Solar Bones
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3.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
An Irish Times Book Club Choice
"With stylistic gusto, and in rare, spare, precise and poetic prose, Mike McCormack gets to the music of what is happening all around us. One of the best novels of the year." —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic
Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.
A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father’s deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway’s thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the “vortex of his being,” surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from McCormack (Notes from a Coma) is a beautifully constructed novel that blends Beckett's torrential monologues with a realist portrait of small-town Ireland. The book opens with short, fragmented descriptions of the "systolic thump" of a church bell heard by a man, Marcus Conway, standing in his kitchen. He is a civil engineer and a one-time seminary student who lives on the west coast of Ireland, at "the edge of this known world." Waiting for his wife and children to return home, Marcus is struck by the "twitchy energy in the ether," mystified at being "swept up on a rush of words" and bombarded with "a hail of images." Free of periods, the one-sentence novel is comprised of Marcus's unceasing reflections and recollections, some lyrical and tender, others caustic, on his childhood, family, politics, and local building projects. He marvels at the miraculous construction of the world while feeling a sense of foreboding at its imminent unravelling. Bodies, minds, buildings, financial systems, the civic order, and the universe itself "the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations" all seem poised of the brink of collapse. As Marcus waxes eloquent on everything from tractor parts to concrete foundations, the novel's suspense derives from the mystery of why this "strange" day All Souls' Day, as it happens occasions such an "unspooling" of the mind. This is an intelligent, striking work.
