People who say of themselves that they are nothing special almost always mean the opposite. That's why you should not trust the friendly, cheerfully laid-back Loslabern novel hero who looks out of his kitchen window at the beginning of this book on a rural town in the Western Mayo province Mayo and complains about a church bell, which is possibly rung at the wrong time. The guy's name is Marcus Conway, determined to "cross thresholds, get things done, check things," after many supposedly lethargic years, and promise the reader nothing less than a "short history of the world."
In fact, Conway, the first-person narrator of the book, "An Unusual Novel on an Ordinary Man," recounts the sensations he has experienced over the course of nearly five decades of life. He and his wife split up and regained them, daughter and son are grown and undressed. Instead of becoming a priest, as he once wanted to, Conway trained as a civil engineer and got commanded by windy bosses.
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Mike McCormack
An unusual novel about an ordinary man
Publishing company:
Steidl GmbH & Co. OHG
Pages:
272
Price:
EUR 24,00
Translated by:
Bernhard Robben
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The hero song that Marcus Conway singles is a hymn to life in the province, to a damaged but lovable world, to the chaos of a family - and the lyrics to this song are all in one sentence. "Solar Bones", as the much more elegant English original title of the baptized in German "An unusual novel about an ordinary man" book, is formally a breakneck experiment.
The author Mike McCormack lets his hero seemingly haphazardly unleashed and divides his Suada only by commas and in the middle of the text placed interludes. McCormack uses the technique of the stream of consciousness that made the equally Irish writer James Joyce famous almost a century ago in the novel "Ulysses". The biggest surprise of McCormack's book is, with what lightheartedness and freshness a seemingly old-fashioned (because long ago classical) and capricious narrative idea is executed here.
McCormack was born in 1965 and has been largely unknown outside of Ireland. In 2016, "Solar Bones" not only earned him a nomination for the Man Booker Prize, but also inspired many critics in the Anglo-Saxon literary world practically without contradiction.
David Levene
Author Mike McCormack
Among the highlights of the book is a visit to an art exhibition in which the artist, Marcus Conway's 22-year-old daughter Agnes, has hung newspaper reports about court rulings from her rural home. The articles and the walls of the exhibition space are painted with keywords from the texts, "a barrage of red writing". The hero quickly realizes that his daughter painted with her own blood. "Agnes's blood was now our common element, the medium in which we stood and breathed."
So does the young artist deride her parents' world by listing the everyday criminal acts there, "from theft to domestic violence to child abuse, disruption of public order, illicit grazing on private land, brawl, burglary, drunk driving"? In any case, the father of Agnes is afflicted with a "whimpering fear", a sense of guilt and self-hatred. He was "a provincial man with a tie, a collar and a peasant's skull," he had said that evening outside the gallery's doorway, Conway reports, "while the rain plopped down on me and nothing but acid shame churned my guts."
There is nothing outstanding spectacular about the outsider complexes and the generational conflict that haunts the hero. He grew up in a society of Catholic morality and quarrels with his libertarian daughter as well as with his son Darragh, who is hanging around in Australia, a bit indecisively and shaggy-skinned.
Even the newspaper reports that Conway finds on the kitchen table are by no means particularly outrageous or even historically significant. And yet, from the narrator's mental leaps, from his portrayal of the economic boom of Ireland's entry into the European Union, the view of the life of his own parents, from his reasoning about the financial crisis of 2008, the character of a torn. The longest time of his life was the hero of this book plagued by fears, shame and confusion; Now, on a gray March day in the fortress of his kitchen, he seems determined to reconciliation with his own existence.
"An unusual novel about an ordinary man" is not a crazy, but funny-entertaining linguistic art piece, which the translator Bernhard Robben admirably casually translated into German. The finale of the novel is created as a surprise coup. For many readers, however, it is likely to be but the confirmation of those hints and metaphysical promises that the writer McCormack has previously very elegantly woven into his long sentence for the brief farewell of Marcus Conway.