produced by the famous Meilland family in France. [ Fiction in translation: The strange workings of myth and history, a work of limpid beauty set in the Bosnian countryside, and more Opens in new window ] Vilmo's narrative voice is very different. Analytical and unemotional, his perspective on fathering a child with Kali solidifies an imbalance of power that also pertains in his relationship with a teenage girl called Annush. However, when we hear her affecting voice, critical judgment is challenged by the temporary escape this illicit affair allows her from a merciless, alcoholic father and the ceaseless work he demands of her. These personal stories are repeatedly impacted by the political turmoil of communist Romania and the 1956 uprising in Hungary. This is especially the case for the fourth narrator, Eleanóra, Annush's sister, who has recently been released from prison for being part of an unofficial convent of nuns. Her contemplative reflections regarding the position she can usefully occupy in a political milieu she barely understands are bolstered by her unwavering beliefs. Through vividly imagined prose, each character's voice emerges distinctly and engagingly, allowing all four to express their perspectives on the uniqueness of their lives within the collectivised society they inhabit. Set in a milieu in which seeking the approval of others is paramount, Cooking In The Wrong Century (Pushkin Press, 172pp, £16.99) by Teresa Präauer, translated from the German by Eleanor Updengraff, deploys sharp but subtle humour to undermine their anxious solipsism. A sense of playfulness is central to a novel in which a couple host three people - all unnamed - for drinks and a meal. The central premise is replayed in several permutations, interspersed with chapters in which the reader is addressed with a familiarity that suggests their complicity in a gathering where every ingredient, gadget and piece of music is a signifier of taste, status and level of sophistication, or lack thereof: 'What Is Culture? ... The book that bore this title had endured four house moves in 20 years and had still never been read. What is culture? Perhaps a short version of the answer could be found in the blurb." Every action is a performance, functioning as potential content for social media posts. The irony is pointed but never overstated, in a witty translation that, despite the satirical intent, also acknowledges the sensuality of food and the ingenuity of jazz. A flood that prevents the guests from leaving hints at the influence of Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel, and this brilliantly clever novel shares that film's sense of absurdity. Nothing described in the novel can, with complete certainty, be said to have happened. There is uncertainty too in The Arsonist (Twisted Spoon, 180pp, £11.50) by Egon Hostovský, translated from the Czech by Christopher Morris, regarding the identity of the person setting fire to buildings in a small Bohemian village called Zbečnov. Central to the novel is the family who live above the Silver Pigeon pub, run by the mercurial Josef Simon. 'Here is home, beyond them, the world.' His teenage children, Kamil and Eliška, are suffused with burgeoning desire in search of an object. Eliška spent three years in a convent because of their mother: 'She's always been bad.' But she too is adrift and unhappy. Outside the confines of their home, the suspicion and distrust of outsiders - already a feature of the village - is heightened when buildings begin to go up in flames. But, as always, the truth is more complex and less convenient than the locals would wish. This sense of an outsider threatening a small community, initiated by their collective paranoia, is like a precursor to the novels of László Krasznahorkai. First published in 1935, the novel is beautifully written, with a narrative style that whispers confidences to the reader. The lyricism of Hostovský's superbly translated descriptions is a pleasure to read, capturing both the delight and ennui in village life: 'The rooftops gleam in the sun, two small clouds sail over the church, the sparrows make a commotion on the fence, somnolent warmth, Sunday outfits and tedium.' A Fortunate Man (NYRB, 870pp, $29.95) by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Paul Larkin, has previously been translated into English as Lucky Per from a novel that was first published in 1905, having appeared in serial form earlier. Using free indirect narration, the novel is ostensibly a birth-to-death narrative about Per Sidenius, born into a family deeply rooted in religious service and sombre conformity. But Per's questioning nature is ill-suited to accepting received doctrines, and his break with his family personifies a journey both outward and inwards, embodying the faltering modernisation of a country and the search for a true self. His personal story, encompassing his far-seeing ambition as an engineer - already envisioning the energy potential of wind and wave power - and indecisiveness in relationships, is at every moment fascinating and unpredictable. But of even greater interest are his discussions about religion, especially those with the ostracised Pastor Fjaltring, and his desperate search for an authentic way of being in the world. Despite its length, the novel never loses focus and includes much elegant, expressive writing, meticulously translated by Donegal-based Larkin, who includes a few phrases that will be familiar to Irish readers: 'the lark in the clear air' appears twice! While the novel inevitably includes the prejudices and assumptions of its time, it also echoes the ever-changing, irresolute, self-questioning and contradictory reflections of Per in a search for the self that leads into the lonely morass that constitutes that self. He is the conscience of a novel that deserves to be considered among the greatest works of world literature.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Irish Times
New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland'
It is typical of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's modesty that she was delighted even to be shortlisted for the €50,000-a-year role of Laureate of Irish Fiction. This week's news of her appointment, succeeding Colm Tóibín , Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright , has left her 'overwhelmed'. It feels like 'even more of an honour', she says, than her PEN award for an outstanding contribution to literature, the Hennessy Irish Writing Hall of Fame award or her appointment as Burns Professor at Boston College. More pragmatically, she observes that another difference is that it involves 'a fair amount of responsibilities and duties. It's a very public role. You don't just grab the medal and walk off.' This laureate will not be resting on her laurels. While she is still discussing with the Arts Council the details of her three-year programme, one idea that appeals to her is visiting every county to celebrate its distinctive literary heritage. READ MORE As a bilingual writer, the daughter of an Irish-speaking father from the Donegal Gaeltacht who grew up speaking Irish in Dublin, she will also be promoting literature in Irish, 'which I've already been doing thanks to The Irish Times', a reference to her reviewing work, which she thinks helped raise her profile for the laureateship. 'People believe they can't read a book in Irish, that it's too difficult, but it just takes a bit of effort. Even when I'm reading, I would come across words every couple of pages that I'd need to look up, but it's a lot easier now with the internet. I've been learning Bulgarian for 10 years (she has a Bulgarian daughter-in-law) and have to look up a word on every line. I know that sounds a bit schoolmarmy.' Ní Dhuibhne has already done her bit to popularise reading in Irish by writing a bestselling series of crime novels as Gaeilge, beginning with Dúnmharú sa Daingean (Murder in Dingle). 'People told me they'd never read a book in Irish before and were surprised that they could.' Ní Dhuibhne is a most versatile author, having written more than 30 books, in both Irish and English, for children, adolescents and adults, spanning novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and literary criticism. Although her best-known work is probably The Dancers Dancing, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2000, her preferred form is the short story. Prof Margaret Kelleher of UCD, in her introduction to the Ní Dhuibhne's Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press, 2023), praised 'their incisiveness and wry humour, and her keen eye for the incongruous and the familiar made strange'. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. 'My short stories are closer to my true personality.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 'When I'm writing at my most serious and deepest, it's the short story,' Ní Dhuibhne says. 'When I'm writing for younger people, it's made up completely, although the stories do end up with something of you in them. My short stories are closer to my true personality. 'The short story is a focus on a moment of truth, when the veil of reality is lifted for a moment to reveal a deeper truth. Because it is short, it has a connection to time which is more controllable. Shelley described inspiration as like a spark to a coal, which begins to fade as soon as you start writing. With a novel it fades on day one and you have to keep rekindling it. With a short story it doesn't have time to fade. You can grab the energy of inspiration and get it drafted before it's gone. That's why short stories can achieve a sort of perfection it's almost impossible for a novel to achieve. [ Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is new Laureate for Irish Fiction Opens in new window ] 'The only guideline I like about short stories is that something has to happen to someone on the surface, a dramatic incident of some kind, and something has to happen underneath, an excavation, what the meaning of the story is.' And yet the short story is, for many readers, the poor relation to the novel. 'Readers like to get lost in a story, immersed,' Ni Dhuibhne says. 'They don't like dipping in and out, just getting to know a setting and the characters and then it's on to the next one.' That's why she feels long short stories are the most successful, more like short novels. The Dancers Dancing, a coming-of-age novel set in an Irish college in the Donegal Gaeltacht, that uniquely Irish rite of passage, grew out of a short story, Blood and Water, after Dolores Walsh, a fellow member of her writers' group, told her she could get a novel out of it. 'It's about a group of girls who go from Dublin to Irish college and it explores the relationship of the English- and Irish-speaking worlds, the urban-rural divide. My main character Orla is in a slightly challenging position. She is not a complete outsider as her mother's family is from that area, she has lots of relatives there and is ashamed of them. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life — Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 'Orla doesn't yet accept the wholeness of her personality. This teenager is trying to navigate a way through middle-class Dublin life and this other side of her, poor Irish-speaking people in Donegal. That arose from my experience as a child and teenager. I aspired to be more upper class than we were. Quite a lot of my fiction explores the connection between past and present, our ancestry.' She is not sure she can describe her voice as a writer. 'Maybe I'd aspire to make it intimate, very gripping. I have quite a comic voice, I'm at home with irony.' Ní Dhuibhne has also spent many years teaching creative writing, at UCD, Trinity, Boston College and the Irish Writers Centre. Her pupils included Colin Barrett, Henrietta McKervey, Andrea Carter, Jamie O'Connell and Jessica Traynor. The new laureate has a rich literary social life, with a lot of writer friends. She has been in the same writing group for 40 years now with authors Catherine Dunne, Lia Mills and former minister of state Liz McManus, among others. It started as a national Irish women writers' workshop set up in 1985 by Eavan Boland, to address the underrepresentation of women's voices in Irish literature. Ní Dhuibhne studied folklore at university alongside English and is now president of the Folklore of Ireland society. The old stories are a big influence on her own writing. 'That is one of my characteristics. I often counterpoint contemporary, modern stories with a folk legend or tale. It gives a different dimension, a deepening.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The first time she did it was with Midwife to the Fairies, the story of a secret birth, in which a midwife goes to a fairy hill and assists with the birth of a child. The other inspiration was newspaper reports about the 1984 Kerry babies case. 'Perhaps it was a way the community had of telling reality in a coded way. I am a folklorist, I do it to offer an interpretation of the old story. On the other hand it gives depth and lustre to what might be a thin little story without it. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life. These stories have survived for centuries because they have some attractive quality.' Ní Dhuibhne's Irish-language memoir, Fáínne Geal an Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), tracks her childhood until the age of 12 in 1966. 'It ends on a very optimistic note with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Rising. My sister and I were lucky with the time of our birth, just in time for free secondary education and grants for university. I wrote it during Covid when everyone was writing memoirs. My life was so different to my children's, I wanted to document it.' Her other memoir, Ten Thousand Days, addresses the death of her husband Bo in 2013, and their lives together. Was its purpose to process or record? 'In the first instance, the former, to process my feelings of devastation and grief at the loss of my husband, but also to record the story of our relationship. 'Bo's death was very difficult, traumatic and horrible. It does take some years, but gradually one gets back to being myself. I think of Bo and I miss him in various ways but I feel healed. Writing the book certainly helped me get through the first three or four years but the real healer is time.' [ 'Grief dissolves you. I could no longer sleep upstairs in our bed' Opens in new window ] Her grief was also channelled into two superb short stories, The Coast of Wales and New Zealand Flax, commissioned by Sinead Gleeson and Belinda McKeon respectively for anthologies. 'I couldn't write about anything else. That was the only thing I was thinking about. They are examples of stories I would not have written if I hadn't been invited to.' Ní Dhuibhne has had two great influences in her writing life, Canadian Alice Munro and Irish feminist and LGBTQ+ activist Ailbhe Smyth. Back in the 1980s, soon after she had married and had two children, Ní Dhuibhne joined a women's studies forum that Smyth had set up in UCD. 'She opened my eyes to cultural feminism, the facts of literary history, that there weren't as many women writers as there should be. I had been blind to the facts. I did English at UCD without realising we only read three women (Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen) in three years. It was consciousness raising. 'I could have let writing go but it became more than a matter of self-expression or personal ambition. It seemed I was now part of a movement of women writers of Ireland. It took off and now we have gender equality in fiction. Women are no longer ignored. There is no way you could have a syllabus these days that excluded women.' Munro, the late Canadian author, 'showed me a way of writing about the past and connecting it to the present' through her stories about her ancestors. 'It definitely influenced Blood and Water. Before that, my stories were really corny, probably because I wasn't linking past and present, just taking my father's anecdotes and trying to transform them into literary stories.' Munro's mesmerising, intimate style pulled her right into the story and her protagonists' unpretentious lives. 'It seemed artless, though obviously was not at all. I loved her luminosity the way she handles time, the way her stories spread out and are not tight little stories focused on one thing. I learned a lot about composition from her.' A wry, dry humour is another of the laureate's trademarks. The Literary Lunch, a satire on self-serving members of an arts organisation dining for Ireland, is her most popular story. The Arts Council must have a sense of humour too. 'Perhaps they haven't read it,' she laughs. 'I know everyone thinks it is based on the Arts Council but it's not at all. It was inspired by another committee.' As well as the late English comic writer David Lodge and Samuel Beckett's bleakly comic novels, she was weaned on an Inter Cert anthology featuring Somerset Maugham and Saki. Finally, why should people read fiction? 'It's hard to answer that without sounding trite,' she says, 'but it is the best way of getting inside the head and heart and personality of other people, total empathy. I think that is its trump card in art. It's so entertaining, you're entering into the lives of other people. In fiction there is an intimacy of contact with humanity, it's psychologically insightful, it teaches you something.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 16th at 7pm.
