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alicroz34 's review for:
Evenings & Weekends
by Oisín McKenna
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
This? Is a debut novel? That's wild to me. I simply devoured this in two days and loved it the whole time.
Quotes I liked:
Now, he grips his handlebars, struggles to breathe, and wonders if he's going to die. He's had this thought more than once since January, when his dad, a labourer, passed away at fifty years old and Ed became aware that a life could end. Ed had always known about death in a theoretical sense, but now that he had encountered death in the flesh - his dad's seizure, the chill of his hands - it was no longer abstract or hypothetical. It was real, wrenching, unacceptably painful, so painful that it should quite literally be impossible. Death could happen to anyone at any time, even people like Ed's dad, big people, solid people, people with the weather-beaten resilience of a surviving Stone Age monument. Even those people die. Even Ed will die. So when he glares at the whale and his heart beats from his chest to his ears, he thinks: this is it. The end. I'll never meet my baby.
Quotes I liked:
Now, he grips his handlebars, struggles to breathe, and wonders if he's going to die. He's had this thought more than once since January, when his dad, a labourer, passed away at fifty years old and Ed became aware that a life could end. Ed had always known about death in a theoretical sense, but now that he had encountered death in the flesh - his dad's seizure, the chill of his hands - it was no longer abstract or hypothetical. It was real, wrenching, unacceptably painful, so painful that it should quite literally be impossible. Death could happen to anyone at any time, even people like Ed's dad, big people, solid people, people with the weather-beaten resilience of a surviving Stone Age monument. Even those people die. Even Ed will die. So when he glares at the whale and his heart beats from his chest to his ears, he thinks: this is it. The end. I'll never meet my baby.
He takes out his phone and almost calls Maggie, primed to say his last goodbye, but remembering she's at work, and also, is pregnant, feels the news of his upcoming death would be both inconvenient and distressing.
Everyone is drunk. Everyone is laughing out loud at jokes they can't hear.
Everyone is smoking, especially the non-smokers. It's too hot to think about ageing or illness or death, and it's too hot, too, to wear a shirt or drink a glass of water or have dinner or go to bed or show up to work on time or show up to work at all. Everyone is downing their drink, getting another, downing their drink, getting another.
Everyone is looking for something to happen.
They talk quickly, a little too loud, trying to brush off the encounter with the man.
How should a person speak? What words do people say?
Phil's body is an illiterate body. It's a body that doesn't speak the language. His mind is never not describing the world, an over-articulate mind, a mind that is hyperactive in its desire to narrate, but his body is dumbstruck, bumbling, upset with itself like a child who hasn't yet learned to speak and becomes enraged when no one understands what is meant by their babbling, their little face scrunched into a small and wounded tantrum.
What was an appropriate amount of time to wait between declarations of love? Was it possible to simply say I love you l love you I love you with no intermission?
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault
Moderate: Bullying, Cancer, Homophobia
Minor: Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Abortion