I Could Read the Sky - Softcover

Timothy O'Grady; Steve Pyke

4.07

285 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860465080 ISBN 13: 9781860465086

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1998

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A well preserved copy, in lovely condition

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From Kirkus Reviews:

The Chicago-born O'Grady (Motherland, 1990) and Britisher Pyke collaborate to form an unusually expressive book of visual and written images, photos enhancing the mournful, lyrical story of a musical Irishman's migration to England in search of fieldwork and other hard labor--and finding the love of his life only to lose her. As he remembers the past, the narrator fixes images of an impoverished farm childhood in Labasheeda: music and the accordion become integral parts of his life, while siblings and neighbors leave home to seek fortunes abroad. His first love goes unrequited, and work as a hired farmhand on Irish soil hastens the day of his own departure, when Ma packs sandwiches, eggs, and a rosary, and Da won't say goodbye. In England, digging potatoes gives way to a transient life of factory work and road repair, with music in the pub of an evening. Da dies, then Ma, and the deep black laborer's hole the narrator is in seems about to claim him for eternity, until Maggie gives a glow to his life with her quick wit as he draws her in with his reels and laments. But when Maggie dies shortly after the two have married and returned to Ireland, all light is extinguished and only the familiar, anonymous toil the bereaved husband had known in Britain can offer comfort until time heals the wound. A tale of sorrow, finely told and delicately illustrated. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

This is a quietly ambitious, grave and earnest book that mixes the elegiac prose of Chicago-born novelist O'Grady (Motherland) with the haunting photographs of Englishman Pyke to establish, remarkably, a quintessentially Irish novel. It's a tale, in the form of a lament, about sadness, longing and resignation, the story of a west of Ireland man who leaves for England in search of work sometime in mid-century. O'Grady's text consists of impressionistic sketches of a hard but colorful youth left behind, of an entire family marked by poverty and transformed by the dire requirements of growing up poor. It's all recalled from a kind of old-folks home, as the narrator remembers the things he could do?"Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds.... Read the sky.... Remember poems"?and those he could not?"Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch.... Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen.... Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering." The keening of the narrator is peculiarly uplifting, distinguished by a teary-eyed lucidity. Pyke's photos support this mood like a fiddle might back an Irish air. Unrelated in subject matter to the text, the images nonetheless underscore displacement while extending the sense of loss into real bogs and real faces and incredibly gnarled "spalpeen" hands.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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