Scan barcode
shimmer's review
5.0
These stories are fairly unrelenting and bleak, without even the occasional moments of near-humor and fantastical disruption in Rohan's first collection Cut Through The Bone. At first, that relentlessness and the repetition of suffering and abuse in a tight domestic sphere was a struggle and made me want to look away, so to speak, because they felt "familiar" in the Irish context (ie, struggling up through misery to consciousness, Angela's Ashes style). But as I kept reading, I discovered the repetition served a different purpose: repetitive not because the character's lives were one-dimensional, but because the narrator leaves out so much: the worst moments of these stories, the worst abuses and brutalest beatings, almost always happen off-page, while the narrator offers us only the in-between moments, the "ordinary" (albeit a bleak ordinary) punctuated by those horrors.
So while the longer arc that emerges through these linked stories delivers the familiar escape to consciousness, what's more exciting is the escape to narrative consciousness and the way writer, character, and text take control of the story through what they keep to themselves. That creates a provocative tension between readerly demands for more (a perhaps prurient, voyeuristic expectation to "see" the worst as it happens) and the refusal of the narrator to be defined or limited by those unwritten worst moments. In fact, the one aspect of the collection that didn't quite work for me, specifically because of the way it contradicts that refusal to be defined by individual moments, was the tendency for each story to include a single line that succinctly, often lyrically, pinned down the emotional "point" of the story. That directness seemed like an attempt to make individual moments definitive in precisely the way the rest of the text resisted, and was always jarring. That's an awfully small complaint, though, dwarfed by the overall strength of this set.
So while the longer arc that emerges through these linked stories delivers the familiar escape to consciousness, what's more exciting is the escape to narrative consciousness and the way writer, character, and text take control of the story through what they keep to themselves. That creates a provocative tension between readerly demands for more (a perhaps prurient, voyeuristic expectation to "see" the worst as it happens) and the refusal of the narrator to be defined or limited by those unwritten worst moments. In fact, the one aspect of the collection that didn't quite work for me, specifically because of the way it contradicts that refusal to be defined by individual moments, was the tendency for each story to include a single line that succinctly, often lyrically, pinned down the emotional "point" of the story. That directness seemed like an attempt to make individual moments definitive in precisely the way the rest of the text resisted, and was always jarring. That's an awfully small complaint, though, dwarfed by the overall strength of this set.
More...