Mondo Desperado - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447259610 ISBN 13: 9781447259619

Publisher: Picador, 2014

Synopsis

You wouldn't expect to find a mature woman of twenty-eight years of age mixed up with a bunch of swingers in a small town like Barntrosna. But that's exactly what happened according to Walter Bunyan. And he should know, she was his wife. As for Declan Coyningham - there wasn't a holier boy in all of Barntrosna - you couldn't move in town without finding a bit of him in your path or under a hedge. And what exactly did come over Noreen Tiernan that made her shriek to wake the dead as she left the main street of the village in a Morris Minor all decked in pink and blue Patrick McCabe's prose is as brilliantly macabre as ever. In scenes of disarming inventiveness, Mondo Desperado will make you howl with laughter from first unnerving page to last.

About this title

Review:

You may not have heard of Phildy Hackball, but thanks to Patrick McCabe--and, we're told, to "an ingenue of an English publisher who had never been in Ireland before"--you're about to get your chance. Hackball is the putative author of Mondo Desperado, a collection of short stories that explore the underbelly of provincial Barntrosna. And what an underbelly it is! McCabe's mouthpiece delivers all the graphic details on Declan Coyningham, the holiest boy in town by far, who seems headed for a life in the church until the locals decide that his inflated prospects need further inflating (literally). Then there's Cora Bunyan, the narrator's wife, who's been enjoying one too many Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge. And let us not overlook a cameo by the actual Bruce Lee, who importunes Hackball to be his ghost writer. Some would have it that the kung fu maestro is just a waiter from the Red Lotus Temple restaurant in Mullingar, but the narrator is nonetheless determined to maintain the highest literary standards:

I wish my story to be as near perfect as possible. To outline and candidly delineate not just the background to my years of friendship with Bruce Lee but that of the martial arts as we have come to know them--the heists, the head-busting she-wolves, the drug lords, the torn trousers, the pieces of other films that get stuck in by accident. And until I have that story told to my satisfaction, I see no point in concerning myself unduly as to whether I receive the occasional letter from a publisher or not.

McCabe's follow-up to Breakfast on Pluto (which made the Booker Prize shortlist) confirms him as one of Ireland's most distinctive and inimitable voices. The stories in Mondo Desperado seem to emanate from some parallel universe, but with their diseased take on national stereotypes, they provide an incisive, viciously cruel commentary on some of Ireland's most sacred cows. And in the end, Phildy Hackball is a wonderfully naive drinking companion, forever leading us up the wrong alleyway. Each time you think you're safely at home, another satiric grenade goes off in your face. Read, laugh, and be afraid. --Alan Stewart

About the Author:

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the children's story The Adventures of Shay Mouse, and the novels Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy (winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize), The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto (shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize), Mondo Desperando, Emerald Germs of Ireland and Call Me The Breeze. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1447259610
• ISBN 13: 9781447259619
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242