days without end sebastian barry summary

Because English was imposed on Ireland over hundreds of years of colonial rule-it had all but replaced the indigenous tongue by the late nineteenth century-the Irish have never entirely made peace with it. “In matters like this,” the man said sagely, “Volvo dealers wield no special magic.”įor Foster, the words were a small but irresistible example of Irish English, the unusually pungent dialect, or set of dialects, native to his homeland. He gave the trunk a good whack with his wrench, and just like that it sprang open. At a nearby garage, Foster asked the mechanic if he ought to take the car back to the dealership.

One summer, he said, he’d been on holiday in County Kerry when the trunk of his aged Volvo became jammed. Instead of reaching for grand theories to account for this remarkable literary surplus, Foster did that very Irish thing: he told a story. Though how could you fail to mention Flann O’Brien? Or Frank O’Connor? For that matter, what about Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, and Seamus Heaney? And this is to say nothing of the extraordinary crop of living talent-from Edna O’Brien to Sally Rooney-whose accustomed toil continues to enrich the tradition. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers? At a bare minimum, the list would have to include Swift, Sterne, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, Beckett. The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature.

Days without end sebastian barry summary