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36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A quiet, happy, gem, March 30, 2002
This review is from: By the Lake (Hardcover)
This is a quiet, happy, gem of novel by a proven literary master. Set in recent time in a small rural community in northwest Ireland, the story follows a year in the lives of several lakeside residents of small neighboring farms. The very common place events of their lives are described in episodic fashion. The central figures are a childless Anglo/Irish couple who left their successful professional careers in London to reside on a farm by the lake. A theme throughout the narrative is about Irish people who leave for England and later return. But the primary theme is the almost seamless and repetitive lives of the people of this almost idyllic community. This is a place where the accidental death of a lamb or the sudden appearance of a new telephone pole are major events. These lives and relationships are told in prose that is so poetically descriptive that, without being at all cloying, almost glistens on the page. The vision of a heron that rises in the mist everytime someone walks by the lakeshore is palpable. There are no chapters in the book. The various episodes are strung together one after another, but this seems fitting where there are no large, climactic events. The people and their speech are quaintly Irish, and it is easy to love and admire each of them in spite of a host of personality quirks and ritualistic behavior. The story resolves itself with the death and funeral of one of the leading characters, replete with the traditional laying out of the corpse, the wake and the digging of the grave in the family plot (many Irish graves contain the remains of several generations of individuals). This episode is described in such detail and matter-of-fact forthrightness that one feels intimately involved. The original title of the book when published in Ireland was "That They May Face The Rising Sun". This more appropriate title comes from a conversation among the grave diggers where one of them explains that people are always buried with their heads toward the west so that when they are eventually resurrected from the grave, they will rise from the ground facing the rising sun. It is an image, both morbid and uplifting, that sticks long after the book is finished.
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book to savor, April 16, 2002
This review is from: By the Lake (Hardcover)
I truly loved this book. But first, I had to slow way, way down. This is a quiet book -- a loving portrait of a year in the life of a small enclave in rural Ireland. Nothing happens, yet everything happens. Ultimately, this book is "about" the nature of life itself -- love of land, the rhythms of the natural world, human connections -- the simple universals. It's beautifully written and well worth pondering.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magnificent celebration of a vanishing way of life., May 2, 2002
This review is from: By the Lake (Hardcover)
A gentleness and warmth infuse this paean to small town Irish life and the usually loving connections among the residents. Almost plotless in the traditional sense, the book achieves surprising power through its sensitive and sometimes humorous portrayals of "everyday" characters as they work their land, respond to the needs of their neighbors, celebrate milestones, and observe the lyrically described changes in flora and fauna around the lake during one year. It's a magnificent novel, a testament (and, unfortunately, perhaps also a memorial) to a vanishing way of life and the enduring connections, both among men and with the land, which have shaped the Irish character and spawned its traditions.
The Ruttledges have returned to Ireland after advertising careers in London, renewing connections with their kin and settling "by the lake," where they are greeted first by Jamesie Murphy and his wife Mary, who bring food, and then by the unforgettable roue of the village, John Quinn, who wants them to find him a wife from out of town, as he's already too well known to be successful in his own village. Other characters, each unique, give color and a sense of reality to life by the lake: Jimmy Joe McKiernan, the local Provo leader who led the breakout from Long Kesh; the pathetic Bill Evans, an orphan brought up by the nuns, then farmed out to an unfeeling family to work when he was 14; Cecil Pierce, the local Protestant; Johnny Murphy, Jamesie's brother, who visits each summer from London, where he lives in relative exile after being dumped by the woman he loved; the Shah, a Ruttledge relative who became hugely successful in the junk business; Patrick Ryan, who never seems to finish the building projects he's doing for his neighbors; and many others who illustrate the charms and frustrations of small town life and the forces which have shaped it. Significantly, all the main characters are middle-aged or older, the young having been lured already to big cities. As one character says, "After us there'll be nothing but the water hen and swan."
As the reader shares the passage of the year with the residents, observing the celebrations of birth, the rites of death, and the homely activities which give meaning to life by the lake, it's impossible not to feel a sense of profound melancholy and to mourn the loss of this rapidly disappearing life. As McGahern himself says, "[The days] did not feel particularly quiet or happy, but through them ran the sense...that there would come a time when these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment and peace." With its profound openness to the sensations of the moment, its constant awareness of even the subtlest changes in nature, and its joy in human connections, it's a life which few harried city dwellers ever know. Mary Whipple
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