Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and...
New translations by veteran Celtic scholar Eickhoff (The Destruction of the Inn, 2001, etc.) of more than 30 early Irish tales and fragments.
Ancient Irish literature is an acquired taste, even for the Irish, and readers dipping into Eickhoff’s meticulously organized and annotated anthology may find themselves reminded on occasion of Frank McCourt’s recollections (in Angela’s Ashes) of little boys in Limerick combing through the folklore for descriptions of Cúchulainn winning his wife in a peeing contest. All of these tales date from well before the arrival of the English in the 12th century, and they portray a world of clans that is almost pre-agrarian and given heavily to the heroic arts of war and conquest. As the author puts it in his introduction, “Ancient Irish stories are categorized as Destructions, Cattle-raids, Courtships, Battles, Cave Stories, Voyages, Tragedies, Adventures, Banquets, Sieges, Plunderings, Elopements, Eruptions, Visions, Love Stories, Hastings, and Invasions.” Most of the selections here, in fact, are written renditions of much older bardic odes, and their content is usually aptly summarized by their titles (“The Battle of Etair,” “The Wooing of Luaine,” etc.). Like all heroic tales, they use a highly formal and ornate rhetoric (“A wrathful brown hero is there and a fair, splendid hero, and a valiant champion who could rival a king with thick, yellow-red hair that is like a honeycomb at the end of harvest”), but they also rely on comic antics and ribaldry (in “The Intoxication of the Ulster Men,” a tribe defends itself by having its women strip naked before the bashful Cúchulainn, knowing that he will turn his back on them) to a much greater degree than the Norse sagas. The “Fragments” collected at the end are a mixture of incomplete tales and miscellaneous proverbs (“Sufficiency is better than a multitude”).
Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and serious Celtophiles.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87019-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Charming tale, sweet as pie, with a just-right touch of tartness from the bestselling Flagg (Standing in the Rainbow, 2003,...
One more Christmas, one more chance.
Diagnosed with terminal emphysema, Oswald T. Campbell leaves wintry Chicago for a friendly little town in Alabama recommended by his doctor. Lost River seems as good a place as any to spend his last Christmas on earth; and Oswald, a cheerful loser all his life, believes in going with the flow. Turns out that the people of Lost River are a colorful bunch: Roy Grimmit, the strapping owner of the grocery/bait/beer store, hand-feeds a rescued fledgling named Jack (the redbird of the title) and doesn’t care who thinks he’s a sissy. Many of the local women belong to the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots, which does good things on the sly, like fixing up unattached men. Betty Kitchen, former army nurse, coaxes Oswald’s life story out of him. Seems he was an orphan named for a can of soup—could there be anything sadder? Oswald is quite taken with the charms of Frances Cleverdon, who has a fabulous collection of gravy boats and a pink kitchen, too. Back to Jack, the redbird: it’s a favorite of Patsy, a crippled little girl abandoned by her worthless parents. She’ll be heartbroken when she finds out that Jack died, so the townsfolk arrange for a minor miracle. Will they get it? Yes—and snow for Christmas, too.
Charming tale, sweet as pie, with a just-right touch of tartness from the bestselling Flagg (Standing in the Rainbow, 2003, etc).Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6304-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poortimes—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everything away, and her death in a well; for Joe, the hand of the "wild" woman, his mother, that never really found his. And all of the child Dorcas's dolls burned up with her mother and her childhood. Truly, the new music of Harlem—from clicks and taps of pleasure to the thud of betrayed marching black veterans with their frozen faces—"had a complicated anger in it." Were Joe and Violet substitutes for each other, for a need known and unmet? At the close, a new link is forged between them with another Dorcas. One of Morrison's richest novels yet, with its weave of city voices, tough and tender, public and private, and a flight of images that sweep up the world in a heartbeat: the narrator (never identified) contemplates airships in a city sky as they "swim below cloud foam...like watching a private dream....That was what [Dorcas's] hunger was like: mesmerizing, directed, floating like a public secret." In all, a lovely novel—lyrical, searching, and touching.
Pub Date: April 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41167-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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