This is an ambitious storytelling pursuit… and the author certainly attempts to be literary about it, but at times, the pathway seems lost between passages of describing the birds in the trees… and we think we’re heading one direction only to be pulled backwards and sideways in the kind of storytelling my own family is good at: non-linear (for most of the English-speaking world, that translates as ‘confusing’ — and I haven’t read up on the author, but her name is O’Farrell, so I’m making an assumption here, but it seems to me she has a few aunties who start you in the middle of the story and bring you halfway to the end before wait, hold on-ing you a minute and jumping back to away before the start of the start of this particular story and bringing you up to speed on all the relevant gossip of the lives of the ones before yer wee man in this particular story takes stage and that you might have missed preparatory to being let in on the not-so-secret-anymore details, which is all to say; is she Irish?). 

 

Overall, this storytelling was certainly revelling in the art of being literary, and while the story is one we who study the great man of literature are familiar with, O’Farrell brings to life the nuanced details of the tragedies in the people dear to him and all around him, without ever once mentioning his name. 

 

Definitely, an emotional one…