Warrenpoint
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age—filial piety, original sin, a child's perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself—it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue's fame as one of our most important critics. Taking its title from the seaside town in Northern Ireland whose police barracks served as the residence for the Catholic Donoghues, it has been described as a family romance, dealing not only with the author's love for his strong-willed, taciturn, policeman father, but his love for literature and how it shaped his life to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recalling his Roman Catholic boyhood in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, where his beloved father was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Donoghue ( Reading America ) muses about guilt, humiliation, original sin, contrition, confession, virtuality and actuality. His short, choppy book stumbles from narrative to reflections about ``books that seem to invite an opportunistic reading,'' as well as about vibrato, an ``effeminate habit'' that ``registers the revulsion the soul feels in the presence of an enforced truth.'' Donoghue, who grew to be 67, thought that he was permanently misshapen, imprisoned in the wrong body. In Dublin, where he went to college and is now settled, a Protestant was as alien to him as a Muslim; and narrative, the clearest form of Catholic customary knowledge, lost its power--as it has in this disturbing memoir.
