Shamrock Tea - Softcover

Carson, Ciaran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862074801 ISBN 13: 9781862074804

Publisher: Granta UK, 2002

Synopsis

Shamrock tea, the magical substance that allows people to experience the world with visionary clarity, can only be found by passing through the famous van Eyck painting The Arnolfini Marriage. The characters who bear this knowledge include a young boy named Carson, his uncle Celestine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the nephew of a famous Belgian writer. Vividly colorful, Shamrock Tea—nominated for the 2001 Booker Prize and winner of a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001—invites readers to enter another world.

About this title

About the Author

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast where he still lives. He has been awarded the Irish Times Literature Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Yorkshire Post Prize. Carson's prose books, The Star Factory and Fishing for Amber - are available from Granta Books.

From Publishers Weekly

Imagine an Irish Borges constructing a Chinese puzzle of a text, describing his characters with Nabokovian relish and concocting a plot reminiscent of Dickens, H.G. Wells and The X-Files and you'll have an idea what Carson's fourth book of prose is like. In lapidary sentences, this fiction proceeds jigsaw-like through 101 brief chapters, each titled for a color from Paris Green to Bible Black. (Cataloguing more shades than anyone might imagine, the table of contents alone is worth the price of the book.) Although the narrator is introduced in the novel's first lines, he reveals surprisingly little about himself, not even his first name. (His surname turns out to be Carson.) Instead, he tells us about Napoleon dying on St. Helena from the fumes of Paris Green and proceeds to discuss Jan van Eyck's double portrait of Arnolfini and his bride, a painting whose importance grows as the novel progresses. Wending his way through the lives of the saints, the lives of Lambert and Jan van Eyck, the lives of Wittgenstein, Conan Doyle and Wilde, Carson craftily unfolds his story about young Carson; his cousin, Berenice; his schoolmate Maeterlinck; and a mission they can fulfill only by sipping Shamrock Tea and slipping into the world of Jan van Eyck's double portrait. This meander through fact and fiction is not new to Carson, a prize-winning Belfast poet, who in past works has turned his peripatetic mind from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Irish fairy tales to etymology and traditional Irish music. This mode clearly suits him, but because the disparate tales do not coalesce until late in this work, readers may lose patience, especially as the characters are "allowed no inner thoughts." But as a meditation on time and art, Carson's book sets its own benchmark.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta UK
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1862074801
• ISBN 13: 9781862074804
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320