Search results for ""author adrian kenny""

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic. On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968. ‘What was it all for?’ his father asks. ‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend. ‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits. The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

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Another first in my life: at the age of thirty-one I brought a girlfriend home. Kathleen sat on the chaise longue, small legs crossed, one tiny toe resting on my mother’s lime-green pouffe, her petite nose wrinkling with distaste as she looked about our family den. Through her eyes I regarded the rusticated fireplace, the crenellation of photos above, the grey cloth donkey – creels full of real turf crumbs from the West – propped against the ormolu clock.’ The Family Business is many things: journal of a frustrated young writer and lover; portrait of bohemian social life in 1970s Dublin; intimate history of the rising Catholic middle class and of a family in flux. Kenny writes autobiography with the eye and ear of a novelist, evoking a time, a place and a welter of emotions through vividly remembered scenes, snippets of dialogue, small epiphanies. Unlike most memoirs, which place so much weight on the act of remembering itself, and are thus more about the writer’s present than his past, The Family Business has the immediacy of a diary, and an almost excruciating honesty. It is, above all, an extraordinarily accomplished piece of writing.

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