Thanks to Two Readers
- Gail Wilson Kenna
- Jul 14
- 2 min read
This past week… a book club member who read This is Happiness thanked me for suggesting this Irish novel. She wrote, “I loved the book for the words of wisdom on almost every page. The characters were real and I cared what happened to them.”
I also heard from the literary friend who gave me this novel. In e-mail Bill called the novel “amazing, joyful, and playful” and he described its historical detail as rich… like black and white photographs. (That’s perfect for the early 20th century time frame in rural Clare County.) “You know a novel is good,” he wrote, “when a sentence pulls you to a stop and you sit back and enjoy images as they sink in.” Just now I went through my marked copy of This is Happiness and found examples to illustrate Bill’s words. “Time has unpeeled a history of infamy.” And what about this one? “Her eyes were Old Testament eyes, grave and grey and allowing not the slightest room for manoeuvre.”
I try to accept that few read my blog on Literature I Love. Yet there are old friends and former students who read my words, and connection with them keep me writing something each week, which Ilona Duncan kindly posts for me.
Currently, I and book club members are reading Colm Toibin’s The Magician.
Next week I will write about this masterful novel, which presents the life of German writer Thomas Mann in chronological order. This means a reader experiences Prussian Germany before the first world war and Germany during and after World War Two. I’m at the end of my second read of The Magician with Toibin’s novel making me even more aware of despotic & fearful times in the USA today. And last night, thinking about Mann who came to the USA to escape The Third Reich, I decided to watch American Masterpiece on PBS.
The most recent one featured the life of Hannah Arendt, a brilliant German-Jewish philosopher, famous for a book on totalitarianism and many other works. She, too, fled Germany. Her famous phrase “the banality of evil” has been with me since the 1960s when she covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel. And the documentary on Arendt juxtaposed in my mind with Rob Reiner’s recent Christian Nationalism.
To be continued next week….
Must read the Irish novel before July ends. There is something whimsical, melancholy and ethereal that the Irish have perfected. I hold my breath with joyful anticipation every time an Irish poet joins a poetry reading session.