This Is the Way: A Novel - Hardcover

Corbett, Gavin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865478910 ISBN 13: 9780865478916

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

Synopsis

Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he's reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign exchange students, but Anthony is from an Irish Travelling community, where blood ties are bound deeply to the past. When his roguish uncle Arthur shows up on his doorstep with a missing toe, delirious and apparently on the run, history and its troubles are following close behind him―and Anthony will soon have to face the question of who he really is.
In prose of exceptional vividness, Gavin Corbett brings us a narrator with the power to build a new, previously unimagined world. His language, shot through with dreams and myths, summons a vision of Ireland in which a premodern spirit has somehow survived into contemporary life, brooding and overlooked. Funny, terrible, unsettling, fiercely unsentimental, This Is the Way is haunted by some of Ireland's greatest writers even as it breaks new ground and asks afresh why the imagination is so necessary to survival.

About this title

About the Author

Gavin Corbett was born in the west of Ireland and was raised in Dublin, where he studied history at Trinity College. This Is the Way is his second novel. He lives in Dublin.

Reviews

Irish ex-pat Corbett proves that Tolstoy was correct about the happiness—or lack thereof—of families. The Hatfields and McCoys had nothing on this divided family of travelers focused on the gormless Anthony and his father’s brother, an aging Lothario named Arthur. The story circles in (all too slowly) on the explanation of how the very sick Arthur arrived at Anthony’s one-room flat. Anthony’s disordered life is depicted in great detail as that of a youngish adult, down on his luck and saddled with an older, smarter relative. The flaws of the writing will, for a limited group of readers, be an attraction. The replication of Anthony and Arthur’s everyday speech has a wonderful rhythm, even if it’s less than totally artful. And readers may have difficulty adjusting to Corbett’s idiosyncratic use of the period—the only punctuation mark used (an occasional comma would have been a blessing). This challenging novel appeals to readers of experimental literary fiction. Purchase accordingly. --Ellen Loughran

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865478910
• ISBN 13: 9780865478916
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240