This will be a review in resemblance.
It’s not just the story that we are thinking about while reading the novel, we are also reflecting on it. Reflecting on it with our own experiences and those of others, and with the books that we’ve read before that might in a way resemble this one. I believe this nature of memories sticking up to new ones only strengthens our ideas about something, our beliefs, and understanding. Maybe it is about love, and how every story and experience that we’ve had, combine to together to produce a definition, an idea, a belief, an understanding about what it is and how we’ve come to perceive it. The same thing about friendship, marriage, death, life, and so on.
This networking of information and memories then becomes the fabric of our personality and values. These stories, fictional or real, become the lenses through which we try to figure out the abstractness of life and many of its mysteries.
So, in this review I’ll try to form a network of books that resemble each other in one way or another. By doing so, I’ll be helping myself to write this review which I didn’t know how to otherwise, and also, I’ll be trying something new; and maybe, just maybe, it’ll become a thing of its own in the future: reviewing books in light of other books that it reminded you of.
Here goes nothing.
Let’s start with the most obvious of similarities: ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett. This absurdist play by Beckett is about two friends, waiting for a character named Godot, who never seems to arrive. They’re waiting for, what seems to be the God, at a very lonely and remote pathway, by a tree that is awfully out of season. Barry’s praise-winning novel is also about two friends, Charlie and Maurice, waiting at a boat station at Algiers, for the daughter of one of them, named Dilly. Dilly also never seems to arrive at the station, but even when she does, she decides not to reveal herself to the two old men, in their fifties, and leaves the port without even saying hi. So, basically the same thing.
The mood here is somber. Those waiting for Godot are in a miserable situation. Waiting for someone who might never come, and killing time doing all sorts of things: suicide, jokes, arguments, doing nothing. It’s a play where nothing happens, twice (referring to the two acts). Charlie and Maurice, the guilty father and friend, who are also old, kill their time by talking to the passengers on the port, refusing to let them go. They also drink and bring up their old days of drug dealing and shit ton of money. And then, the crumbling down of their days: affairs, fights, leaving town, mental hospitals, separation, death.
The way these old men recall their old days, the frenzy narration and salty dialogues, reminded of another hysterical, first-person narrator: the protagonist of David Diop’s novella ‘At Night All Blood is Black’. A WWI soldier, recalling his days of manic killing and trying to save his friend but only prolonging his suffering, and these old men had a similar, if less intense, liking to such a distraught narration of their drug-dealing life and the problem of too much cash.
John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ only comes to mind because it too had two protagonists, who really looked after one and another, and they too talked with an accent of sorts, which these old Irishmen seem to have as well. Their fates however are quite the opposite: tragedy and hope.
Barry’s novel carried a high anticipation for me: two old men, looking back at their detestable lives, trying to fix things but too late. It had a ring of melancholy to it, of regret that is both hopeless but also humbling; a tale of accepting things and clinging on to one another.
But much like the other books that I read this month, I could barely like this novel is parts – and in parts too few. I hoped this book would break the curse of dead reading for me, but it failed. I’m tired of scrapping bits of joy from a book that’s on a whole an experience of bitter disappointment.
The wary descriptions, the melancholic tone, the perseverance of the story: they touched me, but alas very seldom.
Rating: 3/5 25.8.22