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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, unique, existential insights by rare, new talent,
By V.J. Lange (Stormy Oregon Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Cafe Cong (Paperback)
I was first put onto Niall Quinn by a fellow novelist. From the opening lines of his first book, VOYOVIC, I was hooked and couldn't stop until I read all four of his published works. Then I went back and re-read them in sequence for the sheer joy of sensing the unfolding of a vibrant new writer. For make no mistake--these are unique tales spun by a master storyteller with a singular vision and a Gaelic wizardry with words. The dense texture of the syntax is reminiscent of Joyce and Conrad. Sentences resonate with the authority of one who's been there, done that. They mirror the author's adventures, leaving Ireland at 16 to ship out on the merchant navies of the world, jumping ship to work as an illegal in France, Germany, America, Brazil, the Caribbean, Bangladesh. He becomes modern existential man as an underground refugee worker--homeless, a permanent nomad in search of anchors, new roots. And with the rising tide of third-world migrants infiltrating the prosperous havens of Europe and America, we'll see his kind multiplying a million-fold! Some of the European press see Quinn as the spiritual successor to Kerouack and Burroughs. There's that, ofr course, but in the grimy underground of working Paris in THE CAFE CONG, I felt more the brooding gloom of a Dostoievski or Tolstoy on the eve of revolution. For this is around the time of the student uprisings. And the book is about the underbelly of the City of Lights where the can-can frivolity of the surface Folies never penetrates! The young workers and students are shadows in a nether world wishing to ignore them--invisible, like the unseen black man in America. This is a writer who confronts life's ambiguities head-on and doesn't cloak uncomfortable conclusions in mystical allusions. I found magic in all his books--VOYOVIC, STOLEN AIR, WELCOME TO GOMORRAH and most especially in THE CAFE CONG. Not the faux marvels of the dungeon-and-dragon genre so popular today but the genuine wizardry of finding purpose amidst the angst of modern metropolitan aimlessness. Do I recommend Niall Quinn and his four published books? With all the stars I'm allowed to affix! --Jack Lange, author of SEARCH FOR THE DRAGON
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