The Lost Souls' Reunion
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- 2,49 €
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- 2,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
On a hill overlooking the grey sea, in a house filled with the past, a woman gathers her ghosts for one night to hear their story retold.
Born into the grotesque bustle of mid-twentieth century London she is drawn by her mother's past back to wild, coastal countryside in Ireland. Her own heritage is partly this and partly mystery which will never be solved.
She has loved deeply and lives alone. On the night of her beloved only son's departure from a house where she is to be left waiting for the unknown future, she tells the story of her life as it has been. She has cared and lost. That is her strength. She survives through her knowing and those who knew her.
Told in the tradition of the household bard, the folklore stream Irish people are imbued with, she invokes the lost souls, who were her companions up to this, who found each other to form a life apart, and sustained each other. This story does not shrink back from harsh contemporary realities, but the mythic element is the presence of the otherworldly, sustaining and informing the creatures of the margin, who see more than most eyes see.
Sive asks each one to be remembered and to live again through her story, to absolve her grief and feel her love, to inform her resolve, on a single night, on the edge of the future to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Power's debut novel about an impoverished Irish family includes all the usual cast members the alcoholic, brutish husband; the unloved and unloving wife; the pregnant teenage daughter but her writing has such force and clarity that the story is gripping. On the unyielding sea coast of Ireland, Joseph Moriarty spends his life trying to farm a small patch of inhospitable soil. He takes out his frustration in drink and mercilessly beats his wife, Noreen. It's all Noreen can do to protect her daughter, Carmel, from her husband's rage. Carmel, who lives an almost animal existence outdoors trying to evade her father, winds up pregnant by local boy Eddie Green, who, though sweet and protective, isn't brave enough to be seen in public with "the slow Moriarty girl." Noreen scrapes together enough money to send Carmel to London, but without any resources she ends up a Soho prostitute. She miscarries, gets pregnant again by her pimp and gives birth to a daughter named Sive, who is raised mostly by an older prostitute. Sive eventually takes her sick, aging mother back home to Ireland, where she comes to grips with the bitter history of the Moriarty house. It's Sive who narrates the tale of these three generations. Her dramatic tone and habit of apostrophizing her late relatives won't be to everyone's taste ("You were a fine, strong woman, Noreen, with a ready laugh! But you enjoyed life too much, that's what they said"), but Power ably handles the searing material; it is, alas, always believable.
