Oisin Curran

Oisín Curran’s novel, Blood Fable, is a tale of failed idealism. It is 1980, coastal Maine. New Pond is a self-sustaining Buddhist community led by the charismatic Willard. The novel is narrated by the highly imaginative son of New Pond adherents Myles and Iris, who is maturing into a world where Ronald Reagan has been elected president and the sort of idealism on which New Pond was founded is starting to seem quaintly outmoded, naïve and increasingly impractical. When Iris is diagnosed with cancer, the 11-year-old narrator responds to the intrusion of this cruel reality into his life by retreating into his imagination, and he starts reciting a fanciful story to his parents, the implication being that he is remembering events from a past life—though he is actually basing it on the adventure books he loves to read. Curran’s novel is divided into two separate but concurrent story-lines: one describing real-time events in 1980s Maine and the other following the fantastic adventures of a group of characters (led by a young girl: the narrator’s alter-ego) searching for a lost underground city. To his credit, Curran manages the challenges of a bifurcated structure admirably. There are no chapter headings. When real-life pressures mount and his parents are suffering, as a diversionary tactic the narrator slips into his alternative reality and produces a further sequence of events taking his characters to next stage of their quest. When a series of shocking revelations rattle the foundations of New Pond and threaten the community, the narrator’s story ramps up, with new dangers and increasing uncertainty regarding the outcome for the girl leading the quest. Blood Fable can be disorienting—without a doubt the unconventional structure presents challenges to the reader—but it is also remarkably unified and compulsively readable, the numerous transitions between reality and fantasy handled with skill and assurance. It is also written with great appreciation for the beauty of language. Curran’s descriptive powers are so highly developed that both the woodlands of rural Maine and the underground world are rendered equally vividly. The prose is rich with visual detail. If our emotional response to the book is somewhat blunted because our attention is divided between two narrative threads, then that was obviously a risk the author was willing to take. Winner of the 2018 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.… (más)

Contrasts a realist narrative depicting this dying gasps of an era, with the Verne-inspired tangents of a child's imagination. The adults in the introspective child's life are pushed to their limit by personal misfortune, chosen privation and the events of the day (the election of Reagan and accompanying dramatic shift in values). The boy's parents are odd, idealistic, sardonic and at odds with one another, nevertheless as the inevitable collapse of Zen commune life and its overbearing leader comes, his perception of them is heightened and deepened. I liked how a surreal adventure story is interleaved. Besides putting the book in more than one literary genre it gives a sensory counterpoint and evokes what wild, powerful emotions would be unleashed. A child's experience of what happens is not bounded by what we can capture with our rationalist exactitude. The recall of a reasonable adult embraces and softens that within and without over time. This writer has such control and obvious enjoyment of writing that he manages to make each textural realm equally enjoyable. This book is a love story of both lucid recall and ephemeral emotional recoil captured through the half-world of dreams.… (más)

A circling, static, aphoristic, poetic, theatrical, intentionally disarticulated meditation on loss and memory, with a skeletal crew of characters ('William the Silent,' 'Bluebottle,' two dogs, a ghostly sister). All that is like Beckett, as reviewers say. But it is also densely installed with austere lyric fragments, as if it is one long lyric poem. (At random: 'Outside the stars were shards in the rotating vault above the house. I watched the sky. A star did shoot. I prayed for old age.')

This is a very particular kind of lyric, pared down and non-narrative; it comes from Hoelderlin and Novalis by way of Trakl, George, and Rilke, in turn by way of Snyder and Merwin. It is a late romantic metaphysical nature lyric, and that is the problem: it does not belong with Beckett's mid-century existential paralysis. Beckett is founded on many rejections, and this is one of them. It's as if 'Ill Seen Ill Said,' which is also about a solitary person and surrounding woods and rivers, were to be sweetened with honey, salt, and vinegar images of the lonely natural world.

The two modes just do not fit together: the lyric continuously tries to heal the hurt of the existentialist voice, while the existentialist voice seems inaudible to the characters who experience nothing by lyric rapture. What is missing is a voice than can bridge the two, other than by implying that every lyric nature trope is existential, or by hinting that every moment of the realization of the impossibility of action -- every moment that recalls Beckett -- is somehow embodied in a falling star. Curran might ask himself: why did Beckett avoid nature lyric? 'Mopus' is mistaken in its understanding of those historical currents.… (más)

Ostensibly, "Mopus" is William Bluebottle’s 24-hour romp through shifting times, places, and points of view in pursuit of his lost dog and ghost sister. Curran’s masterful work of concise metafiction is cinematic and dreamlike, but it is also understated and lyrical. Like Kelly Link’s stories, the telling is matter-of-fact, but there is something eerie about the world it is set in. Some other works that come to mind are: Danielewski’s "Only Revolutions," Mitchell’s "Cloud Atlas," and Winterson’s "Art and Lies."

This book blew my mind, and you won’t find it in a chain store or the NY Times Book Review. Such a pity…… (más)