Posted on by Radz Pandit

Gaining Ground / Abra – Joan Barfoot

I first heard of Joan Barfoot thanks to the wonderful Backlisted podcast (I have yet to listen to the episode, but I’m all set to do so shortly), and after looking up Gaining Ground, I was intrigued. Her books are hard to find; Gaining Ground was out of print, and I couldn’t find any reasonably priced secondhand copies online. However, many of her books are readily available on Kindle, and I raced through the book on my flight back home from Paris. What a fabulous novel it turned out to be! The good thing is that the folks at Faber are reissuing the novel in July, and I certainly plan to buy a copy, having loved the book so much.

Originally published in 1978, Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground, also known as Abra, is one of those rare novels that are unforgettable: a remarkable exploration of the crippling weight of societal expectations on women, survival and self-liberation, and solitude.

The book opens in a remote cabin in the Canadian countryside, where our middle-aged protagonist, Abra Phillips, is tending her vegetable garden when she notices a disconcerting stranger: a young woman on the cusp of adulthood stepping gingerly into her line of sight. Abra does not recognise the woman, but by this point, she has reached a stage where even her own name feels unfamiliar to her.

My name is Abra.

My name is Abra.

I had almost forgotten that; the naming of things lost its importance here, with no one to hear them named.

Abra, we learn, has been living alone in the cabin for almost nine years, immersed in solitude in a house where the need for mirrors – or even clocks – has long since disappeared. So complete is her isolation that even her own name has acquired an alien quality, having gone so long without the need to interact with anyone in her self-imposed, hermit-like existence. Yet we quickly sense that Abra has a past, a fact that even she is forced to confront upon the young woman’s arrival. The visitor, it turns out, is none other than her eighteen-year-old daughter, Katie, who, after nine years without her mother, has come to reconnect with Abra and understand why she abruptly abandoned her comfortable suburban home, her husband Stephen, and her two children.

I stand suddenly, deliberately forgetting that this person opposite me, whose head snaps back as I rise and whose eyes draw away into themselves, is still afraid of me, wants something from me, is terrified of receiving nothing.

It’s as if Abra has stored all her memories in a brick house she never intended to revisit, but Katie’s sudden appearance has dislodged one of those bricks, sending the entire edifice crumbling, and the memories gushing forth.

The memories of those years have a sameness, a furriness, as if nothing at all happened for days and months and years except for that routine. Could it really have been that way? Is it true that nothing happened? What was I thinking about then, I wonder? What was I feeling? Where was the “I” in all of that? I was the lover, the giver, the doer, the mother, the wife, and that is where the “I” was.

After nine years, Abra is compelled to confront a past she had almost succeeded in forgetting (“If I thought in the last few years about the other life at all, it was only in passing, as of something quite vague and different. Now, confronted by Katie and her bitterness and curiosity, I am confronted, too, by a fragment of the old self”).

A large part of the novel initially unfolds through flashbacks as Abra reflects on her previous life as a married woman, ensconced in a comfortable suburban home with a loving husband, two children, and a dog.

We had a big house. Stephen was (is) a stockbroker, very successful, unusually successful, I was told, and we were, I suppose, what was called upper middle class. Still we had fairly simple tastes, accustomed to comfort but unused to luxury, and the house was the biggest thing we ever bought, quite extraordinary when I think about it.

Abra tells us about her husband, Stephen, whom she portraysg as a kind, gentle man and a devoted father to their two children.

Stephen seemed to me a kind man and gentle. I learned from his friends that at work he was crisp and efficient and intolerant of mistakes, but at home he was loving, and extraordinarily good with the children, for I knew other men who were too tired for theirs. But Stephen tried always to have time for them, and on the weekends, when he could see that I needed a break, he would take them out, to the park, to the zoo, for a swim, or just a walk. He enjoyed them, and they were comfortable with him.

Their married life has its share of struggles and disagreements. In the early years, they depend on their parents’ support while Stephen completes his studies and Abra works as a saleswoman. The job is long and arduous, but the couple needs the money, and it is understood between them that once Stephen finishes his studies and finds a job, Abra will leave hers and focus on the home.

One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the way Barfoot transforms Abra’s domestic life into a gripping account of mounting emptiness and despair, steadily building towards the breaking point that ultimately compels her to leave her home, husband, and children. At first, Abra is content with the ordinary, conventional life she has chosen. She loves her husband, and the couple is overjoyed when she becomes pregnant with their first child. When Elliott is born, Abra reflects on how her overwhelming possessiveness, fuelled by an obsessive concern for his safety, almost destroys her marriage. It is only through Stephen’s quiet firmness that she gradually learns to let go, and by the time Katie is born, she is no longer the possessive mother she once was.

Slowly but steadily, Stephen begins to do very well in his career, and with his success come the obligations expected of his wife – Abra is expected to be supportive, hosting parties for Stephen’s colleagues and attending an endless round of social gatherings. As the children grow older and begin school, she becomes overwhelmed by the routines of domestic life: getting them ready each morning, shopping, preparing meals, sitting anxiously by the window in the evenings waiting to catch sight of them returning home, and feeling a wave of relief once both the children and Stephen are safely back. What Barfoot does vividly is highlight the nature of the predicament that engulfs Abra as her life gradually dissolves into a succession of monotonous tasks, reducing her to the conventional roles of wife and mother. Increasingly consumed by these expectations, she finds herself losing any sense of identity (“On Saturdays, usually just before they came in, there was always a pinch of dread in my stomach, a gearing up for the performance”). She does everything society asks of her – managing the home, raising the children, shouldering the responsibilities of family life, and supporting Stephen’s career – yet she cannot escape the nagging question: what is in it for me? As time slips by, each day as empty and indistinguishable as the last, her inner crisis deepens. She feels divided into two selves: one mechanically carrying out her daily duties, the other watching this disillusioned woman from a distance as though she were a stranger, observing her gradual descent towards an abyss.

Why would a woman abandon a supposedly happy home? Indeed, Barfoot challenges the reader’s expectations – Abra leaves her home, husband, and children not because of familial tensions or because Stephen is violent or has abused her, but because leaving becomes necessary for her to reclaim a sense of self as she begins to spiral into a breakdown. As she struggles through the fog enveloping her mind, Abra learns of a childhood friend who seemingly had everything – a comfortable home, husband, and children – yet commits suicide. That revelation unsettles Abra: she has no wish to die, but is also aware that life in its current form cannot continue.

Selma’s death had something to do with me, I felt it but I could not tell what it was. I tried to see, but it kept slipping away from me. The time slipped away too: the days and months and seasons went round and round, while I sat bewildered in the centre, unmoving, wanting vaguely to make it stop so that I could get a grip on it, but nothing would ever stop and I could not catch up, and meanwhile my life was leaving me behind and I was thirty-four years old and it was winter.

As the novel progresses, Abra’s unhappiness intensifies, though at first she is unable to quite pin down what ails her (“I could have cried out with the frustration, for it seemed that in me was a fog that smothered me whenever I approached the door that might lead to freedom”). Stephen realises that something is amiss and encourages her to find a job or take up some activity, but Abra knows that these are not solutions that will absolve her of the existential crisis permeating her very being; what she needs is something more permanent (“I wanted an answer, a completion, not a preparation”). Learning something new, finding a new job, and other such initiatives are stopgap measures, add-ons to a life that will not dissolve the obligations imposed upon her as a woman in traditional society.

One day, when Abra comes across an advertisement in the newspaper for a remote cabin in the woods for sale, an idea begins to form in her mind. Relying on a small but substantial inheritance left to her by her grandmother, Abra begins to envisage that cabin as an escape from her present life and the possibility of a radically new one on her own terms (“That first time it was like an electric shock, sharp and abrupt, strange and terribly painful, and it changed everything. With it, the life I had disintegrated. From the first moment this was my home. How can that be understood?”). And then she just leaves.

The latter part of the book focuses on Abra’s extraordinary reinvention as she embraces her new beginnings, revitalised by a renewed sense of purpose and the need to adapt to a different form of living. To be sure, Abra ensures that the cabin is equipped with modern comforts and amenities – furniture, a fridge, hot water, and she keeps her own car – but in all other respects, she slowly learns to adapt to and live in harmony with nature.

The cabin itself is very old, hand-built of stone, carefully, solidly made. It is not, however, primitive; it has electricity and plumbing, and I bought a freezer as soon as I came here. It is my home. It is not an outback, a wilderness; I do not have an interest in “roughing it.” I am accustomed to comfort.

The beginning is difficult, as is the first brutal winter. Her initial months are spent preparing for the winter she is warned will be severe. She struggles with chopping wood, making fires, growing a vegetable garden, preserving food, decorating her home to make it cosy and inviting, shopping for basic furniture, and so on.

For a woman brought up in and having lived within suburbia, these tasks are arduous, but Abra faces them head on, and each small success strengthens her resolve and will to carry on.

It had taken a long time, for there had been so many things that I did not know, so many simpler ways there must have been to make curtains, refinish furniture, cut wood, but I didn’t know any of them, and so I learned alone, by trial. There were times when I was annoyed, impatient with my ignorance, but still there was pleasure in doing things slowly, even if I was clumsy, and knowing when they were finished, satisfied, that however they had turned out, they were mine.

More importantly, she is no longer bound by the strict contours of routine or a life determined by the clock, with its constant sense of time slipping by. Abra deliberately chooses to keep no clocks or mirrors in the house; instead, living alone and surrounded by nature sharpens her senses and attunes her to her natural surroundings (“It was necessary to put away fancy human urges to capture or control, or just to make some kind of difference, to be noticed; it was necessary to be an animal”). With no mirrors in the house, Abra is no longer preoccupied with her looks and physical appearance. She cherishes solitude, free from the pressures of being a hostess and maintaining appearances in social settings, although she must make the occasional trip to a nearby town for provisions and, accordingly, interact.

And then the novel returns to the present, nine years after Abra’s departure, when her daughter comes to speak with her and tries to understand what happened. The final chapters focus beautifully on the conversations and exchanges between mother and daughter as they attempt to understand one another or, at least, to articulate what cannot easily be explained. By this time, Abra has grown accustomed to Katie’s reappearance in her life and even begins to look forward to her visits, but she must also contend with Katie’s shifting range of emotions – rage, fear, grief, curiosity, and confusion.               

Gripping and immersive, one of the themes that becomes the nucleus of Gaining Ground is the rejection of traditional roles of marriage and motherhood, and the compulsory self-sacrifice they entail. This is a novel about rebellion and reinvention, and it asks a central question: Does a woman have the right to exist for herself rather than for others? – “I began to see it in that light: I owe it to them, but there is nothing in this for me.”

In a narrative imbued with a thriller-like quality, the veil of depression ensnaring Abra is powerfully rendered – she increasingly feels detached from herself, begins sleeping excessively, daily shopping feels meaningless, while social gatherings become unbearable, and she is beset by the unshakeable feeling that time is slipping by with nothing achieved. Abra never stops loving her children, and yet motherhood itself begins to feel like an endless series of obligations that consume every part of her life; in other words, she can no longer find the person who exists beneath the roles of wife and mother. She begins to think of herself almost as an empty vessel carrying out these prescribed roles to make her husband and children’s lives happier and more fulfilled – but what, she begins to ask herself, is she receiving in return?

Barfoot judges nobody; there are no villains in this novel. Stephen is never portrayed as the archetypal bad husband, and Abra loves her children; she acknowledges that her departure will devastate the family and accepts the blame that is likely to be heaped upon her, but she has no regrets about the radically new path she has embarked upon, one that is essential for her physical and mental well-being.

Gaining Ground also explores the notion of solitude and the acceptance of living with oneself. This sense of being alone is not equated with loneliness; Abra instead welcomes the absence of company.

I did not consider, not then, whether I was lonely. There weren’t labels; I was learning something already, that labels came from outside, when one stood away and said, “Yes, that looks like what people call loneliness.” But there were no people here, no reasons to stand back and look. I was inside myself. I could feel everything, and it was very tender. Raw.

Solitude, instead, becomes a time for her to heal and accept, to be free from judging and being judged. Physical labour renews her; she becomes attuned to seasonal rhythms and relishes the silence, free from the daily noise and rigours of a past life that teemed with societal obligations. The old Abra dies; her roles as a mother and wife are extinguished, and a new woman emerges, ready to live life on her own terms, even if they remain unacceptable to the outside world (“I have been alone. My days and seasons and years have spun gently, unbroken, no time, only rhythm. I am rooted in a moment, and in a pattern of moments. I have been alone, and it is good”). In the old world, Abra’s crisis would likely have been labelled as depression and mental breakdown, and perhaps it was, but the innate joy that springs in this new version of herself could also  be akin to a form of spiritual awakening.

I wondered, “How many fears have there been that I’ve learned to make mine? What am I, just myself, afraid of and what have I been taught to fear?” Maybe in the other life there had been something; here, now, considering it, I could think of nothing.

Time itself takes on an altered texture. In the absence of clocks and calendars, Abra begins to experience time as a cycle of seasons rather than as something hemmed in by the mechanical ticking of a clock. There are no fixed schedules to adhere to; Abra learns instead to listen to her body and determine when she needs to rest, sleep, or engage in physical work.

While the two books are vastly different, there is something about Gaining Ground that reminded me a bit of Marlen Haushofer’s wonderful The Wall, particularly in the way the protagonists in both novels learn to survive and live with nature, although in this book Abra chooses this life for herself, while in The Wall the protagonist is thrust into that situation.

Barfoot’s writing is both immersive and therapeutic – the chapters that dwell on Abra’s dilemma pulsate with tension, but once she is in the cabin, the prose becomes quieter, reflecting Abra’s growing inner peace. These chapters brim with profound insights into guilt, acceptance, reawakening, and self-forgiveness.

“Look,” the memories say, “this is what it was, this is what you left, look at it, see the way it was.” Why is it happening now, when so many years ago, when everything changed, there was very little reflection, or thought, or confrontation, or regret?

Gaining Ground, then, is an intense and rich novel, one that compels the reader to hold two seemingly incompatible truths about Abra at once: that leaving her home destroyed her family to some extent, yet that freedom was also necessary for her own survival (“It was absolute, total selfishness, and never before had anything been so perfect”).

Highly recommended!

Posted on by Radz Pandit

Cathedrals – Claudia Piñeiro (tr. Frances Riddle)

As seen in three superb novels, Elena Knows, A Little Luck, and A Crack in the Wall, the hallmark of Claudia Piñeiro’s fiction is her ability to use crime as a lens through which to examine pressing social issues, and Cathedrals is no exception – this is a brilliant, engrossing tale that explores misogyny, the use of religion as a system of oppression, and complex familial ties.

At the heart of the novel lies the brutal murder of Ana Sardá, a teenage girl whose dismembered and burned body is discovered in a parking lot, the circumstances of her death as horrifying as they are mysterious. Ana’s murder forms the axis around which the novel revolves – through seven interlocking perspectives, Piñeiro gradually assembles a portrait of a family fractured by grief and burdened by polarizing divides, sibling rivalries, forbidden desire, and the suffocating influence of the Church.

“I stopped believing in God thirty years ago” – with this stark declaration begins the account of Lia, the middle of the three Sardá sisters, immediately signalling that Ana’s death continues to cast a long shadow over the family decades later. The loss devastates the Sardás, but each member responds differently. Lia abandons her faith entirely, convinced there’s no point in believing in a God who could permit such a horrific fate for her younger sister. Her rejection of religion places her at odds with her devout mother, who retreats further into grief, and especially with her elder sister Carmen, whose fervent Catholicism comes to define her entire worldview. As Lia’s narrative unfolds, the family’s fractured dynamics become increasingly apparent. Although Carmen presents herself to the outside world as warm, pious, and compassionate, within the home she is by turns feared and resented. Lia’s refusal to pray and her declaration at Ana’s funeral that she no longer believes in God drive an even deeper wedge between the two sisters, exposing the irreconcilable tensions that have long simmered beneath the surface.

From the moment I proclaimed my atheism, my family began to mourn not only Ana, but also my faith. Was it truly necessary to make that declaration in the middle of Ana’s funeral? Yes, I believe it was; I had to say it then and there, even given the circumstances, because I owed my sister that honesty before what was left of her the pieces of her body were buried and condemned to remain underground for all eternity, before I said goodbye to Ana forever. That afternoon I learned that ‘atheist’ is a bad word. And that most religious people can accept those who believe in other gods, but not those who don’t believe in any god at all.

Their father, however, stands apart from the rest of the family. Less rigid in his beliefs and more willing to encourage independent thought, he is the only one in the family with whom Lia chooses to remain in contact after leaving home. More importantly, he is also the only person who seems genuinely determined to uncover the truth behind Ana’s death. What angers Lia almost as much as the tragedy itself is the resignation with which her mother and Carmen accept it. Unshaken in their faith, they seem fine to leave justice in God’s hands, showing little desire to discover who murdered Ana or why.

Meanwhile, Lia is haunted not only by grief but also by regrets. She knew, in a vague way, that Ana had fallen in love with someone, yet she was too absorbed in her own life to become the confidante her younger sister needed. Even more painful is the memory of the night before Ana’s death, when it seemed clear that Ana wanted to tell her something important. Exhausted, Lia put off the conversation until the following day, but by then it was too late.

All these factors compel Lia to sever all ties with her family and leave for Santiago de Compostela, where she gradually builds a new life. She begins working in a bookshop before eventually becoming its owner, and over the next three decades, she succeeds in creating both a physical and emotional distance from the family she has left behind. During these years, she refuses all contact with them until Ana’s killer is identified, making only one exception: an ongoing correspondence with her father.  However, even these letters carefully avoid family matters, touching instead on books and cathedrals and other shared interests, unless new revelations come to the fore regarding Ana’s killer.

Yet the past refuses to remain buried; it returns to intrude upon the present, forcing Lia into contact with family members she had long hoped never to see again. The unexpected visitors are Carmen and her husband Julián, a strikingly handsome man who, decades earlier, had been studying for priesthood before abandoning his vocation. They have travelled to Santiago de Compostela in search of their only son, twenty-three-year-old Mateo, who has abruptly cut off all contact with them. An architecture student, Mateo had set off on a journey around Europe to visit some of its most celebrated cathedrals, with Spain on his itinerary. Since then, however, he has disappeared. His parents have been unable to reach him, and he has even erased his online presence. A private investigator eventually traces a series of purchases Mateo made at Lia’s bookshop, leading Carmen and Julián to wonder whether she might know his whereabouts. Lia has never met her nephew and has little interest in becoming involved with Carmen’s son. But an offhand remark suggesting that Mateo may have forged a close relationship with her father, Alfredo, piques her curiosity.

Through Mateo’s narrative, Piñeiro explores what it means to grow up as the only child of Carmen and Julián, raised within a deeply religious household whose rigid moral framework increasingly feels stifling. At twenty-three, Mateo finds himself at an uncertain stage of life, searching for purpose and a sense of identity, yet his mother’s domineering personality leaves little room for either. Carmen’s faith extends beyond personal conviction into an attempt to shape every aspect of her son’s life, and Mateo instinctively resists her efforts. Even his decision to study architecture appears forced upon him. Mateo, however, finds an ally in Alfredo, his grandfather, who encourages him to think for himself and chart his life, imparting nuggets of wisdom and advice when necessary (“From then on, without explicitly voicing any doubts and without openly confronting my parents or the church, my grandfather taught me that it was possible to be free”).

So, from the moment he resigned himself to the fact that his days were numbered, he began to train me for survival. Sometimes this training was explicit; other times, implied. It took me a while to realize that many of the things my grandfather did in his final months, when he was still relatively well, were deliberate attempts to help me learn to survive. There are places where it’s hard to survive: a desert, an uninhabited island, a mountaintop, Mars, in a war-torn country, in the jungle. In my family.

Alfredo, however, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and knows he has little time left. Before his death, he urges Mateo to embark on a journey across Europe to visit its great cathedrals, once he is no more. In doing so, Alfredo references the acclaimed short story Cathedral by Raymond Carver, in which a blind man asks the narrator to draw a cathedral with his eyes closed while the two of them hold the pen together, an act that allows the narrator to experience the world in a radically new way. Alfredo incorporates something of this idea into Mateo’s journey, encouraging him to draw the cathedrals he visits to capture something of their essence.

My grandfather made me promise that, once he was no longer around, I would travel that route we planned together to see the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe. That path led to where he wanted to go: to be reunited with the daughter he missed most. He missed her even more than Ana, maybe because missing someone who was alive made more sense than missing a dead person. Death demands resignation; absence doesn’t.

Mateo was not yet born when Ana died, yet even he cannot escape the spectre of that tragedy. He knows that his grandfather never abandoned his pursuit of the truth when he comes across papers Alfredo has kept relating to the case. Alfredo also has another mission in mind for Mateo after he is gone. He leaves behind three letters: two to be read as soon as Mateo receives them, and a third to be opened with his aunt Lia once he meets her in Spain. After Alfredo’s death, Mateo immediately begins preparing for his journey, a trip he undertakes not only to fulfill his beloved grandfather’s final wishes but also to escape his parents and break free from the life they have mapped out for him.

The next narrative belongs to Marcela, and it is through her account that some of the circumstances surrounding Ana’s death begin to come into focus, although the identity of the perpetrator remains unknown until much later. We learn that Marcela and Ana were inseparable friends, so much so that Marcela knew many of Ana’s deepest secrets, more than either of her sisters did. “Ana died in my arms” – thus begins Marcela’s account, and as she runs to seek help, a statue topples over and strikes her on the head, leaving her with a severe brain injury that results in short-term memory loss reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Her memories of everything before the accident remain vivid and perfectly intact, but afterward, she struggles to retain new information and carries a notebook everywhere, recording conversations and important details. Marcela’s opening statement immediately highlights a disconnect with what we had been told earlier – she insists that Ana died in her arms inside a church, a claim that seems difficult to reconcile with the discovery of Ana’s burned and dismembered body in a parking lot. Because of her memory impairment, her account is largely dismissed until Alfredo, relentless in his search for the truth about his daughter’s death, decides to meet her and hear her version of events.

Three further narratives follow, culminating in Alfredo’s account, which takes the form of the letter he entrusted to Mateo to be read together with Lia.

Cathedrals, then, pulsates with a multitude of themes, but what Piñeiro does brilliantly here is construct the novel as a sequence of personal testimonies, each narrator contributing only a fragment of the larger picture. None of them possesses the truth in its entirety, making them unreliable in a broader sense, as guilt, faulty memory, denial, self-justification, and misplaced beliefs alter their perception of the truth and shape their understanding of events. In this respect, the structure of Cathedrals resembles the gradual assembly of a jigsaw puzzle. There are, of course, points of overlap, yet no single narrative tells the full story. Instead, each successive testimony adds another layer, steadily reshaping the reader’s understanding of Ana’s death, both in terms of its motives and its aftermath.

Cathedrals uses the framework of a crime not so much to identify a murderer as to examine how institutions such as the family and the Catholic Church shape and govern individual lives. The crime functions as a starting point for a broader exploration of silence, guilt, faith, misogyny, oppression, sex and desire, sibling rivalry, and moral responsibility.

Religion is a dominant theme here, and Piñeiro superbly highlights its corrosive influence on the family, widening the chasm between its members, and its role in the distortion of truth, the preservation of rigid social mores particularly related to women’s lives, and an insistence on avoiding sin at the expense of compassion and humanity. It becomes a vehicle of oppression, particularly for Mateo and Lia, who struggle to escape its pervasive hold over the family. As the novel progresses, sex and desire, along with sibling rivalry, also come to the forefront, further complicating the Sardá family’s life as they grapple with keeping secrets and dealing with their consequences.  

Piñeiro particularly shows how Ana’s murder devastates the Sardá family, leaving indelible scars as each member struggles to come to terms with the loss in their own way. Alfredo, for instance, never stops searching for answers over the thirty years that follow; Mateo later comes across his carefully compiled papers, in which he has meticulously filed every new document or piece of evidence that might shed light on the circumstances of his daughter’s death. In a sense, Alfredo loses both of his daughters – Ana through death, and Lia through her relocation to another continent. Carmen, Ana’s older sister, turns even more intensely to Catholicism, directing her religious fervour into a form of denial topreserve the family name while avoiding any confrontation with the truth. Lia, by contrast, moves in the opposite direction, rejecting both religion and her family entirely.

I no longer believed simply because I was no longer afraid. And if I wasn’t afraid of God, I wasn’t afraid of anyone. What was the worst thing that could happen to me if I stopped believing? Ana’s dismembered body had been found in a vacant lot and, like a revelation, that savage act made me see with perfect clarity that my faith was founded entirely in fear, in the suspicion that, if I didn’t believe in that supposed God that everyone around me believed in or any other god – something bad would happen to me, something terrible: it would be the end of the world. That’s how I had been raised, to have a reverential fear of God. But now someone had killed my sister, tried to burn her body, and chopped her into pieces. What could possibly happen to me that was more horrible than that?

The title Cathedrals carries a range of connotations. It refers, first, to Mateo’s journey across Europe to visit some of its most magnificent cathedrals, and more broadly to religion itself, one of the novel’s central themes. It also echoes Raymond Carver’s short story of the same name. At another level, the imagery of stained-glass windows in these cathedrals can be read as reflecting the changing “colours” of Ana’s body before and after her death – details that ultimately help an investigator hired by Alfredo piece together the circumstances of her murder, and in doing so free Marcela from the burden of keeping Ana’s secret and breaking her promise to her best friend.

In a nutshell, told in an unshowy yet arresting prose style, Cathedrals is a rich, layered novel that examines how powerful institutions such as the family and the Church can fracture relationships and destroy lives. Highly recommended.

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 2 Comments

Crazy Genie – Inès Cagnati (tr. Liesl Schillinger)

Last year, I was introduced to the magic and sadness of Inès Cagnati’s world when I read her novel Free Day for #NYRBWomen25, and I was very much looking forward to the release of Crazy Genie this year. It lived up to my expectations, although if you have read Free Day, you just know that this is going to be drenched in sadness, and boy, it really was! I read this for #NYRBWomen26, the first book I’ve read for this marvellous reading project this year.

A mother-daughter relationship dominates the pages of both Free Day and Crazy Genie. In Free Day, the vulnerable yet defiant Galla struggles with conflicted feelings toward her mother as she cycles between school and home: she longs for her mother’s company while yearning to break free from her. In Crazy Genie, however, young Marie loves her mother with complete and unconditional devotion. There is no desire to break away; if anything, Marie wishes she could remain with her mother all the time, at every hour of the day. But that is not to be. Her emotionally absent mother, called by the villagers as Crazy Genie, spends her days labouring in neighbouring farms and fields for pitiful wages and scraps of food, barely enough to sustain herself and Marie. Genie’s indifference toward her daughter stems less from cruelty than from the profound emptiness that consumes her.

For Genie has suffered a cruel turn of fate. We learn that she comes from a respectable, well-to-do family but is cast out after becoming pregnant out of wedlock. At seventeen, Genie is barely more than a child herself, abruptly thrust into motherhood with no support system. We do not initially know who Marie’s father is; that will become clear later, but when Marie first demands answers, Genie slaps her.

Genie and Marie live alone in a ramshackle house by the river. Each day, Genie walks from farm to farm searching for whatever work she can find, working relentlessly until nightfall – pruning vines, feeding animals, husking corn, cleaning stables, slaughtering livestock, preserving food. She rarely speaks. The villagers call her ‘Crazy Genie’ because she does not respond when spoken to and seems withdrawn from the world. Sometimes Marie helps her, but more often than not, she is told to go home. Marie lives in constant fear, haunted by the possibility that if Genie disappears from sight, she might vanish forever. Terrified of being abandoned, Marie runs desperately across fields and farms searching for her mother, her heart swelling with happiness and relief whenever she finally spots her. But Genie, emptied of joy and exhausted by the relentless toil, simply tells her to go home. At night, Genie often weeps, lamenting her cruel fate and insisting she has nothing left to live for, unmoved by Marie’s attempts at comfort.

Often she cried at night, in front of the fire. Her eyes would take on the color of tears. She would say: “And me, I’ve had nothing.”

I would say: “Me, you have me.”

But she would keep on crying. Then I would believe that she didn’t want me. I wanted to love her every minute of my life so that she would want me, I followed her everywhere.

She would say: “Get out of my hair.”

But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.

But for Marie, her mother is everything. Every evening, she waits anxiously, with equal measures of patience and fear, listening for Genie’s footsteps returning home after another gruelling day of labour. Genie arrives utterly spent: she prepares a quick meal, cleans the cracks in her feet with a pin, and collapses into sleep from exhaustion. There is no time left for tenderness or companionship. On one level, Marie has accepted this. It is enough that her mother has returned home and that, for another night, they remain together within their tiny shared world.

Marie is still young, and despite their crushing poverty, small flickers of hope continue to animate her world. She dreams of owning a cow, perhaps a duck, perhaps even a dog – companions to ease her loneliness. Eventually, her mother brings home a cow, whom Marie names Rosa; later comes a duck that Marie discovers during one of her walks. These animals provide precisely the companionship and happiness she has long craved. But this is an Inès Cagnati novel, and perhaps inevitably, such moments of joy are likely fragile and fleeting.

Marie frequently runs across the fields to visit her grandparents despite Genie forbidding it, but even there, she senses that she is unwanted. Whenever relatives and cousins gather, her arrival is greeted with uncomfortable silence, while her grandmother repeatedly insinuates that Marie has come to spy on them. The grandfather is more sympathetic, indulging her with fruit, which Marie often throws into the well, but he, too, remains largely absorbed in his own world, retreating into his books rather than offering any form of genuine connection.

Interspersed with this storyline is another that appears to take place several years later, when Marie is studying at boarding school and travelling home for the holidays. We learn that Genie now lives in Antoine’s house and that Marie is making her way there. At the train station she meets Pierre, a young man. In their first meeting, they merely introduce themselves, but in subsequent conversations, Pierre promises to take her to fantastical lands, “on gentle islands of frangipani” and “to the edge of the deserts”, before he is called to fight in the war. These sections are imbued with an unmistakably dreamlike quality: are those conversations with Pierre real, or merely a figment of Marie’s imagination? Does she imagine Pierre to be the person who might finally love her in the way her mother never could and carry her away from this life?

Pierre spoke of Hyères, of airplanes. He talked about the camp on the sea road, the velvety perfume of the mimosas along the avenues bordered with palm trees. He talked about the orange trees in the paths, the green waters and the blue waters of the sea. He said: “Marie. My sweet. My lonely one. My flower.”

When he left, he said, on the platform: “Don’t feel bad, Thumbelina, I’ll be back.”

As the novel progresses, death and tragedy punctuate the narrative with alarming regularity, though moments of hope sometimes do pierce through, brief flashes of light that always seem on the verge of being extinguished.

One of the novel’s most striking qualities is Marie’s simple yet beguiling narrative voice, rendered through short, matter-of-fact sentences. We experience the world entirely through her perspective, the viewpoint of a child; events, phrases, and refrains repeat because Marie does not rely on the benefit of hindsight or deep analysis. Being a child, Marie accepts the world as it is, and the result is prose of extraordinary emotional force – unadorned and imbued with a raw beauty and honesty that makes her narrative all the more heartbreaking.

Much in the novel remains ambiguous, things hinted at. Early on, for instance, a young abbé befriends Marie, only to later be accused by another girl of sexual abuse. The police repeatedly question Marie, asking whether the abbé abused her too, but Marie vehemently denies it. It is possible that a child so starved of affection simply responded to the abbé’s kindness and attention; equally possible that this relationship, too, involved some form of exploitation. We never really know.

And what of Genie herself? Once, she came from a respected local family and was described as cheerful and sociable. Then something catastrophic occurs: she becomes pregnant under circumstances that are never fully revealed, and she is subsequently rejected both by her family and by the wider community. Sexual violence and abuse are hinted at as part of her history, though much remains unspoken. Rather than receiving sympathy or support, Genie is socially exiled and looked down upon as a figure of shame.

It would perhaps be easy to dismiss Genie as an uncaring mother, but this reader found it difficult to judge her too harshly, given the wretchedness of her circumstances, her complete lack of support, and the overall hostility of a society toward unmarried mothers. Genie herself is still little more than a child at seventeen, abruptly forced into motherhood through what may well have been assault, only to be shunned nevertheless by both society and her own family, who repeatedly imply that she has stained their respectable reputation. Meanwhile, the village continues to exploit her labour while simultaneously treating her as an outsider. Yet Genie rarely complains. She simply moves through her hard, empty existence, though beneath everything lies a sorrow so profound that even Marie, as young as she is, cannot fail to notice it.

When I was big enough, I said, so she wouldn’t be sad anymore: “One day we will go away, far away, to lands where the vines touch the sky, where we will get lost in forests of acacias in pursuit of wild cyclamens.”

She never responded. I knew there couldn’t be lands where vines grow up to the sky, where you could lose yourself along the banks of streams while hunting wild cyclamens. I just wanted to console her. When you’re little, you don’t know.

In the later sections, we briefly glimpse Genie illuminated by an unexpected happiness when support finally arrives from Antoine, but again, there’s this persistently hovering dread that this fragile happiness might not last.

Achingly sad yet beautifully written, Crazy Genie is ultimately a devastating novel about a daughter’s unconditional love for a mother who often seems incapable of returning it. Like Free Day, it unfolds in rural southwestern France and explores poverty, isolation, a child’s consciousness, female suffering, and the complicated textures of mother-daughter relationships, but it is possibly bleaker, particularly in the latter half of the novel.

There are two fraught mother-daughter relationships here. First is the relationship between Genie and her own mother, who severs contact when she decides that her daughter’s misfortune has become a source of disgrace. But at the centre of everything lies the poignant relationship between Genie and Marie. Marie desperately craves her mother’s love, affection, and attention, yet Genie is so caught up in the grind of daily life, throwing herself headlong into hard labour not only to survive but also to keep despair at bay, that she is often impervious to Marie’s emotional needs.

And yet occasional flashes of tenderness break through. We see this particularly when Marie falls seriously ill following one especially horrific incident, but the circumstances are such that Marie has no one to talk to about it, not even her mother. Yet Genie cares for her daughter and, later, when a life with Antoine seems possible, insists that Marie get a good education. Cagnati is especially powerful when depicting the grinding reality of poverty and the limited possibilities available to women trapped within these environments. Abuse is commonplace, as is societal judgement.

Crazy Genie pulsates with vivid imagery – misty mornings (“some days, the mist rose up from the river, drowned the sad willows, buried the world”), scorching, sweltering summers (“the ponds, long since dried up, showed nothing but a bottom of cracked ancient mud, on the surface of which frogs had come to shrivel under the demented sun”), and magical faraway lands that lend the novel a dreamy, hypnotic quality.

The little old woman wanted to know about the islands. I continued watching the movement of the froth of the waves, hearing Pierre’s voice telling of the perfume of the frangipani, the deep caves where the red birds nest, the gardens of wild orange trees, the blue sand of gentle beaches, and the water of the night, the lonely cry of the herons. I thought of the crazy willows of the river, of the big paulownia that rocked the sky with its mauve clusters, and of her, the one they called Crazy Genie because she didn’t talk and because she had had me, whom nobody wanted.

There is a spare beauty to Cagnati’s prose, a mesmeric simplicity woven into Marie’s voice, rhythmic repetitions that gradually accumulate emotional force, and sentences whose apparent plainness conceal devastating depths. This is an emotionally intense, immensely sad novel, but also one I am very glad to have read.

Translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger.

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Two Months of Reading – March & April 2026

March was a slow reading month, but April more than made up for it, and taking both months together, I read seven books – all very good, of which two are strong contenders for my year end list. The books are a mix of translated literature (Swedish, German, and French), Irish literature, and crime with novellas comprising a large part of this stack.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the seven books…Barring one, you can read the detailed reviews on the rest by clicking the title links.

EVERY MAN DIES ALONE by Hans Fallada (Translated from German by Michael Hofmann)

At the end of Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada’s extraordinary, gripping account of the resistance of ordinary Germans to Nazism, we learn that the novel draws upon the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a poorly educated working class couple living in Berlin, who had never previously engaged in any form of political activity, until they began writing and leaving postcards around the city urging the citizens to wake up to Nazi tyranny, a regime that would bring them no peace. Drawing on the Gestapo case files compiled on the couple, Fallada shapes this material into a masterful narrative centred on the fictional Otto and Anna Quangel  (modelled on the Hampels) who, shattered by the death of their only son, set their perilous act of resistance into motion.

When Otto and Anna begin writing anonymous postcards that attack Hitler and the Nazi Party, leaving them on the stairwells of buildings to be discovered by other ordinary German citizens, they are hopeful that these cards will inspire them to resist in their own way and to find courage in the knowledge that there are many others like them. Sadly, the impact on people is quite the contrary. With an atmosphere of deep-rooted fear pervading all layers of German society, most of the discovered cards end up being reported to the Gestapo. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game, as the Gestapo mounts an investigation to apprehend the writer of these postcards, for whom death is certain if caught.

Every Man Dies Alone is imbued with a thriller-like quality that makes it an immersive read – first in the opening half, when the Gestapo races to close in on the Quangels, and later in the poignant way their fate unfolds. Fallada brilliantly captures not just the story of the Quangels but also that of German society at large, and how it grappled with the all-pervading atmosphere of fear, distrust, and paranoia that prevailed in a police state. With its cast of vivid characters, a compelling story rendered in fluid, fast-paced prose, and its central themes of resistance and moral clarity, Every Man Dies Alone is a remarkable novel – one that feels ominously relevant in the troubled times we live in today.

THE DESERTERS by Mathias Enard (Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell)

In some sense, the two storylines that form the DNA of Mathias Enard’s The Deserters are akin to its double helix structure – two distinct narrative strands that wind around each other, yet remain linked by a common theme of war, violence, and disrupted lives.

The first storyline, easily my favourite, is classic Énard – an engrossing narrative that showcases his considerable erudition and vivid prose as he combines the personal with the political, weaving mathematics and history (including the Holocaust, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the Covid pandemic, and the Russia–Ukraine war) into the story of a complicated relationship between a man and a woman. The man in question is Paul Heudeber, a committed Communist and anti-fascist, brilliant mathematician, and survivor of Buchenwald, but the story is told from the perspective of his daughter Irina, a historian of mathematics (“My father walked on two legs: algebra and communism”). Paul has long been dead, and much of his story unfolds through Irina’s flashbacks as she reflects on the life and political ideals not only of her father but also of her mother, Maja, whom Paul regarded as the love of his life. One particular event held aboard a cruise ship on the Havel becomes the narrative’s focal point: a conference held in Paul’s memory, bringing together several brilliant minds in Berlin to discuss the impact and enduring value of his written work, The Buchenwald Conjectures.

The second storyline is a completely different beast in terms of tone and style. More poetic and elusive, it centers on an unnamed man – a soldier who has deserted his band of troops in the midst of war – though Énard deliberately avoids fixing the narrative in any specific time or place, lending its larger theme of the debilitating impact of war, a universal quality. Pangs of extreme hunger besiege him, as do fears of being captured by soldiers who would certainly torture him to death once they discover his desertion; he must therefore reach the cabin stealthily and remain unseen. He manages to do so, only to be confronted with an unexpected development: a woman, accompanied by her donkey, has also taken refuge there. Intellectually rich and inventive, and beautifully translated as ever by Charlotte Mandell, The Deserters is another excellent novel by Mathias Énard, and one that will particularly reward his fans (I am certainly one). 

QUEEN by Birgitta Trotzig (Translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel)

Set in rural Sweden in 1930, Queen opens with a letter announcing the arrival of a mysterious woman from America to the impoverished farm of Judit Lindgren, known locally as the “Queen”, and her meek, withdrawn brother Albert. It is November 1930; we do not yet know who this woman is (that will be revealed later), but she arrives in the village in the dead of night, her arrival as unsettling as the bleak landscape she traverses. The narrative then shifts back across generations, tracing the decline of what was once a prosperous farm. Judit’s father, Johan, proves incapable of managing the land, and the family gradually descends into debt and misery. While Johan retreats into himself and Albert grows into a slow, neglected figure mocked by the villagers, Judit is the epitome of control and fortitude, determined to preserve the farm and impose order on their collapsing world.

Much of the novella revolves around Judit’s intense bond with her younger brother Viktor, whom she raises almost as a surrogate mother after their own mother falls into permanent depression. Judit invests all her hopes in Viktor, but he grows into a rebellious, destructive man marked by cruelty, irresponsibility, and scandalous relationships that bring shame upon the family. Though Judit possesses the strength and resilience lacking in the men around her, she is ultimately betrayed by the very brother to whom she has devoted herself. Viktor eventually flees to New York during the Great Depression, and the novel circles back to the mysterious woman’s arrival at the farm, as Judit and Albert fear she may threaten the little they still possess.

Dark as carbon and hard-edged as a diamond, Queen is steeped in darkness and despair, yet it glints with Trotzig’s lyrical prose and striking symbolism, the sentences often reading like blank verse. This heightens the strange, haunting quality of the bleak, remote world she portrays, even as it remains grounded in the earthy reality of abject poverty and complicated relationships.

THE TENNIS PLAYERS by Lars Gustafsson (Translated from Swedish by Yvonne L. Sandstroem)

At just over ninety pages, The Tennis Players is a fun, enjoyable read, in which Gustafsson deftly weaves his signature irony and sense of the absurd into a narrative that is deceptively light yet richly layered. Nostalgia, the aesthetics of tennis, campus life, literary criticism, and questions of truth, the peculiarities of Texas politics, and even music all find their place here, coalescing into an impressive, engaging whole.

Narrated in the first person, the protagonist is likely the author himself – he is, after all, called Lars – and he reminisces about his stint as a Professor of Swedish Literature at a university in Austin, Texas, in 1974. We learn that Lars teaches the works of Nietzsche and August Strindberg, and must navigate the often tricky terrain of cultural difference as he tries to convey his ideas to his students. Soon, a student in his class, Bill, lends him a copy of an obscure work – Memoires d’une chimiste, written by a Polish exile, which has the potential to challenge the assumptions underlying Strindberg’s famed “Inferno Crisis” of 1894-96 and to likely shake many scholarly reputations built on the narrative of Strindberg’s madness. 

Meanwhile, Lars derives pleasure from the time he spends on the tennis courts, even if he does not consider himself a professional. He begins playing doubles with a new group of people he meets, including Abel, an older, seasoned player, and Chris, a computer programmer working for the National Defense. Soon, Lars entrusts both manuscripts – Strindberg’s Inferno and the Polish exile’s memoirs – to Chris to be fed into a supercomputer for comparison. But will any noticeable similarities emerge? Both comic and absurd, and elegantly composed in a style that is unmistakably Lars Gustafsson’s, The Tennis Players is a fascinating work – an artful blend of the interplay between art and politics, the dynamics of academia and its pursuit of truth in literature, and the fusion of philosophical musings with the craft of perfecting a tennis serve.

VENGEANCE IS MINE by Friedrich Torberg (Translated from German by Stephanie Gorrell Ortega)

Written in 1943, Vengeance is Mine is a brilliant, feverish, and thought-provoking novella that explores the elusive nature of hope alongside the moral and psychological complexities of revenge and justice. Set against the horrifying backdrop of a concentration camp, it is, as the blurb notes, among the first works of fiction to anticipate the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, their systematic program to exterminate the Jews.

Vengeance is Mine opens on a cold, fog-shrouded morning in November 1940 at a pier in New Jersey. The unnamed narrator notices a gaunt, solitary man waiting in vain for someone, or perhaps several people, who never seem to disembark from the arriving ships. Before long, curiosity gets the better of him. He approaches the stranger and asks whom he is waiting for. When the man replies that he is expecting seventy-five people to arrive, the narrator is stunned. Who is this gaunt man, and what is his story? Eventually, the man begins recounting his tale, which forms the heart of the novella, unfolding as a harrowing account of the chain of events and psychological torment that took place within the Heidenburg concentration camp, where he himself had once been imprisoned.

Intense and powerful, Vengeance is Mine examines the nature of pure evil and the ambiguous quality of vengeance and justice, and who, if anyone, has the right to wield them. Do morals and principles matter in a world that has lost all morality? The book takes on some weighty themes on its slim shoulders, offering the reader a harrowing, unsettling yet immersive reading experience.

A GOAT’S SONG by Dermot Healy

Originally published in 1994, A Goat’s Song opens on the Mullet peninsula, along the wild, windswept coast of western Ireland. Here we meet Jack Ferris, who has just received a letter from Catherine, the woman he loves and who appears to have left him. The collapse of their affair has left Jack devastated; he is lonely, lost, and emotionally adrift, and yet Catherine’s letter rekindles a fragile sense of hope. She professes her love for him and hints at the possibility of reconciliation, provided Jack can remain sober. For Jack, we soon learn, is a raging alcoholic.

Catherine’s continued absence and refusal to speak to him send Jack spiraling deeper into an alcohol-fuelled abyss as his insecurities and paranoia intensify. He drowns himself in whiskies, wine, gin, and vodka at regular intervals to numb the pain, only to resurface later with an even greater force of shame and self-loathing. When has one final conversation with Catherine, it becomes clear that their relationship is well and truly over. Jack, however, cannot let go. The only way he can begin to move forward is by reconstructing Catherine’s life in his imagination and writing not only about their doomed love affair, but by widening the circle to include her family, particularly her father, Jonathan Adams, a complex, compelling figure in his own right. 

We then move into the second section, at the heart of which lies Jonathan Adams’ story. This is, without question, the finest section of the novel, not only for the brilliance with which it evokes the bloody history of Northern Ireland while seamlessly weaving together the personal and the political, but also for the sheer quality of the writing itself; in this section in particular, the prose simply soars. Raised in a Protestant household in Northern Ireland, Jonathan initially trains to become a parson but fails, eventually enlisting in the RUC, Northern Ireland’s police force. A crucial turning point comes when Jonathan takes part in policing IRA demonstrations in Derry. During a riot, he violently beats protesters, and is later horrified to see himself on television acting with brutality he can barely recognise, leaving him consumed by shame and guilt from which he longs to escape. At Maisie’s insistence, he buys an isolated house on the western coast of Ireland – a place of desolate landscapes, ancient myths, fishing communities, silence, and unforgiving weather. Though initially skeptical of the move, the summers he spends there gradually become an almost spiritual refuge, a retreat from the ideological violence of the North. Yet, there remains a sense that Jonathan never fully belongs in West Ireland either.

A lyrical and emotionally intense novel set against the backdrop of the Troubles and the religious divide between Northern Ireland and the Republic, A Goat’s Song, then, is at once a tragic love story and a political novel; an exploration of memory, exile and isolation, alcoholism and insecurity, faith and religion, family and friendship, self-destruction and redemption.

ROSEANNA (Martin Beck, 1) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Translated from Swedish by Lois Roth)

Set during a hot summer in Sweden, Roseanna opens with the discovery of a young woman’s corpse dredged from the Göta Canal, somewhere in the Swedish countryside. The local police are unable to identify her, and when Stockholm detective Martin Beck and his team are roped in, they soon realize they are dealing with a murder that offers almost no immediate clues. The investigation stretches on for months, moving slowly through interviews, reports, and frustrating dead ends – Beck has to figure out which boat passed through the canal on that fateful day, scour the passenger lists, contact the relevant embassy if the woman was a tourist and her family back home had reported her missing, read through the interviews with other passengers, and so on. Eventually, her identity is established, and as her case progresses, Beck and his colleagues begin to suspect that the woman’s murder was sexually motivated and that the killer may strike again.

Meanwhile, Martin Beck is a weary, melancholic character, trapped in a strained marriage, consumed by work, and particularly obsessed with this case, which gives him no peace. This is a police procedural cum detective novel, but one that also explores themes of loneliness, violence against women, and the emotional exhaustion of policing. It is an impressive first novel in the Martin Beck series, and I plan to continue, as I’ve since gone on to buy the rest of the books in the series (there are ten).

That’s it for March and April. In May, I am reading the heartbreaking Inès Cagnati novella, Crazy Genie, for #NYRBWomen26, as well as William Trevor’s short story collection, Cheating at Canasta, and Claudia Piñeiro’s Cathedrals, which I received as part of my Charco subscription. All three books are superb so far, more on them soon.

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A Goat’s Song – Dermot Healy

I meant to read Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song for “Reading Ireland Month” in March, but somehow got distracted by other things. It is, however, a novel I have long wanted to read – one that first came to my attention thanks to the Backlisted episode, which I now plan to listen to soon.

Somewhere in the middle of A Goat’s Song comes a scene in which Jack Ferris and Catherine Adams, the novel’s two tormented protagonists, meet for the first time. Catherine asks Jack what he does for a living. He tells her he is a playwright, and when she asks what kind of plays interest him, he replies: “Goat songs.” In other words, Jack writes tragedies; in Greek, tragos means goat, while oide means song. A Goat’s Song = a tragedy. It is a fitting title for a haunting, atmospheric novel steeped in sorrow and sadness, one that traces the doomed trajectories of its characters against the backdrop of a divided, violent Northern Ireland.

Originally published in 1994, A Goat’s Song opens on the Mullet peninsula, along the wild, windswept coast of western Ireland. Here we meet Jack Ferris, who has just received a letter from Catherine, the woman he loves and who appears to have left him.

And yet he knew there can be no more pitiful sight than those who are defeated in love. He was an object of pity and therefore to be avoided. He had become the very thing he despised – a man obsessed with his own misfortune.

The collapse of their affair has left Jack devastated; he is lonely, lost, and emotionally adrift, and yet Catherine’s letter rekindles a fragile sense of hope. She professes her love for him and hints at the possibility of reconciliation, provided Jack can remain sober. For Jack, we soon learn, is a raging alcoholic. The letter offers him comfort, but it also ignites a feverish anxiety – he repeatedly walks on the triangular route from his isolated cottage on the peninsula to the Adamses’ summer house in Corrloch, only to discover that Catherine has still not returned, before ending up once again at the Erris Hotel, where the bar continues to lure him.

He stopped on the threshold and looked at the glass and thought, how did that happen? It was as if he had been transformed into someone else, someone he had once been. Someone he disliked entirely. In his sleep on the boat he’d often dream of drinking and wake with immense relief to find that it had not happened. The glass of whiskey he’d been swallowing in some unlit room of his consciousness he’d find did not exist. Now it did. It sat whole in his hand.

But that is not all. Whenever his anxiety becomes unbearable, Jack repeatedly calls his friend Eddie in Dublin, who is staging and directing one of his plays. As it happens, the production’s lead actress is none other than Catherine herself. The calls become increasingly frantic – desperate pleas to be put through to her, to hear her voice, to speak to her again. But Eddie informs him that Catherine shows no desire whatsoever to come to the phone.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s continued absence and refusal to speak to him send Jack spiraling deeper into an alcohol-fuelled abyss as his insecurities and paranoia intensify. He drowns himself in whiskies, wine, gin, and vodka at regular intervals to numb the pain, only to resurface later with an even greater force of shame and self-loathing. Desperate to regain control of his life, Jack checks himself into a hospital in Castlebar on Christmas Eve for treatment. There, within the structured and protective atmosphere of the ward, he gradually forms bonds with the nurses and fellow patients. The hospital’s rituals and rhythms begin to steady him, and he finds himself listening to the stories and struggles of the people around him, carefully jotting them down in notebooks, an exercise that begins to have a therapeutic effect on him. Yet, leaving the hospital unleashes a fresh wave of fear and uncertainty. Having grown accustomed to the protective environment of the hospital, Jack is no longer certain he can preserve his fragile sobriety once he is thrust back into the outside world.

When he returns home and has one final conversation with Catherine, it becomes clear that their relationship is well and truly over.

He tried to imagine her in her new life. Would she trade in ceaseless affection with some other again? Would the evil energy be dissipated now? They had lived together thinking they knew everything about each other, but they had forgotten the strange world that would be there after they parted.

Jack, however, cannot let go. The only way he can begin to move forward is by reconstructing Catherine’s life in his imagination and writing not only about their doomed love affair, but by widening the circle to include her family, particularly her father, Jonathan Adams, a complex, compelling figure in his own right. In this act of committing Catherine to paper, Jack hopes, perhaps, to lay to rest a difficult chapter of his life.

This first section – ‘Christmas Day at the Workhouse’ – is beautifully written and haunting, wonderfully capturing Jack’s isolation, both mental and geographical. Alone in an isolated cottage in Aghadoon on Ireland’s dramatic West Coast, a landscape of ragged terrain, bogs and howling easterly winds, storm-tossed seas and inclement weather, these violent elements of the natural world pretty much mirror the turbulence of Jack’s inner life. His loneliness heightens, sparking a ready descent into wild drinking as he wrestles with his inner demons and struggles to come to terms with his tumultuous relationship with Catherine. Drinking heavily, Jack wanders the coast, recalling fragments of conversations and memories, while attempting to understand how his life has fallen apart in a narrative style that often feels hallucinatory, poetic, and self-lacerating. These early sections of the novel are steeped in grief and longing as Jack moves between drunken self-pity and flickers of self-awareness, fear, and loneliness.

We then move into the second section – ‘The Salmon of Knowledge’ – at the heart of which lies Jonathan Adams’ story. This is, without question, the finest section of the novel, not only for the brilliance with which it evokes the bloody history of Northern Ireland while seamlessly weaving together the personal and the political, but also for the sheer quality of the writing itself; in this section in particular, the prose simply soars.

It opens violently with the suicide of Matti Bonner, a Catholic labourer, who hangs himself from a tree positioned between the Catholic and Presbyterian churches in the village of Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. We are also introduced to Jonathan Adams, a Protestant and retired RUC officer, who, along with his wife, Maisie, and their two daughters, Sara and Catherine, spends his summers at their house in Corrloch. Mattie’s death strikes Jonathan hard. Although Matti is a Catholic, the religious divide never deters the two men from forming a close friendship, even within a politically charged and volatile climate. It is through Matti that Jonathan first meets Maisie, and when they marry, Matti becomes Jonathan’s best man. In a friendship spanning twenty years, despite one man being Catholic and the other Protestant, it is a bond that transcends politics; the unfolding violence and tensions are never explicitly discussed, even if they remain constantly palpable beneath the surface. Matti certainly accepts Jonathan for what he is, and remains a generous neighbour and steadfast friend; a bond that, in a deeply divided society, might have seemed unthinkable, yet endures on the back of sheer humanity and forgiveness. That is why Matti’s death unsettles Jonathan – he never saw it coming, and therefore, did it mean that he never really knew his friend after all?

For the past twenty years they had probably spoken to each other every day. And never once had Matti Bonner been any-thing but genial and offhand. They had an understanding. Now it made the Sergeant think he had imagined a friendship that did not exist. Matti Bonner had no confidence in him, the man’s tribal distrust had prevented him from asking for help.

Moreover, not only does Matti’s death perplex and embarrass his fellow Catholics, who can’t quite wrap their heads around his suicide, but the Presbyterians are equally aggrieved too…

The Presbyterian elders who were standing under the birch tree felt both alienated and aggrieved. His death had somehow exposed them. Even though this suicide should have been a reproach to the Catholics, they felt it was directed at them. It involved them all. There was a curse in what he’d done. It was a sign. He wanted to remain forever in their minds. And as for the Catholics, who moved round his death with an easy familiarity, they, at a further remove, felt let down. By his suicide he had gone over to the other side. He had smashed the idol of life itself. By his death he had turned informer.

But whatever depths of despair Matti had sunk into, his death was a statement…

He had picked that spot and that time and those two churches, and said: I’ve had enough one day you go out alone and marry death. Matti Bonner was not saying he died because of politics, or economics, or because of a broken heart. He was saying that God had failed him in his despair. And so he risked the concept of everlasting mercy. I am not staying around, said Matti Bonner from the tree, I’ve had enough.

Meanwhile, we are given a further glimpse into Jonathan and his family. Raised in a Protestant household in Northern Ireland, Jonathan initially trains to become a parson, to follow in the footsteps of his successful older brother, but fails spectacularly in his first chosen profession. While he possesses a scholarly bent, he lacks the gift of the gab and the charismatic persona needed to move and inspire a congregation through his sermons. Considered a disappointment by his father, Jonathan eventually enlists in the RUC, the police force of Northern Ireland, where he rises gradually through the ranks to a certain level.

It was because of his fluency in the world of figures exact figures – that Jonathan Adams eventually got preferment. The other policemen might consider him an oddity, an outsider, but he earned the rank of sergeant because his paperwork was always fastidious. The reports he drew up in the barracks were minutely detailed, dated correctly and coolly observed. His initials on a piece of paper meant all contained therein was exact. He was a man the judges liked to see in court. He may have been a poor preacher, but explaining facts came easily to him. His evidence was trustworthy. They understood each other, the judges and Jonathan Adams. The judges appreciated the discreet scholarly aside. The evangelical turn of phrase.

In time, he marries Maisie, and their daughters Sara and Catherine are born. A crucial turning point comes when Jonathan takes part in policing IRA demonstrations in Derry. During a riot, he violently beats protesters, and is later horrified to see himself on television acting with brutality he can barely recognise, leaving him consumed by shame and guilt from which he longs to escape.

On the TV the old policeman had found his hat. As he put it on, he looked round for someone else to hit. Seeing no one he turned back and hit the screaming man again. A woman crouched low as she pulled her man away. The old policeman charged past the camera. Then, wild-eyed and wielding a baton, he stared remorselessly straight at the lens. Jonathan Adams had become a witness to himself. He saw the mad look of fury in his own eye. He looked round the bar but no one was taking any notice of him. His chin began shaking. Then he shook uncontrollably.

Increasingly, Northern Ireland itself begins to feel like a trap; as the British Army moves in to quell the unrest, the RUC is pushed to the sidelines, its officers fearing for their lives. In such a fractious, volatile environment, Jonathan seeks escape and, with it, a form of redemption. At Maisie’s insistence, he buys an isolated house on the western coast of Ireland – a place of desolate landscapes, ancient myths, fishing communities, silence, and unforgiving weather. Though initially skeptical of the move, the summers he spends there gradually become an almost spiritual refuge, a retreat from the ideological violence of the North. In a sense, Jonathan goes into a kind of exile; during these sojourns, he immerses himself in the region’s history and mythology, reads widely, attempts to write, and even begins learning Irish, employing two teachers whose personalities and outlooks are as different as chalk and cheese, both also tasked with instructing the family in the language. Yet, there remains a sense that Jonathan never fully belongs in West Ireland either.

This gorgeously written section shimmers with pain and melancholy, hope and despair as it traces a flawed, complex man traumatised by the implications of his actions that threaten to engulf him. He throws himself headlong into reinventing himself in a different setting, one where he might live in relative obscurity, with the only violence to contend with being that of the natural world. And yet, even here, he doesn’t always succeed.

A lyrical and emotionally intense novel set against the backdrop of the Troubles and the religious divide between Northern Ireland and the Republic, A Goat’s Song, then, is at once a tragic love story and a political novel; an exploration of memory, exile and isolation, alcoholism and insecurity, faith and religion, family and friendship, self-destruction and redemption.

The final two sections dwell on Jack and Catherine’s all-consuming relationship – passionate yet intensely destructive. Catherine, it turns out, is a heavy drinker herself, often flighty and prone to jealousy, and the pair moves between Belfast and western Ireland, bound by desire but steadily undermined by alcohol, suspicion, and emotional instability. The Troubles begin to haunt them more directly in Belfast, particularly when they briefly relocate there after Catherine lands a role. Catherine, worried about Jack being caught up in the violence of the city as someone from the Republic, forbids him from frequenting certain unsavoury pubs, but the lure of drink proves too strong, and Jack drifts between these drinking dens, easily forging a camaraderie with the regulars. Ultimately, as tensions in Belfast intensify, they are compelled to leave and take refuge in the Adams family home in the West.

As compared to the first two sections, which have a mesmeric and immersive feel, the final sections are significantly more dialogue-heavy, as if Jack is drawing upon his skills as a playwright in his storytelling. Alongside the tense, insecurity-laced, high-pitched quarrels with Catherine, Jack depicts, among other things, the string of conversations he has in bars with random strangers he meets. They drink, voice their experiences and views, and listen to records; these sections are filled with talk, music, and the need for connection in a world gone awry.

Jack’s alcoholism is brilliantly rendered through the gradual deterioration of his mental state. A simple task, such as meeting Catherine at a designated place, becomes an uphill battle, fraught with anxiety that threatens to overwhelm him. Unable to resist the appealing pubs along the way, Jack repeatedly succumbs to drink and, in his drunken state, struggles to reach the meeting point on time, always arriving too late and missing her.

Every move he made he questioned. He was fighting against a lifetime’s habits. Every thought he had was suspect. He felt all his actions were false, masks behind which he imitated and observed normality. That meant he was false, playing to an audience. But the chief member was missing – Catherine.

A Goat’s Song reverberates with a strong sense of place – the bleak coasts of western Ireland, the heaving seas and ruined cottages, the incessant rain and isolated bogs lending the landscape a mythic, almost otherworldly quality.

They drove from Erris Head in Broad Haven Bay down to Blacksod in the south, amazed at the isolation, the white sandy roads that ran by the sea; the Inishkea Islands, holy, absolute; the wind-glazed violent cliffs; the meteorological station; the endless bogs, the rips and cracks through the huge dunes; the black curraghs; the lighthouse that sat perched on Eagle Island like a castle in a fairy story; the piers, the harbour, the sea.

Healy superbly shows how the violence and polarising politics of the Troubles seep into and disrupt ordinary lives, leaving deep scars: Jonathan’s wounds are primarily psychological, while even Jack, who has little interest in political discussions, cannot always escape their all-pervading grip. There is a persistent sense that the characters’ inner and outer lives are as fractured as the political violence that has torn the North apart.

This is a novel about guilt and shame, exile, being outsiders, and trying to belong and attain some form of redemption. Both Jack and Jonathan find themselves trapped in a kind of emotional and geographical no man’s land. The Derry incident erodes Jonathan’s sense of self, heightening his shame and guilt, and while he feels alienated from Northern Ireland, he never truly belongs in the Republic either, despite his attempts to integrate himself into life on the western coast. Maisie and Matti remain his emotional anchors, but Matti’s suicide disturbs that fragile calm.  Jack is also adrift after his breakup with Catherine, losing himself in drink and memory, with no other serious attachments beyond his fishing friends and casual acquaintances in pubs. In that sense, Jack belongs nowhere either; drink pushes him into a state of mind far removed from reality, but even in the real world, Jack, by virtue of his Southern roots, is an outsider, a fact particularly accentuated during his brief time in Belfast.

This is a brilliant novel, though it must be said that Healy is at his best when he fleshes out the complexities of his characters and dwells on their flaws and tragic fates. Seen in that light, the scenes depicting Jack and Catherine’s early days of romance feel a tad unconvincing, and the later chapters charting their increasingly tortured, destructive relationship do meander at times. Yet in all other respects, A Goat’s Song is superb, particularly in the way it captures the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, and between Northern Ireland and the Republic, alongside the inner conflicts of its characters as they wrestle with insecurity, guilt, and alienation; ordinary lives deeply affected by the fractured politics of their time. Highly recommended!