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The Lesser Bohemians
The captivating new novel from Eimear McBride, critically acclaimed and Baileys Women’s Prize-winning author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.
Upon her arrival in London, an 18-year-old Irish girl begins anew as a drama student, with all the hopes of any young actress searching for the fame she’s always dreamed of. She struggles to fit in—she’s young and unexotic, a naive new girl—but soon she forges friendships and finds a place for herself in the big city.
Then she meets an attractive older man. He’s an established actor, 20 years older, and the inevitable clamorous relationship that ensues is one that will change her forever.
A redemptive, captivating story of passion and innocence set across the bedsits of mid-1990s London, McBride holds new love under her fierce gaze, giving us all a chance to remember what it’s like to fall hard for another.
Upon her arrival in London, an 18-year-old Irish girl begins anew as a drama student, with all the hopes of any young actress searching for the fame she’s always dreamed of. She struggles to fit in—she’s young and unexotic, a naive new girl—but soon she forges friendships and finds a place for herself in the big city.
Then she meets an attractive older man. He’s an established actor, 20 years older, and the inevitable clamorous relationship that ensues is one that will change her forever.
A redemptive, captivating story of passion and innocence set across the bedsits of mid-1990s London, McBride holds new love under her fierce gaze, giving us all a chance to remember what it’s like to fall hard for another.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2016
404 people are currently reading
16081 people want to read
About the author
Eimear McBride
24 books691 followersEimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. She spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo. Then, at the age of 17, she moved to London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 935 reviews
August 2, 2016
The prose was challenging for me -It felt unnatural and awkward.
...plus, I didn't think much of the story. Many drama students go to London to study acting, only to get caught up in more drama off stage than on.
It's no different for the main female. The drama takes place off stage when an Irish woman becomes involved with an older man- a more seasoned stage actor twice her age.
I'd read sentences and paragraphs over and over...hoping each time I'd feel 'something'.
Here is an example of a paragraph I read three times:
"Still and so we're here for Art. She has tickets while I have a heart that I hope art will burn. But her shrug au gait keep my mouth shut and I map my gait on how she walks.
Blasé with the sculptures. Stooping to the glass. Paintings mostly lingered at the same amount of time. So this is how I do it too and when the crowd gets hard for art to squeeze out through I chase after. Encourage it myself".
I think the book cover is lovely......and the title intriguing.
As for the novel itself...I didn't comprehend parts of the dialogue. I didn't enjoy having to struggle and doubt my intelligence.....( I did both: struggled and questioned my intelligence).
When books are 'too' challenging - too odd- for me to understand ---unless I have a reading coach to support my reading process - then I just feel as if I've fallen flat on my face - alone - without a supporting hand to help me out! It's not fun.
This novel hurt my brain...and self-esteem. But kudos to those who see the beauty and brilliance. I mean it! The readers who sincerely rate this book 5 stars ---and I bet there will be many who love this book- win- as they are the ones who take in deeper depths of value and enjoyment. Please read more reviews. I simply am not smart enough for this type of writing.
Thank you very much to Crown Publishing, Netgalley, and Eimear McBride.
...plus, I didn't think much of the story. Many drama students go to London to study acting, only to get caught up in more drama off stage than on.
It's no different for the main female. The drama takes place off stage when an Irish woman becomes involved with an older man- a more seasoned stage actor twice her age.
I'd read sentences and paragraphs over and over...hoping each time I'd feel 'something'.
Here is an example of a paragraph I read three times:
"Still and so we're here for Art. She has tickets while I have a heart that I hope art will burn. But her shrug au gait keep my mouth shut and I map my gait on how she walks.
Blasé with the sculptures. Stooping to the glass. Paintings mostly lingered at the same amount of time. So this is how I do it too and when the crowd gets hard for art to squeeze out through I chase after. Encourage it myself".
I think the book cover is lovely......and the title intriguing.
As for the novel itself...I didn't comprehend parts of the dialogue. I didn't enjoy having to struggle and doubt my intelligence.....( I did both: struggled and questioned my intelligence).
When books are 'too' challenging - too odd- for me to understand ---unless I have a reading coach to support my reading process - then I just feel as if I've fallen flat on my face - alone - without a supporting hand to help me out! It's not fun.
This novel hurt my brain...and self-esteem. But kudos to those who see the beauty and brilliance. I mean it! The readers who sincerely rate this book 5 stars ---and I bet there will be many who love this book- win- as they are the ones who take in deeper depths of value and enjoyment. Please read more reviews. I simply am not smart enough for this type of writing.
Thank you very much to Crown Publishing, Netgalley, and Eimear McBride.
August 14, 2024
NOSTALGIA DEL DUBLINESE ERRANTE
Copertina
Storia d’amore nella Londra degli anni Novanta.
Storia d’amore tra due attori, lei – io narrante – è alle prime armi e ai primi passi, è venuta nella capitale inglese proprio per studiare recitazione, e in fondo ha solo diciotto anni, non ci si può aspettare che sia già una professionista consumata e magari affermata. Lui di anni ne ha più del doppio, trentotto, è attore anche lui, noto e apprezzato almeno nell’ambiente teatrale, si dedica anche alla scrittura di sceneggiature.
Storia d’amore tra una irlandese del Nord, con padre morto quando aveva otto anni, educazione cattolica esasperata, che approda nella tentacolare metropoli ancora vergine, timida oltre ogni eccesso (spietatamente disperatamente irrimediabilmente timida). E un inglese del nord che ha già fatto la sua strada, ha già accumulato esperienza, sa come muoversi nel mondo per le strade e nei letti, ma per duecento sterline al mese vive ancora in una stanza in affitto con letto singolo condividendo l’appartamento che ha un bagno senza lavandino.
Mi pare che già fin qui si comprenda come non sia facile, come la storia d’amore poggi su terreno franabile: troppo timida e troppo giovane e troppo provinciale lei, troppo più grande e navigato lui. Lui ha una famiglia alle spalle, una figlia che non sente mai perché vive in Canada. Lei, quando le cose girano storte, ama farsi male, bruciature di sigarette et similia. Si prendono e si lasciano, fanno molto sesso, lei è abbastanza lesta ad impararne l’arte, entrambi lo fanno anche fuori della coppia che tale non è mai. Lei vorrebbe solo raggomitolarsi tra le sue braccia ed essere amata, lui la ama ma non vuole legami. Aspettative diverse, la solta vecchia storia.
Pagine e pagine di baci e lingue, di erezioni e affondi, di morsi e succhiotti, di orgasmi ed estasi, una ripetizione che si dovrebbe sapere non giova, smorza, annulla.
Nulla di particolarmente originale o stimolante, ci si muove su terreno più e più volte battuto. Avevo voglia di conoscere quest’altra scrittrice irlandese – dall’Irlanda sono arrivate fior di scrittrici negli ultimi anni – ma non è andata bene.
Le cose peggiorano ulteriormente per via dello stile adottato dalla McBride: un flusso di coscienza così frammentato e reso contorto (oh quante volte non sono stato certo d’aver capito, oh) da risultare a me piuttosto flusso d’incoscienza. E io non avrei nulla contro lo stream of consciousness, tutt’altro, perlopiù mi piace, anche molto. Ma non questa volta.
Perché risulta esageratamente costruito artefatto e artificioso. McBride usa font a grandezza normale e font a grandezza minore, usa corsivo, per indicare chissà che cosa, visto che si tratta di un flusso di coscienza, di un monologo interiore, che tipo di cambiamento avviene alla e nella voce interiore dell’io narrante – la ragazza irlandese – quando mi trovo davanti a parole scritte in piccolo o in corsivo? E poi reinventa la punteggiatura, quando troppa e quando poca, quando un punto segue ogni singola parola e quando invece scompaiono del tutto, virgole incluse (le frasi sono comunque sempre piuttosto corte). Aumenta gli spazi a sostituire la punteggiatura, modifica gli accapo, persevera nel suo stile anche quando la protagonista narratrice è (abbastanza spesso) fatta e strafatta di alcol, fumo, erba, piste.
Le fotografie sono di Billy & Hells.
Copertina
Storia d’amore nella Londra degli anni Novanta.
Storia d’amore tra due attori, lei – io narrante – è alle prime armi e ai primi passi, è venuta nella capitale inglese proprio per studiare recitazione, e in fondo ha solo diciotto anni, non ci si può aspettare che sia già una professionista consumata e magari affermata. Lui di anni ne ha più del doppio, trentotto, è attore anche lui, noto e apprezzato almeno nell’ambiente teatrale, si dedica anche alla scrittura di sceneggiature.
Storia d’amore tra una irlandese del Nord, con padre morto quando aveva otto anni, educazione cattolica esasperata, che approda nella tentacolare metropoli ancora vergine, timida oltre ogni eccesso (spietatamente disperatamente irrimediabilmente timida). E un inglese del nord che ha già fatto la sua strada, ha già accumulato esperienza, sa come muoversi nel mondo per le strade e nei letti, ma per duecento sterline al mese vive ancora in una stanza in affitto con letto singolo condividendo l’appartamento che ha un bagno senza lavandino.
Mi pare che già fin qui si comprenda come non sia facile, come la storia d’amore poggi su terreno franabile: troppo timida e troppo giovane e troppo provinciale lei, troppo più grande e navigato lui. Lui ha una famiglia alle spalle, una figlia che non sente mai perché vive in Canada. Lei, quando le cose girano storte, ama farsi male, bruciature di sigarette et similia. Si prendono e si lasciano, fanno molto sesso, lei è abbastanza lesta ad impararne l’arte, entrambi lo fanno anche fuori della coppia che tale non è mai. Lei vorrebbe solo raggomitolarsi tra le sue braccia ed essere amata, lui la ama ma non vuole legami. Aspettative diverse, la solta vecchia storia.
Pagine e pagine di baci e lingue, di erezioni e affondi, di morsi e succhiotti, di orgasmi ed estasi, una ripetizione che si dovrebbe sapere non giova, smorza, annulla.
Nulla di particolarmente originale o stimolante, ci si muove su terreno più e più volte battuto. Avevo voglia di conoscere quest’altra scrittrice irlandese – dall’Irlanda sono arrivate fior di scrittrici negli ultimi anni – ma non è andata bene.
Le cose peggiorano ulteriormente per via dello stile adottato dalla McBride: un flusso di coscienza così frammentato e reso contorto (oh quante volte non sono stato certo d’aver capito, oh) da risultare a me piuttosto flusso d’incoscienza. E io non avrei nulla contro lo stream of consciousness, tutt’altro, perlopiù mi piace, anche molto. Ma non questa volta.
Perché risulta esageratamente costruito artefatto e artificioso. McBride usa font a grandezza normale e font a grandezza minore, usa corsivo, per indicare chissà che cosa, visto che si tratta di un flusso di coscienza, di un monologo interiore, che tipo di cambiamento avviene alla e nella voce interiore dell’io narrante – la ragazza irlandese – quando mi trovo davanti a parole scritte in piccolo o in corsivo? E poi reinventa la punteggiatura, quando troppa e quando poca, quando un punto segue ogni singola parola e quando invece scompaiono del tutto, virgole incluse (le frasi sono comunque sempre piuttosto corte). Aumenta gli spazi a sostituire la punteggiatura, modifica gli accapo, persevera nel suo stile anche quando la protagonista narratrice è (abbastanza spesso) fatta e strafatta di alcol, fumo, erba, piste.
Le fotografie sono di Billy & Hells.
November 10, 2024
In the first few pages I felt like I needed to learn to read again. Is it poetry, I wondered for a few sentences in horrified dread. What is and WHY is it, all this stream-of-consciousness fragmented jumbled up staccato inner monologue that acts as though punctuation has offended it?
But then it just took a few pages to let it wash over me, to stop mentally translating it into anything “proper” and sounding it out, to let my inner voice blend with hers, to feel the voice of this young woman both tough and rawly fragile just starting her stumbling into adult London life — and something tenderly beautiful happened, and I felt it and loved it and maybe messy it is, but it’s a wonderfully and uncomfortable intricate mess with heart and hurt and all the scars.
And I loved it.
Its a story of first love, intense and messy and with edges that refuse to be abraded, but theirs is nothing of romance here, thank deities. Unnamed until late in the book (until some damage is faced and somewhat healed, and it’s effective), she and he are an odd couple, with age difference greater than her actual age, with a hook-up of two genuinely sincerely hurt and damaged souls tenderly and sometimes very messily blossoming into something painfully real and healing which yet is always on the brink of breaking.
McBride takes what other contemporary writers tried to do and actually DOES it, makes her words spring alive and ring true, lived in, without a shred of feeling artificial. There is healing that does not bring to mind authorial puppetmastering. There is so much sex that yet is awkward naturally without that artificial clinical awkwardness that comes when others try to pour sex on page (looking at you, Sally Rooney). It’s not a play-by-play stilted account of motions and mechanics but rather the minute emotions and feelings shifts poured through the physical, with both awkwardness and sincerity coexisting like they do in real life, without a single cringeworthy moment or any attempt at titillation.
So get through the initial effort and discomfort of lacking distinction between thought and speech, the blending of inner and outer realities, the blurry distinction between body and mind, the thoughts within thoughts. It’s worth it. It becomes natural. It becomes lovely. And when the language subtly changes until the end, it’s earned.
5 stars.
———
Buddy read with Nastya.
——————
Also posted on my blog.
Remember. Look up. Like the face of god was lighting me through those grilles above, through windows once a church this hall, and old men watch below. Come in. Please go straight to the stage. I snag my skirt on continents of paint chipped out black by toes and heels, by fingers picking clicking for years. I’d do too if I was here. When I’ll be here. Will I be here? Take a moment, they say Then let’s have your first piece. I. Suck antique air and. Go.
But then it just took a few pages to let it wash over me, to stop mentally translating it into anything “proper” and sounding it out, to let my inner voice blend with hers, to feel the voice of this young woman both tough and rawly fragile just starting her stumbling into adult London life — and something tenderly beautiful happened, and I felt it and loved it and maybe messy it is, but it’s a wonderfully and uncomfortable intricate mess with heart and hurt and all the scars.
And I loved it.
From their path I stroll to the City no city, I think to Camden Town. London unspooling itself behind. Traffic all gadding in the midday shine. So many people. So much stone. All at once and streets ahead. I’ll bring it with. I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine.
Its a story of first love, intense and messy and with edges that refuse to be abraded, but theirs is nothing of romance here, thank deities. Unnamed until late in the book (until some damage is faced and somewhat healed, and it’s effective), she and he are an odd couple, with age difference greater than her actual age, with a hook-up of two genuinely sincerely hurt and damaged souls tenderly and sometimes very messily blossoming into something painfully real and healing which yet is always on the brink of breaking.
In the white wrenching view I ask How do you feel? Relieved, he says But I can’t quite believe you’re still here. I am though, I say. And even if I feel spaces opening between that neither seem to know how to fill, I know we will. I know I will once I’ve worked out the right distance again.
McBride takes what other contemporary writers tried to do and actually DOES it, makes her words spring alive and ring true, lived in, without a shred of feeling artificial. There is healing that does not bring to mind authorial puppetmastering. There is so much sex that yet is awkward naturally without that artificial clinical awkwardness that comes when others try to pour sex on page (looking at you, Sally Rooney). It’s not a play-by-play stilted account of motions and mechanics but rather the minute emotions and feelings shifts poured through the physical, with both awkwardness and sincerity coexisting like they do in real life, without a single cringeworthy moment or any attempt at titillation.
Then I am back in the world and must understand again how to cover my bones with my skin.
So get through the initial effort and discomfort of lacking distinction between thought and speech, the blending of inner and outer realities, the blurry distinction between body and mind, the thoughts within thoughts. It’s worth it. It becomes natural. It becomes lovely. And when the language subtly changes until the end, it’s earned.
5 stars.
His skin and bones showing the other side of love we’ve arrived at. Not hate. I see it now, and so clearly tonight, that the opposite of love is despair.
———
Buddy read with Nastya.
——————
Also posted on my blog.
Read
November 1, 2021Lo lay London Liverpool Street I am getting to on the train. Legs fair jigged from halfway there. Dairy Milk on this Stansted Express and cannot care for stray sludge splinters in the face of England go by. Bishop's Stratford. Tottenham Hale. I could turn I could turn. I cannot. Too late for. London. Look.
Those are the opening lines of this book. The young narrator doesn't narrate so much as spill her thoughts onto the page in a kind of scrappy shorthand. The scraps are her reactions to what she's living through each moment, and what she further thinks about what she's just experienced, the further thoughts getting their own smaller font in the text. All the thoughts read as if they are delivered for herself alone, and not for any possible readers so initially they verge on being indecipherable to a reader who isn't her.
Lullish the sun through a scant cherry tree threading meek in and out of the blow.
I might have given up in the early pages except that I read a previous book by Eimear McBride and I knew I'd get the hang of her way of writing if I had a little patience.
And so it turned out. I quickly learned to decipher most of the meanings, and I improved as I went along because I had become intensely curious about the thought processes of this eighteen-year-old Irish girl from a rural background starting a new life as a drama student in London in the mid 1990s.
Get out at Barbican. Her first into the salient wind, fists of grasping hair. Me blinking the grit over the bridge and after her. Bricks and towers. Lour and paint. Here's nowhere like any life I've learned. Even going under, it goes on up. She saying how it's ugly and I think not. I think it is Metropolis. Still and so we're here for Art. She has the tickets while I have a heart that I hope art will burn.
Those lines are from page 15, the narrator's first visit to an art gallery, and the words 'heart' and 'burn' are like a blazing neon message about what will happen soon afterwards when damaged innocence meets suffering experience. Yes, on page 23, Eily, whose name we don't hear until page 216, meets Stephen, whose name isn't mentioned until page 277, in a pub where he is sitting in a corner reading Dostoyevsky's 'The Devils'. From then on, hearts bleed, flesh burns, minds fragment, emotions explode. But through it all, some deep feeling, laid down in that first meeting, survives and grows into a kind of health.
It's not everyone you're not lonely with.
I can say with truth that I was comfortable among the pages of this immensely turbulent book—or to borrow the narrator's voice for a moment: Good here I.
Those are the opening lines of this book. The young narrator doesn't narrate so much as spill her thoughts onto the page in a kind of scrappy shorthand. The scraps are her reactions to what she's living through each moment, and what she further thinks about what she's just experienced, the further thoughts getting their own smaller font in the text. All the thoughts read as if they are delivered for herself alone, and not for any possible readers so initially they verge on being indecipherable to a reader who isn't her.
Lullish the sun through a scant cherry tree threading meek in and out of the blow.
I might have given up in the early pages except that I read a previous book by Eimear McBride and I knew I'd get the hang of her way of writing if I had a little patience.
And so it turned out. I quickly learned to decipher most of the meanings, and I improved as I went along because I had become intensely curious about the thought processes of this eighteen-year-old Irish girl from a rural background starting a new life as a drama student in London in the mid 1990s.
Get out at Barbican. Her first into the salient wind, fists of grasping hair. Me blinking the grit over the bridge and after her. Bricks and towers. Lour and paint. Here's nowhere like any life I've learned. Even going under, it goes on up. She saying how it's ugly and I think not. I think it is Metropolis. Still and so we're here for Art. She has the tickets while I have a heart that I hope art will burn.
Those lines are from page 15, the narrator's first visit to an art gallery, and the words 'heart' and 'burn' are like a blazing neon message about what will happen soon afterwards when damaged innocence meets suffering experience. Yes, on page 23, Eily, whose name we don't hear until page 216, meets Stephen, whose name isn't mentioned until page 277, in a pub where he is sitting in a corner reading Dostoyevsky's 'The Devils'. From then on, hearts bleed, flesh burns, minds fragment, emotions explode. But through it all, some deep feeling, laid down in that first meeting, survives and grows into a kind of health.
It's not everyone you're not lonely with.
I can say with truth that I was comfortable among the pages of this immensely turbulent book—or to borrow the narrator's voice for a moment: Good here I.
February 25, 2022
3.75 Stars
Eily is recently arrived in London, not even 20 yet, excited about beginning drama school. It’s a world away from her home in Ireland, the big city life of London so far from the life she lived with her mother. She’s naïve, but overcome with the thrill of it all, this new life.
She meets a man in a bar one night early on in this new life, she doesn’t recognize him as a well-known actor, he’s 38, twice her age, damaged, emotionally scarred. She’s not without her own emotional scars.
This has been called an “unlikely love story” which is somewhat of an understatement. I suppose in some tragic sense, it seems appropriate that two such scarred individuals in a world of people would magically find each other, like magnets drawn to somewhat similar horror stories from their childhood. Hers is more “hinted” at, in smaller snippets, from an early age on. His, well. I wish I could just erase it from my mind. Both repeatedly victims of the adults in their young lives.
There’s a lot to recommend this book that is lovely. While her prose takes a bit of mental adjusting, I found that as the story progresses I’d stopped thinking about it, or pausing and parsing out the words. Her stream of conscious style of writing includes colloquial phrases, words, which occasionally made it more difficult, but I still believe it was most often in the beginning of the book that I noticed it. It helped to find a quiet place to read this.
The relationship that develops isn’t kissed by Disney, it’s not all Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows, it’s real, and gritty, and raw. There’s even love, albeit a rather screwed up variety, with a neediness that is palpably real. There’s heartbreak. Recriminations. Even a little redemption.
Love has the power to heal, and inner demons have the power to destroy. Sometimes, there’s a little of both in the best love stories.
Pub Date: 20 Sept 2016
Many thanks to Crown Publishing Hogarth, NetGalley and author Eimear McBride for providing me with an advanced copy
November 22, 2017
Love it or hate it, Eimear McBride's writing has a raging intensity that is impossible to ignore. Her extraordinary, uncompromising and innovative first book A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was a hard act to follow, but this one is equally fierce, brave and sometimes luminous.
The framework of the plot is simple - a rites of passage love story that relates the experiences of its narrator, an Irish stage school student during her first year in London. At the start she is desperate to lose her virginity, which she accomplishes with the help of a much older actor she finds reading a battered Dostoyevsky in the pub. Their relationship is intense and confrontational, and McBride does not flinch from describing anything - there is plenty of sex, drug-taking and drinking, related in McBride's now familiar short and often incomplete sentences, with other distracting stylistic quirks like changing the font size several times in the same sentence and extra spaces between words.
If anything, the story gets more intense in the middle section when the man relates the story of his childhood, his relationship with his own abusive mother, his young adulthood, and how he became estranged from his daughter and her mother and fell prey to various addictions. The sections where he tells his story are told in more conventional sentences, but the writing loses none of its power.
Neither of the two main protagonists are named in the first half of the book, so when the names appear in the later stages () they have a surprising force.
Like her first book, this is not an easy one to love, but it reading it is a startling and unforgettable experience.
The framework of the plot is simple - a rites of passage love story that relates the experiences of its narrator, an Irish stage school student during her first year in London. At the start she is desperate to lose her virginity, which she accomplishes with the help of a much older actor she finds reading a battered Dostoyevsky in the pub. Their relationship is intense and confrontational, and McBride does not flinch from describing anything - there is plenty of sex, drug-taking and drinking, related in McBride's now familiar short and often incomplete sentences, with other distracting stylistic quirks like changing the font size several times in the same sentence and extra spaces between words.
If anything, the story gets more intense in the middle section when the man relates the story of his childhood, his relationship with his own abusive mother, his young adulthood, and how he became estranged from his daughter and her mother and fell prey to various addictions. The sections where he tells his story are told in more conventional sentences, but the writing loses none of its power.
Neither of the two main protagonists are named in the first half of the book, so when the names appear in the later stages () they have a surprising force.
Like her first book, this is not an easy one to love, but it reading it is a startling and unforgettable experience.
November 2, 2024
How do you even write a review for the book you adore this much? Can I be objective? Not at this point. Can I recommend it? Hardly, because according to a lot of reviews it’s too hard and demanding and the story is banal. Unless you're interested and then I can't recommend strongly enough!
Quick summary: 18 year old Irish drama student comes to London to study, she's lonely and craves to remake herself and grow up and decides to pick up a guy in the bar to lose her virginity. So she decides on this older man who reads Dostoevsky's Demons. What happens next is a story of an intense first love and heartbreaks.
It’s a stream of consciousness
It's a thought before thought and raw emotions.
For lots of people the writing style is insufferable. For me it's almost poetry
It's a coming of age story
It's a story about healing
Whereas her debut, A girl is a half formed thing is about self-destruction, this one is about healing and becoming whole. For both of them
And of course It's a love story
And a very intense, tumultuous messed up one. And it’s told through a lot of sex scenes. Every sex scene is there to develop this relationship, create intimacy and eventually open up and tell the darkest secrets.
Characters’ healing is shown through sex. Sex is used to show them at their lowest. So yeah, as reviewers noted, there's a lot of sex. And it’s very much integral to the story.
That's where vulnerability comes through.
And it gets very dark before we're allowed to see the light. And I loved every second of it.
P.S. Just recently heard Eimear McBride on a podcast saying she's been writing a screenplay for a movie and I can't imagine how it can be translated into that medium
Quick summary: 18 year old Irish drama student comes to London to study, she's lonely and craves to remake herself and grow up and decides to pick up a guy in the bar to lose her virginity. So she decides on this older man who reads Dostoevsky's Demons. What happens next is a story of an intense first love and heartbreaks.
It’s a stream of consciousness
It's a thought before thought and raw emotions.
For lots of people the writing style is insufferable. For me it's almost poetry
From their path I stroll to the City no city, I think to Camden Town. London unspooling itself behind. Traffic all gadding in the midday shine. So many people. So much stone. All at once and streets ahead. I’ll bring it with. I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine.
or
Daub my soul with a good few pints til my mouth swings wide with unutterable shite. Laughing lots too, like it’s true.
It's a coming of age story
Strange in its stillness and. Some new thing in me which, if followed, who knows where will lead? When I first came here I wanted the world to look at me and now I might prefer to be the eye instead.
Could I grow up in a night? Grow up in this day? Curled here with him on his small bed, in the cradle of our arms and wrap of our legs watching him deep in his deep dream, far the threat of what he’s been while I lie here, in love. So much and sooner than I thought I’d be. Years off, I’d thought and not like this. But I have come into my kingdom where only pens and pencils were. Abrupt and all abrupt. No longer minnow in the darkness and the deep. Through the portholes and currents I’ve been. Going to the surface. Up into the sun.
It's a story about healing
Whereas her debut, A girl is a half formed thing is about self-destruction, this one is about healing and becoming whole. For both of them
And of course It's a love story
And a very intense, tumultuous messed up one. And it’s told through a lot of sex scenes. Every sex scene is there to develop this relationship, create intimacy and eventually open up and tell the darkest secrets.
Characters’ healing is shown through sex. Sex is used to show them at their lowest. So yeah, as reviewers noted, there's a lot of sex. And it’s very much integral to the story.
That's where vulnerability comes through.
And it gets very dark before we're allowed to see the light. And I loved every second of it.
Out into the cold sun of morning. I am tired but I am still. That shake of losing him settling itself, becoming what it is. I do not rebel. I have given love its due. Put kindness where it should be. Now we may part in this good memory. I hope he will be happy, that today will not be bad. But now my own clock ticks and turns inside. Go on. Get on. Let your own Juliet in.
P.S. Just recently heard Eimear McBride on a podcast saying she's been writing a screenplay for a movie and I can't imagine how it can be translated into that medium
May 26, 2016
This book is magic. McBride pulls off stunts I would have never imagined. You have to commit to this book. You can't read it half-heartedly, or grab a few pages here and there. Dedicate some time to it. And if you put yourself in her hands, McBride will not let you down. In fact, she'll surprise you.
The trick lies in the most challenging part of this book. McBride tells it as a first-person narrative. I'm not sure if it technically qualifies as stream of consciousness. But it's effectively that technique. You are IN the head of the narrator. And that is what makes it hard. She isn't telling you the basic things about herself, because she already knows those things, and they aren't important. We only learn her age, her origins, something of her appearance, and eventually - Finally! - her name through other people reacting to her. Almost nothing is told explicitly, until she finally gets her boyfriend to tell his tale in full.
About that boyfriend: we don't get his name for a really long time, either. We do know that he is 20 years older than her, a famous actor, and not very committed to her. At first.
As time wears on, we piece it together: she is a daughter, looking for a father; he is a father, looking for a daughter. They are both damaged, he possibly irrevocably so. And while the story deceptively starts out as a young woman's sexual awakening, it morphs into being his story just as much as hers, a love affair, a knitting together of these broken people.
Normally, I have no interest or patience in love stories between people with this age disparity. They're always unhealthy humans, and doomed to fail. But by making me be this girl for 300 pages, McBride gets me to cheer for them. By making me live in her head with her thoughts and feelings, McBride tricked me into it. I want to believe he can still be healed, even though he's on the brink of 40, even though he was ruined and then destroyed himself over and over. I want to believe she only needs his loyalty to fend off the insecurities inherent with her age and maturity, that she can love in a way that transcends psychosexual development. McBride creates a way that imperfectly perfect love is possible.
And that is nothing short of magic.
My thanks to Library Thing for an ARC of this charming book.
The trick lies in the most challenging part of this book. McBride tells it as a first-person narrative. I'm not sure if it technically qualifies as stream of consciousness. But it's effectively that technique. You are IN the head of the narrator. And that is what makes it hard. She isn't telling you the basic things about herself, because she already knows those things, and they aren't important. We only learn her age, her origins, something of her appearance, and eventually - Finally! - her name through other people reacting to her. Almost nothing is told explicitly, until she finally gets her boyfriend to tell his tale in full.
About that boyfriend: we don't get his name for a really long time, either. We do know that he is 20 years older than her, a famous actor, and not very committed to her. At first.
As time wears on, we piece it together: she is a daughter, looking for a father; he is a father, looking for a daughter. They are both damaged, he possibly irrevocably so. And while the story deceptively starts out as a young woman's sexual awakening, it morphs into being his story just as much as hers, a love affair, a knitting together of these broken people.
Normally, I have no interest or patience in love stories between people with this age disparity. They're always unhealthy humans, and doomed to fail. But by making me be this girl for 300 pages, McBride gets me to cheer for them. By making me live in her head with her thoughts and feelings, McBride tricked me into it. I want to believe he can still be healed, even though he's on the brink of 40, even though he was ruined and then destroyed himself over and over. I want to believe she only needs his loyalty to fend off the insecurities inherent with her age and maturity, that she can love in a way that transcends psychosexual development. McBride creates a way that imperfectly perfect love is possible.
And that is nothing short of magic.
My thanks to Library Thing for an ARC of this charming book.
August 7, 2016
A Year of Drama
As I noted in my review of McBride's first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, the secret to her writing is hearing it aloud. Listening to a YouTube video of her reading a short excerpt unlocked the rest for me. Or more or less. It still sounded strange, though there were moments where the pain and violence of that book that could not have been written any other way. Here, the language is most appropriate for the sex. I have seldom seen so much bedroom writing in a novel outside of Henry Miller, but it did not offend me. In the earlier stages at least, she seemed very real in her discoveries of shame, pain, and soon enough eagerness. What did upset me was the amount of dissolution in between. I began to wonder how the protagonist ever had time to learn anything at that drama school, with so much of it spent on getting drunk, or stoned, or recovering from same. But alas I too recognize the craziness of that first year away from home as a fledgling adult, and McBride's fractured syntax, running the gamut from total chaos to sheer poetry,* is as good a way to capture it as any. Much as I would rather forget.
Readers of A Girl will recall that it is not until quite late in that book that the story kicks into high gear. So it is here. Both the protagonist and her actor lover (both unnamed for now), bring baggage to their relationship; being older, he carries more than her. As the novel nears its end, however, much of this back-story gets revealed, first in hints, then more completely. The characters acquire names. The jagged sentences begin to smooth out, without ever completely losing Eimear McBride's characteristic lilt; apart from that, it might almost be a different author. Whereas A Girl used much the same language throughout, only later showing the reason for it, The Lesser Bohemians tells its story partly through the transformation of language. Is it too easy a device? Does it make for too sentimental an ending? Perhaps—if you see this as her story, which is how it starts. But having read a couple of reviews which see it more as his evolution, I am changing my tune on this one, raising my original three stars to four. There is some painful truth in here, but you do need the patience to winkle it out.
======
*
I had a curious experience while reading. As it happens, I am currently writing a long poem, a parody pastoral in loose iambic pentameters, which has given me the habit of testing lines in my head for scansion. And there were times when, mentally reading McBride aloud, I heard her prose slipping into the familiar verse patterns, or variants of them. Which confirmed for me that much of what she is writing is poetry. But it also made me less able to grasp her poetry-prose, with its unpredictability of rhythm, its run-ons, sudden stops, and occasional surprise of concealed rhymes.
Jesus. Jesus he never. Jesus he really did. No teacher Never, nor anyone else. Bang out blatant about going permissive. Noting, I note another face laughing just like me. Trying not. To be mature. To keep the rict from boiling over. Of an age she also seems so I Hello when I'd not usually. Then she, sloe-eyed with slowest smiles, says Cuppa? In the Canteen? And so wriggle in. Slip in. Remember people are blind to under your skin or. Under my skin now.Irish girl on her first day at drama school in London. The teacher tells them to remember to use condoms. She, a virgin still, is both shocked and validated in her desire for new life, new experiences and, starting here, new friends. The sex part will come soon enough (together with an enormous amount of drinking, smoking, and stoning). She meets in a bar an older man, 38, twice her age, an actor too, somewhat well-known, although she does not recognize him. The novel is about that first year of hers in London, not so much about drama school (which disappointed me a little), but a lot about that relationship.
As I noted in my review of McBride's first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, the secret to her writing is hearing it aloud. Listening to a YouTube video of her reading a short excerpt unlocked the rest for me. Or more or less. It still sounded strange, though there were moments where the pain and violence of that book that could not have been written any other way. Here, the language is most appropriate for the sex. I have seldom seen so much bedroom writing in a novel outside of Henry Miller, but it did not offend me. In the earlier stages at least, she seemed very real in her discoveries of shame, pain, and soon enough eagerness. What did upset me was the amount of dissolution in between. I began to wonder how the protagonist ever had time to learn anything at that drama school, with so much of it spent on getting drunk, or stoned, or recovering from same. But alas I too recognize the craziness of that first year away from home as a fledgling adult, and McBride's fractured syntax, running the gamut from total chaos to sheer poetry,* is as good a way to capture it as any. Much as I would rather forget.
Readers of A Girl will recall that it is not until quite late in that book that the story kicks into high gear. So it is here. Both the protagonist and her actor lover (both unnamed for now), bring baggage to their relationship; being older, he carries more than her. As the novel nears its end, however, much of this back-story gets revealed, first in hints, then more completely. The characters acquire names. The jagged sentences begin to smooth out, without ever completely losing Eimear McBride's characteristic lilt; apart from that, it might almost be a different author. Whereas A Girl used much the same language throughout, only later showing the reason for it, The Lesser Bohemians tells its story partly through the transformation of language. Is it too easy a device? Does it make for too sentimental an ending? Perhaps—if you see this as her story, which is how it starts. But having read a couple of reviews which see it more as his evolution, I am changing my tune on this one, raising my original three stars to four. There is some painful truth in here, but you do need the patience to winkle it out.
======
*
I had a curious experience while reading. As it happens, I am currently writing a long poem, a parody pastoral in loose iambic pentameters, which has given me the habit of testing lines in my head for scansion. And there were times when, mentally reading McBride aloud, I heard her prose slipping into the familiar verse patterns, or variants of them. Which confirmed for me that much of what she is writing is poetry. But it also made me less able to grasp her poetry-prose, with its unpredictability of rhythm, its run-ons, sudden stops, and occasional surprise of concealed rhymes.
November 29, 2016
I tried for a while to get into this book, and gave up pretty quickly. But you know what, I don't like to feel dumb when reading and I found this so hard to understand that I actually started getting down on myself.
After two DNF books in a row, I'm really needing something solid. Maybe there are people who will love this one (maybe even due to it's complexity), but based on how good the description sounded I couldn't help but feel like I had been mislead once I tried getting into this one.
As much as I wanted to love it, I won't be recommending this one.
WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM
After two DNF books in a row, I'm really needing something solid. Maybe there are people who will love this one (maybe even due to it's complexity), but based on how good the description sounded I couldn't help but feel like I had been mislead once I tried getting into this one.
As much as I wanted to love it, I won't be recommending this one.
WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM
October 23, 2018
Going to be processing this one for a while because at times it was like A Little Life-levels of dark. But wow if she doesn't write in a way that just completely puts you inside the characters' minds; it's remarkable. Definitely a book that you will either love or hate, and not one that I would widely recommend because of the style and content. However, I found it completely engrossing and mesmerizing and quite amazing. Again, so much to process that I'll be thinking about this for quite some time—the sign of a truly great book.
(TW: sexual assault, child abuse, self-harm, substance abuse—at times these things can be described quite vividly so I would say if you are at all sensitive to this stuff, be careful.)
(TW: sexual assault, child abuse, self-harm, substance abuse—at times these things can be described quite vividly so I would say if you are at all sensitive to this stuff, be careful.)
October 15, 2016
What is it with the Irish and their need to reconfigure language? Although not as challenging as reading, say, James Joyce, The Lesser Bohemians starts with a near stream-of-consciousness that the reader must work through to figure out just where this story begins. As the book progresses, the strangeness of the language subsides, or maybe it simply gets easier to see the path down which the author is pointing us.
Where that path leads can be truly heart-breaking, but it is also where the magic of McBride's storytelling craft resides. The two main characters -- a young Irish woman fresh off the boat and just beginning her college study of acting and a successful middle-aged actor, who comes with his own baggage -- meet one night in a pub. Where they go from there is the essence of this tale.
What begins as a one-night hook-up for each turns into something much more profound, as they slowly begin to reveal the pain they bring to the relationship. Yes, there's a lot of sex in the book, but that often seems nearly beside the point when compared with the emotional revelations.
The May-December romance is by no means assured. The traumatic events that have come before are profound. What each of the characters has gone through prior to the point of their lives at which they currently find themselves could just as easily destroy the relationship as help it to flourish. There's also plenty of acting out and enough bad behavior to rend the relationship apart permanently.
Still, readers will appreciate the journey to understanding. After all, for the most part what we want from a relationship isn't the sex necessarily, but for someone else to truly see us as we are. Achieving that is something rare and beautiful indeed.
Thanks to Hogarth Press and Good Reads for letting me read an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book.
Where that path leads can be truly heart-breaking, but it is also where the magic of McBride's storytelling craft resides. The two main characters -- a young Irish woman fresh off the boat and just beginning her college study of acting and a successful middle-aged actor, who comes with his own baggage -- meet one night in a pub. Where they go from there is the essence of this tale.
What begins as a one-night hook-up for each turns into something much more profound, as they slowly begin to reveal the pain they bring to the relationship. Yes, there's a lot of sex in the book, but that often seems nearly beside the point when compared with the emotional revelations.
The May-December romance is by no means assured. The traumatic events that have come before are profound. What each of the characters has gone through prior to the point of their lives at which they currently find themselves could just as easily destroy the relationship as help it to flourish. There's also plenty of acting out and enough bad behavior to rend the relationship apart permanently.
Still, readers will appreciate the journey to understanding. After all, for the most part what we want from a relationship isn't the sex necessarily, but for someone else to truly see us as we are. Achieving that is something rare and beautiful indeed.
Thanks to Hogarth Press and Good Reads for letting me read an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book.
December 7, 2017
So, even though I had The Lesser Bohemians on my 'currently reading' shelf for over three months, I actually read the bulk of it in the last two days. I think I read the first 75 pages or something and then found myself unable to read this concurrently with War and Peace, so it got put aside for a few months. But even so, this is the longest it's taken me to read a book all year - and it's only 310 pages. So, why the delay?
Because the whole thing is written like this. I won't lie - this book is challenging and draining.
But interestingly, the style of prose isn't what ultimately hurt this for me. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it became easier (reading a few lines out loud every now and then helped), and I sort of vacillated between thinking it was pretentious gibberish, and thinking this Joycean stream of consciousness was actually a very profound and striking means of storytelling. I don't know, I still haven't made up my mind.
But my main problem with this book is the story itself, which is basically two highly melodramatic people having a lot of sex. 18-year-old Eilis meets 39-year-old Stephen, and we chronicle their dysfunctional liaison with a heightened pathos verging on absurdity. On the one hand, I sort of admire how Eimear McBride was able to make the stakes of this story feel so high when all that was really at stake was an unhealthy train wreck of a relationship; on the other hand, it got to be somewhat tedious. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't wholly captivated by this affair from time to time, against my better judgement.
What frustrates me about this novel is that even though it's told from Eilis' point of view, I think Stephen's story is the one that McBride really wanted to tell. His backstory was unexpected harrowing, more twisted and disturbing than I had possibly imaged. But the more he tells his story, the more Eilis fades. Her whole life and existence becomes about Stephen, and the novel that starts as Eilis's sexual bildungsroman ultimately casts Eilis in a rather inconsequential role. I was left feeling dissatisfied with her character's journey, which is frustrating when essentially all your novel has to offer in the first place is characterization.
I didn't hate it, though, even though I wanted to, for the most part. There was something undeniably stimulating and compelling about this book. I'm tentatively intrigued by McBride's style and I'm curious about her debut, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. But I would not recommend reading this author lightly - I'd only suggest picking up The Lesser Bohemians if you're up for a challenge and a bit of weirdness, and more than a fair share of sex scenes.
Thanks to Blogging for Books, Hogarth Press, and Eimear McBride for the copy provided in exchange for an honest review.
Down down I down to the last flakes in. Dreaming for hours I think in my dream. Over over. Day white tongue teeth. Quickness and slowness. Stilts pander to streets and their up down their. I don't know what I've yet. Wander where no notion wanders in amongst the dust of. Devil may Slip. Then wake up.
Because the whole thing is written like this. I won't lie - this book is challenging and draining.
But interestingly, the style of prose isn't what ultimately hurt this for me. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it became easier (reading a few lines out loud every now and then helped), and I sort of vacillated between thinking it was pretentious gibberish, and thinking this Joycean stream of consciousness was actually a very profound and striking means of storytelling. I don't know, I still haven't made up my mind.
But my main problem with this book is the story itself, which is basically two highly melodramatic people having a lot of sex. 18-year-old Eilis meets 39-year-old Stephen, and we chronicle their dysfunctional liaison with a heightened pathos verging on absurdity. On the one hand, I sort of admire how Eimear McBride was able to make the stakes of this story feel so high when all that was really at stake was an unhealthy train wreck of a relationship; on the other hand, it got to be somewhat tedious. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't wholly captivated by this affair from time to time, against my better judgement.
What frustrates me about this novel is that even though it's told from Eilis' point of view, I think Stephen's story is the one that McBride really wanted to tell. His backstory was unexpected harrowing, more twisted and disturbing than I had possibly imaged. But the more he tells his story, the more Eilis fades. Her whole life and existence becomes about Stephen, and the novel that starts as Eilis's sexual bildungsroman ultimately casts Eilis in a rather inconsequential role. I was left feeling dissatisfied with her character's journey, which is frustrating when essentially all your novel has to offer in the first place is characterization.
I didn't hate it, though, even though I wanted to, for the most part. There was something undeniably stimulating and compelling about this book. I'm tentatively intrigued by McBride's style and I'm curious about her debut, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. But I would not recommend reading this author lightly - I'd only suggest picking up The Lesser Bohemians if you're up for a challenge and a bit of weirdness, and more than a fair share of sex scenes.
Thanks to Blogging for Books, Hogarth Press, and Eimear McBride for the copy provided in exchange for an honest review.
August 17, 2016
Eily is an 18 year old Irish girl in London to attend a drama school. Stephen is a 38 year old successful actor tortured by his past. Eily meets Stephen and they fall in love.
The story is basically simple. The language is not.
McBride writes in a prose that is musical, rhythmic fragments from which the reader has to piece together a meaning. I found the writing dizzying in its challenge for many pages until I "mastered" its style and was able to generally understand it (in its overall meaning, not always the individual sentences-or rather, phrases).
Although there were moments when I enjoyed the sound of the prose, I was often very frustrated by the trying to make sense of it.
And when I did, I found the story to be a simple, rather banal one, filled with sex-sometimes happy, often brutal. Maybe it's just my age, but I found the sex boring, especially after the fifth or tenth or whatever episode.
I found the end lovely and it almost redeemed the book for me. But overall, I found this book to be a lot of work with not enough reward. Again, on the positive side, the prose was lovely and overall (in the end) the story somewhat touching.
This book was given to me by LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.
The story is basically simple. The language is not.
McBride writes in a prose that is musical, rhythmic fragments from which the reader has to piece together a meaning. I found the writing dizzying in its challenge for many pages until I "mastered" its style and was able to generally understand it (in its overall meaning, not always the individual sentences-or rather, phrases).
Although there were moments when I enjoyed the sound of the prose, I was often very frustrated by the trying to make sense of it.
And when I did, I found the story to be a simple, rather banal one, filled with sex-sometimes happy, often brutal. Maybe it's just my age, but I found the sex boring, especially after the fifth or tenth or whatever episode.
I found the end lovely and it almost redeemed the book for me. But overall, I found this book to be a lot of work with not enough reward. Again, on the positive side, the prose was lovely and overall (in the end) the story somewhat touching.
This book was given to me by LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.
April 20, 2025
I see it now, and so clearly tonight, that the opposite of love is despair.
The great paradox of McBride's art in this, a prequel of sorts and companion piece to 2025's The City Changes Its Face, is that she conjures up a sense of rawness, intimacy and emotional authenticity through a highly ornate style that luxuriates in its own conspicuous artfulness. From the opening lines, 'I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here's to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine' we are introduced to an elliptical, staccato, impressionistic voice that enjoys its own rhythms, assonance and half-rhymes (life... bite...mine). This both is and is not the voice of Eily- a seventeen year old Irish drama student in London for the first time whose innocence and naivety are part of what makes her so joyous but also so vulnerable but who, equally, may not be quite as linguistically sophisticated as her thoughts spilled lyrically on the page.
Not that that mattered to me - fiction is, after all, art and not reality so I am more than happy to enter into this contract with the text and to plunge into the extravagance of lexicon and language that is the spectacular hallmark of the writing here. But this book doesn't simply trade on its gorgeous style, it also delivers in terms of emotional payoff. For both Stephen and Eily herself are both, to different extents, 'walking wounded' and their coming together in a messy and messed up love affair is fraught and deeply troubled, even while it is grounded with a kind of simplicity of wonder in their good times.
The evocation of mid-1990s student life in north London (Camden Town, mainly) is recognisable in all those grotty bedsits and shared houses, the drinking, the careless sex, the regrets and the self-questioning. But it's in the awkward, bitter and disordered relationships that McBride's interest seems to lie, excavating the confused and chaotic feelings through which all her characters have to muddle.
The relationship between Eily and Stephen is claustrophobic and yet we feel a true sense of intimacy, not least through their vulnerability, especially in that long central section at around 50% through the narrative when Stephen reveals his traumatic past, a process which only binds them more closely together.
There's something about the messy poetry of McBride's vision which I find piercing - this is extreme in subject matter, unflinching in its power and passionate in its telling.
April 30, 2017
I didn't expect to react this way to a novel with this style and subject matter, but I am emphatically, unapologetically in love with this book. Although it has maybe the best sex scenes I've ever read, what I find most seductive about it is the way that the experimental writing so clearly enhances the reading experience. The compression and intricacy of the language sucked me into a vortex of sensations and emotions, and I closed my kindle feeling dizzy and blissful. A prize winner, as far as I'm concerned.
October 23, 2022
Historie o miłości we wszelkich jej kształtach i wymiarach, o uzdrawiającej mocy czułości, ale też o odnalezieniu własnego bólu w innym człowieku — to się nigdy nie zestarzeje; relacje międzyludzkie są i zawsze będą niewyczerpanym źródłem literackich inspiracji. W wielkim skrócie tak właśnie można opisać „Pomniejszych wędrowców”, niewątpliwie najpiękniejszą książkę, jaką dane mi było przeczytać w tym roku i kolejny dowód na wspaniałość literatury irlandzkiej.
Jestem całkowicie zachwycona intensywnością i żarliwością tej prozy; tym, co McBride robi z językiem i jakie zabiegi stosuje, by opowiedzieć o uczuciach i doświadczeniach bohaterów. Narracyjnie najbliżej tu do strumienia świadomości, ale autorka stosuje też szyk przestawny, który dodaje tej książce mnóstwo elegancji, a także wplata dialogi w opisy, robiąc to tak zręcznie, że czasem trzeba się zatrzymać, by zastanowić się, które z słów padły w rzeczywistości, a które pojawiły się jedynie w głowie głównej bohaterki. Pod względem językowym jest to z pewnością bardzo innowacyjna książka i jej skrajny odbiór nie dziwi mnie ani trochę. Nie jest to rzecz, którą kupiłabym w ciemno na prezent, mówiąc „Na pewno Ci się spodoba!”, ale zachęcam do pójścia do księgarni i przekonania się, czy taka niecodzienna narracja Wam odpowiada.
Przeczytałam tę książkę z wielkim wzruszeniem i pozostałam w nim jeszcze długo po zakończeniu lektury. Piękna jest ta nowa tendencja w literaturze, by pokazywać ludzi ze wszystkimi wadami i zaletami; prawdziwych — bez upiększeń, bez przekłamań.
Jestem całkowicie zachwycona intensywnością i żarliwością tej prozy; tym, co McBride robi z językiem i jakie zabiegi stosuje, by opowiedzieć o uczuciach i doświadczeniach bohaterów. Narracyjnie najbliżej tu do strumienia świadomości, ale autorka stosuje też szyk przestawny, który dodaje tej książce mnóstwo elegancji, a także wplata dialogi w opisy, robiąc to tak zręcznie, że czasem trzeba się zatrzymać, by zastanowić się, które z słów padły w rzeczywistości, a które pojawiły się jedynie w głowie głównej bohaterki. Pod względem językowym jest to z pewnością bardzo innowacyjna książka i jej skrajny odbiór nie dziwi mnie ani trochę. Nie jest to rzecz, którą kupiłabym w ciemno na prezent, mówiąc „Na pewno Ci się spodoba!”, ale zachęcam do pójścia do księgarni i przekonania się, czy taka niecodzienna narracja Wam odpowiada.
Przeczytałam tę książkę z wielkim wzruszeniem i pozostałam w nim jeszcze długo po zakończeniu lektury. Piękna jest ta nowa tendencja w literaturze, by pokazywać ludzi ze wszystkimi wadami i zaletami; prawdziwych — bez upiększeń, bez przekłamań.
Read
March 1, 2025This a story of a budding passionate love between two “lesser bohemians”: she is a drama student, eighteen, new to the metropolis; he is an actor, almost forty, with a tumultuous and destructive past. Both are haunted by childhood traumas. What could go right? What could go wrong? What’s new?
For the first hundred pages though i’ve forgotten about my unfortunate but well earned cynicism. McBride’s language has carried me through the streets, the haunts of north London intimately familiar to both of us and kept me believing in her creation of a reckless brave girl too eager to love.
In writing McBride lets herself to be free. She seems to be not self-couscous at all of her experimentation, not trying to show off. She just writes. And it is refreshing. Her syntax is quirky, her sentences are halves or quarters. Beckett once said he started to write in French to get rid off style. For the first hundred pages of so, i was convinced her unique stylish lack of style came to her totally naturally. One can say it was just a carefully but invisibly crafted internal monologue of her girl- main-character. But for me it felt wider than that: it was as if i’ve seen the author behind the girl, somewhere on the background gently shadowing the girl through all this new stuff in her life. And almost contrary to my expectations, it has actually added the authenticity to the voice.
Sex scene were also good. To write about sex is almost as difficult as to write about sport: ungrateful walking on the rope between the repetitive, physiological acts and a thrill impossible to render on the page. Or worse in case of sex: pseudo-romantic flavour. This novel is soaked in sex as you would expect. But for the first half at least the author has pulled it off without serious damage. The scene of losing virginity from a perspective of a young woman was probably the most poignant, unsentimental and therefore true to life i’ve ever read.
Another substance this novel is soaked in is literature, predominantly the Russian one*. Dostoevsky is here as well as Chekhov and Bulgakov. At least she avoids the worst of stereotypical admiration and uses The Possessed (The Devils): Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (as opposed to “White nights”, the recent 80 pages tik-tok favourite, or Raskolnikov) and Bulgakov’s Black Snow (as opposed to the usual “Master and Margarita”). In fairness, “The Devils” are actually important for her plot. The book serves as a prompt at the first meeting of our characters and raises a moral dilemma that haunts the novel: how much of forgiveness should go to a child molester. Dr. Faustus and another Dr. Faustus also appear doubling down on devil’s whispering into the ears the lovers. Initially the novel is deliciously dark but playful in spite of a risky premise: a possibility of a sincere and non-exploitative love between a grown up man and a still-teenage girl.
But then comes the middle part which is a confessionary monologue by the actor to the girl and through the eyes of the girl. It is an exhausting list of horrific childhood traumas, addictions, loss, grief and other partly self-inflicted misfortunes that would be sufficient for composing a separate mini-misery memoir. This has stuffed the novel like a turkey for Christmas. The idea of a forty-year-old unloading all of this on a shoulders of a young woman sounds quite bad by itself, though not unrealistic unfortunately. However, from my perspective as a reader, it felt the author overusing trauma narrative. I did not need all these troubles to be spelled out in such a level of details. Leaving some of them unspoken, just hinted would be much more impactful than providing a methodical recount of misfortunes and misdeeds in a monotonous prose. Maybe it was supposed to mimic the confession by Stavrogin in The Devils, albeit with some shifting of a victim vs monster roles. But the result is more akin A Little Life - lite. I understand why the tone of the actor's speech in the girl's conscience has to be so detached and dry: to compensate for the horror of the content. Still, this has done nothing for me apart wanting it to end and making me losing momentum of the present story.
In general my “wish list” would be to have a perspective on the actor independent of the girl’s conscience. When he is absent from her he is totally absent for us as well. I understand that it is the author’s deliberate choice. But maybe because of this and in spite of all the confessions, i could not quite understand what is that so attractive for her in his personality. (Ok: being damaged, two-times-older and good in bed might be enough but does not count as a character development). Moreover, i would be interested to find out who is he independent of her as a man in the present, not in the past. There are some emerging “strokes” like the perspective of his older friend. But still he remains more like a prompt for her dramatic imagination. This is a minor complaint though: I can see certain benefits doing it as she has done it as well.
The third part gets little repetitive and occasionally too melodramatic: one more needless betrayal one more sex scene here and there. The girl develops a taste for the “green eyed monster”; they enter into a competitive sport of wounding each other, and then begging for each other’s forgiveness very much in a style of Dostoevsky’s best characters. Nothing unexpected is in there and a bit too much of everything. However, there are some powerful scenes still. For example the girl rehearsing Julliet was quite good. Also the language is being revived a bit after the insipidness of the confessional part. Sometimes it is almost reaching the quality of a song:
North London, the atmosphere of the nineties is very good throughout.
But it seemed to me that the book has ran out of steam towards the middle and never fully recovered. There was this attempt of creating an additional layer with a backstory within a story. But those layers have stubbornly refused to blend for me. This book has reminded me of another contemporary novel Never Was by H Gareth Gavin. That one is as well a bildungsroman where sexual awakening plays a big part (though in that case the protagonist was a trans-man). Both books are dealing with love, grief, addiction, trauma, etc. Both books experiment with the language and even typesetting on the page. But “Never Was” is more daring and formally interesting in terms of the ambition of experimentation, the character development and layering of the narrative.
Anyway, “You want to be happy but there are more important things” as Eli, the girls says after watching Tarkovsky's film. I am about to find out how this develops in the sequel to this novel The City Changes Its Face that has been recently published. I am not sure where the logic of such a relationship would take the characters but I hope McBride would not disappoint.
__________________________
*I’ve learned that the author has spent a summer in Russia in her twenties where she has started to write seriously for the first time. That might explain her references to various Russian cultural arte-facts. Apart from Dostoyevsky, there is Chekhov’s “Seagull", Tarkovsky’s film "Nostalgia" and more rarely mentioned “Black Snow” by Bulgakov. “Black snow” is unfinished novel called “Theatre Novel” in russian. Apart from other things, it satirizes Konstantin Stanislavski whose methods “hinder actors' performances, reflecting Bulgakov's frustration with Stanislavski.” (Wiki).in “Black Snow”, there is also reference to Faustus opera . The acting training system by Stanislavski for actors training is also used in this novel when Eli is made to relive a scene from her past (a childhood trauma in her case) for acting it out in front of other students.
For the first hundred pages though i’ve forgotten about my unfortunate but well earned cynicism. McBride’s language has carried me through the streets, the haunts of north London intimately familiar to both of us and kept me believing in her creation of a reckless brave girl too eager to love.
In writing McBride lets herself to be free. She seems to be not self-couscous at all of her experimentation, not trying to show off. She just writes. And it is refreshing. Her syntax is quirky, her sentences are halves or quarters. Beckett once said he started to write in French to get rid off style. For the first hundred pages of so, i was convinced her unique stylish lack of style came to her totally naturally. One can say it was just a carefully but invisibly crafted internal monologue of her girl- main-character. But for me it felt wider than that: it was as if i’ve seen the author behind the girl, somewhere on the background gently shadowing the girl through all this new stuff in her life. And almost contrary to my expectations, it has actually added the authenticity to the voice.
Sex scene were also good. To write about sex is almost as difficult as to write about sport: ungrateful walking on the rope between the repetitive, physiological acts and a thrill impossible to render on the page. Or worse in case of sex: pseudo-romantic flavour. This novel is soaked in sex as you would expect. But for the first half at least the author has pulled it off without serious damage. The scene of losing virginity from a perspective of a young woman was probably the most poignant, unsentimental and therefore true to life i’ve ever read.
Another substance this novel is soaked in is literature, predominantly the Russian one*. Dostoevsky is here as well as Chekhov and Bulgakov. At least she avoids the worst of stereotypical admiration and uses The Possessed (The Devils): Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (as opposed to “White nights”, the recent 80 pages tik-tok favourite, or Raskolnikov) and Bulgakov’s Black Snow (as opposed to the usual “Master and Margarita”). In fairness, “The Devils” are actually important for her plot. The book serves as a prompt at the first meeting of our characters and raises a moral dilemma that haunts the novel: how much of forgiveness should go to a child molester. Dr. Faustus and another Dr. Faustus also appear doubling down on devil’s whispering into the ears the lovers. Initially the novel is deliciously dark but playful in spite of a risky premise: a possibility of a sincere and non-exploitative love between a grown up man and a still-teenage girl.
But then comes the middle part which is a confessionary monologue by the actor to the girl and through the eyes of the girl. It is an exhausting list of horrific childhood traumas, addictions, loss, grief and other partly self-inflicted misfortunes that would be sufficient for composing a separate mini-misery memoir. This has stuffed the novel like a turkey for Christmas. The idea of a forty-year-old unloading all of this on a shoulders of a young woman sounds quite bad by itself, though not unrealistic unfortunately. However, from my perspective as a reader, it felt the author overusing trauma narrative. I did not need all these troubles to be spelled out in such a level of details. Leaving some of them unspoken, just hinted would be much more impactful than providing a methodical recount of misfortunes and misdeeds in a monotonous prose. Maybe it was supposed to mimic the confession by Stavrogin in The Devils, albeit with some shifting of a victim vs monster roles. But the result is more akin A Little Life - lite. I understand why the tone of the actor's speech in the girl's conscience has to be so detached and dry: to compensate for the horror of the content. Still, this has done nothing for me apart wanting it to end and making me losing momentum of the present story.
In general my “wish list” would be to have a perspective on the actor independent of the girl’s conscience. When he is absent from her he is totally absent for us as well. I understand that it is the author’s deliberate choice. But maybe because of this and in spite of all the confessions, i could not quite understand what is that so attractive for her in his personality. (Ok: being damaged, two-times-older and good in bed might be enough but does not count as a character development). Moreover, i would be interested to find out who is he independent of her as a man in the present, not in the past. There are some emerging “strokes” like the perspective of his older friend. But still he remains more like a prompt for her dramatic imagination. This is a minor complaint though: I can see certain benefits doing it as she has done it as well.
The third part gets little repetitive and occasionally too melodramatic: one more needless betrayal one more sex scene here and there. The girl develops a taste for the “green eyed monster”; they enter into a competitive sport of wounding each other, and then begging for each other’s forgiveness very much in a style of Dostoevsky’s best characters. Nothing unexpected is in there and a bit too much of everything. However, there are some powerful scenes still. For example the girl rehearsing Julliet was quite good. Also the language is being revived a bit after the insipidness of the confessional part. Sometimes it is almost reaching the quality of a song:
“Tie up your long hair that the salt drops have wet. Being you have not known the fool’s triumph nor yet nor yet love lost as soon as won. No. That’s wrong. Only won here. Not lost at all.”
North London, the atmosphere of the nineties is very good throughout.
But it seemed to me that the book has ran out of steam towards the middle and never fully recovered. There was this attempt of creating an additional layer with a backstory within a story. But those layers have stubbornly refused to blend for me. This book has reminded me of another contemporary novel Never Was by H Gareth Gavin. That one is as well a bildungsroman where sexual awakening plays a big part (though in that case the protagonist was a trans-man). Both books are dealing with love, grief, addiction, trauma, etc. Both books experiment with the language and even typesetting on the page. But “Never Was” is more daring and formally interesting in terms of the ambition of experimentation, the character development and layering of the narrative.
Anyway, “You want to be happy but there are more important things” as Eli, the girls says after watching Tarkovsky's film. I am about to find out how this develops in the sequel to this novel The City Changes Its Face that has been recently published. I am not sure where the logic of such a relationship would take the characters but I hope McBride would not disappoint.
__________________________
*I’ve learned that the author has spent a summer in Russia in her twenties where she has started to write seriously for the first time. That might explain her references to various Russian cultural arte-facts. Apart from Dostoyevsky, there is Chekhov’s “Seagull", Tarkovsky’s film "Nostalgia" and more rarely mentioned “Black Snow” by Bulgakov. “Black snow” is unfinished novel called “Theatre Novel” in russian. Apart from other things, it satirizes Konstantin Stanislavski whose methods “hinder actors' performances, reflecting Bulgakov's frustration with Stanislavski.” (Wiki).in “Black Snow”, there is also reference to Faustus opera . The acting training system by Stanislavski for actors training is also used in this novel when Eli is made to relive a scene from her past (a childhood trauma in her case) for acting it out in front of other students.
November 16, 2017
So books are just like buses. You wait all year, then two 5 star reads come along one after another. (See previous review for a riveting analysis of my star awards.) As soon as I finished this book, I knew it was getting 5 stars from me. In fact half way through, I knew it was one of my favourite books of the year. However, it didn't start out that way. I hated the beginning. I haven't read McBride's other book yet (it's been sitting on my shelf since it won the Bailey's Prize) so this is my first taste of her writing style and it was a rocky start. I thought it was pretentious, faux Joyce, bullshit. So you see, it was not love at first sight. However, I kept at it and after thirty or so pages I started to get into the swing of things. Then I stopped noticing the writing, while at the same time I couldn't imagine it being written any other way. I'm not going into the plot (that's what book blurbs are for) but this is a story of youth, passion, adventure, love and abuse. No I don't mean the type of abuse that pretends to be a relationship (looking at you modern love stories and erotica), but it's a story of past abuses and how they can impact a normal, everyday, fucked up relationship. There was so much I loved about this book. The sex (yes, if you listen on audiobook people will 100% think you're listening to porn), the London location and nineties setting, the heartache and longing of a first relationship. It was messy, with talk of parties, drugs and regretted hook ups, which plausibly reminded me of so many past experiences (not all my own). Can I mention the sex again. It was good and bad in all the right ways. Graphic, but realistic. I think it might have been my favourite part. I'm not sure what that says about me and no I don't need to read erotica. I'm just grateful for some realistic sex in literary fiction. As for the disappointment. Again, the ending. Probably the last 30 pages were the worst part for me. And remember how I described the first 30 pages (pretentious, faux Joyce, bullshit). Even with these problems, I absolutely loved it. Now a note on recommending it to other people. I can entirely see why everyone would hate it and I can understand why. In some ways, I can't think why anyone else would remotely like it, as it was so clearly written with me in mind. But isn't that the greatest feeling you can have about a book.
October 25, 2024
Eily, an 18 year old Irish girl (sexually abused as a child), comes to London to study a drama school – making a conscious decision to lose her virginity. She starts a relationship with a middle aged actor Stephen (as it turns out reasonably well known, albeit living in an old run-down flat).
The book effectively documents their turbulent and sexually charged relationship – including a lengthy account by the actor of his past (emotionally then physically then, as a teenager, sexually abused by his mother which leads him to a life of sexual and substance abuse – and one relationship which lead to a child, who now lives in Canada) and then a second account by his ex-lover and mother of the child of her views of him and the relationship with the daughter.
Most of the book – particularly the first half is written in McBride’s unique and experimental style, one inspired by method acting (something which is explicitly referenced through the story) – effectively a stream of consciousness/speech and feelings, interior and external monologue’s combined.
When read holistically and quickly it proves both readable and to give a reasonably strong impression of what is happening. But when individual sentences are re-read the text makes close to no sense at all.
Much of the action is sexual between the two protagonists (or Eily and others) or written under by Eily under the effect of alcohol or strong emotions or self-harming.
There are two very different styles when Stephen finally tells her all about his past (in huge detail) and when he more briefly recounts the conversation with his daughter’s mother.
Although very unpleasant in subject matters these parts ground the book more and add an emotional (possibly slightly melodramatic) angle to Eily and Stephen’s story which when it resumes is in a modified version of McBride’s style – somehow reflecting the way in which the relationship of the characters (and their ability to face up to their past and how it has affected them) has changed.
By the book’s end this has become a conventional love story conducted and retold unconventionally by two deeply damaged individuals, as well as a book which clearly is partly autobiographical in its treatment of what it is like to live in London.
A powerful novel.
The book effectively documents their turbulent and sexually charged relationship – including a lengthy account by the actor of his past (emotionally then physically then, as a teenager, sexually abused by his mother which leads him to a life of sexual and substance abuse – and one relationship which lead to a child, who now lives in Canada) and then a second account by his ex-lover and mother of the child of her views of him and the relationship with the daughter.
Most of the book – particularly the first half is written in McBride’s unique and experimental style, one inspired by method acting (something which is explicitly referenced through the story) – effectively a stream of consciousness/speech and feelings, interior and external monologue’s combined.
When read holistically and quickly it proves both readable and to give a reasonably strong impression of what is happening. But when individual sentences are re-read the text makes close to no sense at all.
Much of the action is sexual between the two protagonists (or Eily and others) or written under by Eily under the effect of alcohol or strong emotions or self-harming.
There are two very different styles when Stephen finally tells her all about his past (in huge detail) and when he more briefly recounts the conversation with his daughter’s mother.
Although very unpleasant in subject matters these parts ground the book more and add an emotional (possibly slightly melodramatic) angle to Eily and Stephen’s story which when it resumes is in a modified version of McBride’s style – somehow reflecting the way in which the relationship of the characters (and their ability to face up to their past and how it has affected them) has changed.
By the book’s end this has become a conventional love story conducted and retold unconventionally by two deeply damaged individuals, as well as a book which clearly is partly autobiographical in its treatment of what it is like to live in London.
A powerful novel.
Read
January 4, 2025I am glad that I have finished this book, glad that I read it, though I am in a post-novel disappointment.
is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless tiers of ilium (or something more or less like that )
The novel opens with this intense interior monologue of a young woman from Ireland who is arriving in London to study at a drama college in the 1990s. This monologue is cut into by a counter voice of interior self-criticism in a smaller font. It was challenging to read and understand. This voice provides all the narration at first, it was hard to know at times who was speaking to who, but it was a style and approach that came strongly into its own when the young woman was drunk. Which as I was saying - young, student, London, 1990s - was often enough. Purely, of course, to try and keep the pubs open. She is very keen to lose her virginity, and, eyes meeting over a copy of Dostoevsky's "The Devils", she meets an older man (as it turns out a well known actor).
Then as the novel progresses further, it gets off the high horse of modernism and becomes pedestrian. Ultimate bad boy transformed by the self sacrificing love of a good woman, it couldn't be a bodice ripper, but only because her old bra is held together by a sticking plaster and so doesn'tneed ripping. Personally I wouldn't have thought that a sticking plaster would be sticky or strong enough to hold clothes together, but then I have always lacked the inventiveness or ingenuity to ever to try to repair clothes with anything other than a needle and thread.
There is, after a lot of relationship ups and downs, f'ing and blinding, drinking, & plenty of smoking; a long Stavrogin's confession section. In which the man tells the young woman the story of his life in sex , drugs, and drink. That section felt as though it was a hundred pages long, though it might have been only about thirty in fact.
After this the young woman's internal monologue calmed down considerably - that process might have began earlier, but I was distinctly aware of it then. Also from then on the man's voice breaks into the text more and more with direct narration. I wondered if McBride wanted to write a book about the young woman, or about the older man, or more regressively, if the drive in her life was to subordinate herself to his emotional gravity.
Anyhow the whole novel covers her first academic year in London, and in July, pages before the end of the book we learn the characters names, which out of kindness I will not spoil for you.
What with it being set in the world of theatre and drama, it is a literary book. Literary devils haunt the pages. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus gets a name check, there is Dostoyevsky's "Devils", and Marlowe's Faustus is a strong presence. I thought of the scenes in it in which Faustus, aided by his diabolical friend plays tricks on students and the Emperor, in this novels scenes of debauchery. I felt that the two main characters here were both Faust and Mephistophiles. Each yearning to escape their former life, each offers the other a chance to transcend it, both have a history of having been sexually abused in childhood, and part of their stormy relationship is acting that out. I have he suspicion that part of the attraction between them is that the other reminds them of their abuser, giving them a chance to replay the dynamic on their own terms. The devilry I thought an interesting aspect, I wonder if the whole novel is an homage to Dostoyevsky's "Devils" (the man who take on the project of saving people at low spots in their lives and the older man in his youth stepping off a good in a bargain with God struck me both as Dostoeyevskian motives too), problem is that I am not sure if I have actually read it or only read about it, and in any case, I sense that my Dostoyevsky days are behind me. For all that this novel did annoy me, I am impressed enough to be interested in what McBride will write next. And it strengthens my resolution to finally read Edna O'Brien's Country Girls, possibly next year, which I imagine McBride would have been aware of before writting her novel.
is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless tiers of ilium (or something more or less like that )
The novel opens with this intense interior monologue of a young woman from Ireland who is arriving in London to study at a drama college in the 1990s. This monologue is cut into by a counter voice of interior self-criticism in a smaller font. It was challenging to read and understand. This voice provides all the narration at first, it was hard to know at times who was speaking to who, but it was a style and approach that came strongly into its own when the young woman was drunk. Which as I was saying - young, student, London, 1990s - was often enough. Purely, of course, to try and keep the pubs open. She is very keen to lose her virginity, and, eyes meeting over a copy of Dostoevsky's "The Devils", she meets an older man (as it turns out a well known actor).
Then as the novel progresses further, it gets off the high horse of modernism and becomes pedestrian. Ultimate bad boy transformed by the self sacrificing love of a good woman, it couldn't be a bodice ripper, but only because her old bra is held together by a sticking plaster and so doesn'tneed ripping. Personally I wouldn't have thought that a sticking plaster would be sticky or strong enough to hold clothes together, but then I have always lacked the inventiveness or ingenuity to ever to try to repair clothes with anything other than a needle and thread.
There is, after a lot of relationship ups and downs, f'ing and blinding, drinking, & plenty of smoking; a long Stavrogin's confession section. In which the man tells the young woman the story of his life in sex , drugs, and drink. That section felt as though it was a hundred pages long, though it might have been only about thirty in fact.
After this the young woman's internal monologue calmed down considerably - that process might have began earlier, but I was distinctly aware of it then. Also from then on the man's voice breaks into the text more and more with direct narration. I wondered if McBride wanted to write a book about the young woman, or about the older man, or more regressively, if the drive in her life was to subordinate herself to his emotional gravity.
Anyhow the whole novel covers her first academic year in London, and in July, pages before the end of the book we learn the characters names, which out of kindness I will not spoil for you.
What with it being set in the world of theatre and drama, it is a literary book. Literary devils haunt the pages. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus gets a name check, there is Dostoyevsky's "Devils", and Marlowe's Faustus is a strong presence. I thought of the scenes in it in which Faustus, aided by his diabolical friend plays tricks on students and the Emperor, in this novels scenes of debauchery. I felt that the two main characters here were both Faust and Mephistophiles. Each yearning to escape their former life, each offers the other a chance to transcend it, both have a history of having been sexually abused in childhood, and part of their stormy relationship is acting that out. I have he suspicion that part of the attraction between them is that the other reminds them of their abuser, giving them a chance to replay the dynamic on their own terms. The devilry I thought an interesting aspect, I wonder if the whole novel is an homage to Dostoyevsky's "Devils" (the man who take on the project of saving people at low spots in their lives and the older man in his youth stepping off a good in a bargain with God struck me both as Dostoeyevskian motives too), problem is that I am not sure if I have actually read it or only read about it, and in any case, I sense that my Dostoyevsky days are behind me. For all that this novel did annoy me, I am impressed enough to be interested in what McBride will write next. And it strengthens my resolution to finally read Edna O'Brien's Country Girls, possibly next year, which I imagine McBride would have been aware of before writting her novel.
February 28, 2025
"I'd rather think of him as only lost instead of finding what he wanted inside some man he bought".
"I've never been closer to anyone than you and I've never loved anyone more".
"At first we are only people in love, reducing all life to the measure between us. But others pass into. Lives break through, making him go elsewhere and I become".
This is one of the most erotic love stories I've read in a long time. Eimear McBride's prose is written in disjointed and unsettling sentences that blur the two narrators telling the story- first there is Eily, a naive 18 year old Irish girl who goes off to London with big dreams of becoming an actress- and Stephen, the handsome and weary 38 year old actor she has an affair with.
Though this is a story that's been written through time and time again- young actress who comes of age through a dalliance with an older man, the story is made unique and refreshing again through the clipped and choppy sentences that suggest fragmented and torrid love.
The sex scenes are tastefully and brutally written, as if sex and love are all consuming and required as oxygen for Eily and Stephen.
There is also the subplot shown through Stephen's point of view about his brief dalliances with both men and women as a young actor, and his eventual ill-fated marriage to Marianne that produces their daughter Grace that adds to the melodramatic storyline.
But the story is supposed to be a chamber opera about two souls that fall in love with the stars aligned- and is why this is an affecting and beautiful novel.
"I've never been closer to anyone than you and I've never loved anyone more".
"At first we are only people in love, reducing all life to the measure between us. But others pass into. Lives break through, making him go elsewhere and I become".
This is one of the most erotic love stories I've read in a long time. Eimear McBride's prose is written in disjointed and unsettling sentences that blur the two narrators telling the story- first there is Eily, a naive 18 year old Irish girl who goes off to London with big dreams of becoming an actress- and Stephen, the handsome and weary 38 year old actor she has an affair with.
Though this is a story that's been written through time and time again- young actress who comes of age through a dalliance with an older man, the story is made unique and refreshing again through the clipped and choppy sentences that suggest fragmented and torrid love.
The sex scenes are tastefully and brutally written, as if sex and love are all consuming and required as oxygen for Eily and Stephen.
There is also the subplot shown through Stephen's point of view about his brief dalliances with both men and women as a young actor, and his eventual ill-fated marriage to Marianne that produces their daughter Grace that adds to the melodramatic storyline.
But the story is supposed to be a chamber opera about two souls that fall in love with the stars aligned- and is why this is an affecting and beautiful novel.
August 16, 2022
Uwielbiam książki o ludziach niedoskonałych, pokiereszowanych, czułych i rozbijackich, pełne emocji, których się nie rozumie i które trudno wytłumaczyć, opowiadające o relacjach, które zjadają i nasycają. O destabilizacji, która okazuje się terapeutyczna. O niespodziewanych odkryciach w sobie i drugim człowieku. O relacjach, po prostu, z całą ich złożonością, z której często chcemy brać tylko to, co ładne. O ludziach, w których wierzę. O historiach miłosnych, którym daleko do komedii romantycznych.
To, co mnie chwyta za serce najmocniej to ta nieoczywistosć relacji, widzianych od wewnątrz, bolesnych, pełnych namiętności, pasji, ale i nieświadomości i naiwności. Prawdziwych w swojej surowości, wwiercających się w przeszłość i szukających w niej odpowiedzi. Poharatani doświadczeniem ludzie, którzy popełniają błędy, dojrzewają w związkach, uczą się siebie i siebie nawzajem. Ludzie, którzy wielu rzeczy nie potrafią (wielu rzeczy, na które z łatwością rozwiązania znaleźliby niektórzy, mniej wyrozumiali, czytelnicy), często są niesłusznie obwiniani lub sami na siebie taką winę nakładają, wymierzając karę innym i sobie jednocześnie. Ludzie, którzy w coś wierzą; którzy - choć czasem tego nie widać - troszczą się o tę drugą osobę. Którzy coś odnajdują, z czymś walczą i dzięki czemuś zdrowieją. Którzy się otwierają na drugiego człowieka i przed nim. Ludzie, obok których w realnym życiu przeszlibyśmy obojętnie, może z jakimś komentarzem, oceną, bo przecież gołem okiem, rzuconym od niechcenia, wszystko można dostrzec (sarcasm alert).
Dorzućmy jeszcze piękny język, wręcz poetycko czuły, nieocenzurowany w treści i formie, konsekwentnie prowadzony oryginalnym stylem, trzymającym uwagę strumieniem świadomości, oblepiający niepowtarzalnym klimatem i lokalizacją (Londyn, lata 90.!), to jestem kupiona.
Tak, to jest w 100% tekst o 'Pomniejszych wędrowcach', których to skończyłam w emocjach wczoraj późno w nocy, po czym napisałam ten post, bo pójście spać wydało mi się niemożliwe.
* Jedyne (naprawdę jedyne!) co mi się nie podoba to polski tytuł. No nijak się ci wędrowcy mają do bohaterów, dynamiki ich relacji, sposobu życia i o życiu myślenia. A jeśli da się jakoś wędrowców wybronić (mam pewne przypuszczenia) to wówczas nie spinają się z "pomniejszymy". The Lesser Bohemians to piękny, lekki i wspaniale oddający treść, klimat, bohaterów i ich perspektywę tytuł. Szkoda.
To, co mnie chwyta za serce najmocniej to ta nieoczywistosć relacji, widzianych od wewnątrz, bolesnych, pełnych namiętności, pasji, ale i nieświadomości i naiwności. Prawdziwych w swojej surowości, wwiercających się w przeszłość i szukających w niej odpowiedzi. Poharatani doświadczeniem ludzie, którzy popełniają błędy, dojrzewają w związkach, uczą się siebie i siebie nawzajem. Ludzie, którzy wielu rzeczy nie potrafią (wielu rzeczy, na które z łatwością rozwiązania znaleźliby niektórzy, mniej wyrozumiali, czytelnicy), często są niesłusznie obwiniani lub sami na siebie taką winę nakładają, wymierzając karę innym i sobie jednocześnie. Ludzie, którzy w coś wierzą; którzy - choć czasem tego nie widać - troszczą się o tę drugą osobę. Którzy coś odnajdują, z czymś walczą i dzięki czemuś zdrowieją. Którzy się otwierają na drugiego człowieka i przed nim. Ludzie, obok których w realnym życiu przeszlibyśmy obojętnie, może z jakimś komentarzem, oceną, bo przecież gołem okiem, rzuconym od niechcenia, wszystko można dostrzec (sarcasm alert).
Dorzućmy jeszcze piękny język, wręcz poetycko czuły, nieocenzurowany w treści i formie, konsekwentnie prowadzony oryginalnym stylem, trzymającym uwagę strumieniem świadomości, oblepiający niepowtarzalnym klimatem i lokalizacją (Londyn, lata 90.!), to jestem kupiona.
Tak, to jest w 100% tekst o 'Pomniejszych wędrowcach', których to skończyłam w emocjach wczoraj późno w nocy, po czym napisałam ten post, bo pójście spać wydało mi się niemożliwe.
* Jedyne (naprawdę jedyne!) co mi się nie podoba to polski tytuł. No nijak się ci wędrowcy mają do bohaterów, dynamiki ich relacji, sposobu życia i o życiu myślenia. A jeśli da się jakoś wędrowców wybronić (mam pewne przypuszczenia) to wówczas nie spinają się z "pomniejszymy". The Lesser Bohemians to piękny, lekki i wspaniale oddający treść, klimat, bohaterów i ich perspektywę tytuł. Szkoda.
December 5, 2021
Review to come.
September 4, 2017
Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 13/16
Eimer McBride's second novel, The Lesser Bohemians takes a lot of elements that were present in her debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing but improves on it, thus making this novel a more enjoyable read.
I don't really want to repeat the main plot as it has been done in nearly every review I've read but I will go into the main theme of The Lesser Bohemians and that is love in all its forms. At the start we have erotic love (eros) which develops into what is known as true love (agape). So without saying there is a ton of sex in the beginning of the book, however as the love unfolds the couple in the book - an 18 year old student and a 40 year old actor start to reveal their true selves and this is where the book just elevates to a whole new level. In fact when the actor is telling his life story McBride takes a break from using her trademark self conscious stream of thought prose and reverts to a readable style.
From this point on the book becomes a sort of condensed version of Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. It is a sordid account but it is totally essential to the plot as it delves into other types of love that exists, brotherly love (filigia) selfish love, selfless love, love for material objects.It portrays the male protagonist in the book as a complex character, which totally different from the initial idea we readers get from him at the start of the novel.
I have read that the female protagonist is nothing but empty and submissive but this far from the truth. Since she is narrating the story she undergoes an evolution as well, from a meek girl who has a low opinion of her body, to a girl who understands the power of her gender to compassionate, yet rational lover and listener. Both through these character McBride unleashes her message: Love is strong, even when there are hurdles.
As with experimental authors, the writing style will polarize. McBride's writing may appear haphazard. There is use of alliteration, half-formed sentences, font size varies, even couplets appear but if the reader gives it a chance you have an oddly poetic novel and halfway through the book that style changes.
The Lesser Bohemians is a beautiful novel which is stuffed with many heartbreaking moments and although the subject matter is tough, the book is an rewarding experience.
Eimer McBride's second novel, The Lesser Bohemians takes a lot of elements that were present in her debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing but improves on it, thus making this novel a more enjoyable read.
I don't really want to repeat the main plot as it has been done in nearly every review I've read but I will go into the main theme of The Lesser Bohemians and that is love in all its forms. At the start we have erotic love (eros) which develops into what is known as true love (agape). So without saying there is a ton of sex in the beginning of the book, however as the love unfolds the couple in the book - an 18 year old student and a 40 year old actor start to reveal their true selves and this is where the book just elevates to a whole new level. In fact when the actor is telling his life story McBride takes a break from using her trademark self conscious stream of thought prose and reverts to a readable style.
From this point on the book becomes a sort of condensed version of Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. It is a sordid account but it is totally essential to the plot as it delves into other types of love that exists, brotherly love (filigia) selfish love, selfless love, love for material objects.It portrays the male protagonist in the book as a complex character, which totally different from the initial idea we readers get from him at the start of the novel.
I have read that the female protagonist is nothing but empty and submissive but this far from the truth. Since she is narrating the story she undergoes an evolution as well, from a meek girl who has a low opinion of her body, to a girl who understands the power of her gender to compassionate, yet rational lover and listener. Both through these character McBride unleashes her message: Love is strong, even when there are hurdles.
As with experimental authors, the writing style will polarize. McBride's writing may appear haphazard. There is use of alliteration, half-formed sentences, font size varies, even couplets appear but if the reader gives it a chance you have an oddly poetic novel and halfway through the book that style changes.
The Lesser Bohemians is a beautiful novel which is stuffed with many heartbreaking moments and although the subject matter is tough, the book is an rewarding experience.
April 30, 2025
More like a 1.5, but I'm feeling generous - and any novel that ends with a graphic blow-by-blow (sorry!) description of fellatio (complete with swallowing!), deserves an extra half-star! I almost bailed on this during the first 30 or so pages, however, since the stream of consciousness choppy enigmatic style (along with the British colloquialisms and references that had no resonance for this Yank), just wasn't doing it for me.
Although the story itself got better thereafter, and thankfully the author more or less abandoned the gobbledygook after the first 100 pages, I can't say I enjoyed this much - although I have some grudging admiration for it anyway. It actually should have been entitled 'Sex, Drugs, Tears and Vomit', since those seem to be the major themes ... and it often veers perilously close to soap opera territory, especially that treacle-y ending, with the two lovers gazing longingly from a hillside onto twilit London (AFTER aforementioned fellatio, that is), which unfortunately reminded me of the even more dreadful 'Serious Sweet'. Gag me. (...sorry/not sorry!)
Another of my disappointments is that from the précis, I was expecting a lot more about the heroine's drama school experiences (McBride herself matriculated at The Drama Centre at 17, so one would expect this to be at least semi-autobiographical). But apart from a few brief mentions, the plot mainly concerns her affair with an equally f**ked-up older actor, with both of them suffering from clichéd (danger: semi-spoilerish-ness ahead) childhood physical and sexual abuse.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sorry I read this one, considering McBride's debut novel seems even more off-putting, but I don't expect to find it in my best of the year pile ... or remember much about it in a week's time.
PS Does ANYONE think this relationship has a chance in hell of succeeding long-term?
Although the story itself got better thereafter, and thankfully the author more or less abandoned the gobbledygook after the first 100 pages, I can't say I enjoyed this much - although I have some grudging admiration for it anyway. It actually should have been entitled 'Sex, Drugs, Tears and Vomit', since those seem to be the major themes ... and it often veers perilously close to soap opera territory, especially that treacle-y ending, with the two lovers gazing longingly from a hillside onto twilit London (AFTER aforementioned fellatio, that is), which unfortunately reminded me of the even more dreadful 'Serious Sweet'. Gag me. (...sorry/not sorry!)
Another of my disappointments is that from the précis, I was expecting a lot more about the heroine's drama school experiences (McBride herself matriculated at The Drama Centre at 17, so one would expect this to be at least semi-autobiographical). But apart from a few brief mentions, the plot mainly concerns her affair with an equally f**ked-up older actor, with both of them suffering from clichéd (danger: semi-spoilerish-ness ahead) childhood physical and sexual abuse.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sorry I read this one, considering McBride's debut novel seems even more off-putting, but I don't expect to find it in my best of the year pile ... or remember much about it in a week's time.
PS Does ANYONE think this relationship has a chance in hell of succeeding long-term?
August 20, 2022
Ciężko jest pisać o książce, która okazała się jedną z twoich książek życia. Historia zaczyna się dość klasycznie. Młoda Irlandka rozpoczyna dorosłe życie studentki aktorstwa w Londynie. Jest zagubiona, ale pełna pragnienia zasmakowania nowego życia w obcym kraju i z nowo poznanymi ludźmi. Bardzo szybko spotyka w barze starszego od siebie o 20 lat mężczyznę, też aktora - i tak się zaczyna historia trudnej relacji (a ja jak wiadomo, o takich kocham czytać najbardziej).
Siedzimy w głowie narratorki, która raczy czytelniczkę/czytelnika swoim strumieniem świadomości. Jest to miejscami trudne w odbiorze, ale im dalej tym wchodzimy w tym rytm-nie rytm. Nie wiemy o niej wszystkiego, poznajemy wyrwane skrawki, które dopiero bardzo powoli zaczynają się układać w jedną całość. Podobnie jest z Nim, kawałek po kawałku dowiadujemy się więcej, a im więcej tym bardziej jest traumatycznie. Spotkało się więc dwoje pokiereszowanych i pełnych bólu ludzi, którzy chcą tej drugiej osobie powierzyć swoją historię. I powierzyć ciała, bo seksu i namiętności tu jest dużo, ale tak realistycznie i plastycznie opisanych, że ja byłam zahipnotyzowana.
To zdecydowanie powieść, do której będę wracać, i którą będę przytulać, przy której będę jeszcze płakać, ale której nie polecę niestety każdemu bo wiem, że wielu może jej nie poczuć. Już słyszę te żale, że jest toksycznie, że za dużo alkoholu i narkotyków, że znowu irlandzka powieść napisana w dziwnej językowej formie - bla bla bla. Ja kocham i kropka.
I na koniec TW: przemoc fizyczna, przemoc seksualna, uzależnienie, samookaleczanie.
Siedzimy w głowie narratorki, która raczy czytelniczkę/czytelnika swoim strumieniem świadomości. Jest to miejscami trudne w odbiorze, ale im dalej tym wchodzimy w tym rytm-nie rytm. Nie wiemy o niej wszystkiego, poznajemy wyrwane skrawki, które dopiero bardzo powoli zaczynają się układać w jedną całość. Podobnie jest z Nim, kawałek po kawałku dowiadujemy się więcej, a im więcej tym bardziej jest traumatycznie. Spotkało się więc dwoje pokiereszowanych i pełnych bólu ludzi, którzy chcą tej drugiej osobie powierzyć swoją historię. I powierzyć ciała, bo seksu i namiętności tu jest dużo, ale tak realistycznie i plastycznie opisanych, że ja byłam zahipnotyzowana.
To zdecydowanie powieść, do której będę wracać, i którą będę przytulać, przy której będę jeszcze płakać, ale której nie polecę niestety każdemu bo wiem, że wielu może jej nie poczuć. Już słyszę te żale, że jest toksycznie, że za dużo alkoholu i narkotyków, że znowu irlandzka powieść napisana w dziwnej językowej formie - bla bla bla. Ja kocham i kropka.
I na koniec TW: przemoc fizyczna, przemoc seksualna, uzależnienie, samookaleczanie.
March 17, 2017
But I have come into my kingdom where only pens and pencils were. Abrupt and all abrupt. No longer minnow in the darkness and the deep. Through the portholes and currents I’ve been. Going to the surface. Up into the sun. Touch my own throat. His long arm. Shining like a body come fresh into the light.
The plot of The Lesser Bohemians can be summarised all too briefly: An eighteen-year-old girl comes from small town Ireland to London in order to study acting and becomes romantically entangled with an older, successful actor whose childhood demons have prevented him from ever knowing real love before. And as a follow-up to the much lauded A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, one can expect (and does find) that author Eimear McBride will continue to play with language and syntax and narrative forms. And while neither of these facts (soap opera-ish plot + challenging writing) might sound like an enjoyable reading experience, the truth of small moments throughout had me streaming with tears, and I'm left wrung out, flattened, and satisfied. I'm not without complaints, and I appreciate that this book wouldn't be for everyone, but I'm so happy that I finally picked it up. To begin at the beginning, this is the opening paragraph:
I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here's to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine.
And I still have no idea what that paragraph means. But, take cheer, the prose becomes more accessible, and the reader eventually picks up McBride's quirks; as one does when learning another language. Told from the perspective of the Irish maiden (we don't learn her name 'til halfway through), we gather that she has led a sheltered, protected life, and once in the city and exposed to drink and drugs and casual sexual advances for the first time, she is eager to embrace all that her new life offers. When she meets a charming older man at the pub one night, and is just drunk enough to play brazen, she agrees to go back to his place and secretly unburden herself of her virginity. The scene that follows is so totally believable – from the surprising squalor of the man's bedsit to the graphic bodily descriptions – that the jumbled half-sentences that leap from the physical sensations to the emotional reactions to the eventual verbalisation seems the very description of how the brain works. While each of the pair intends this to be a one time thing, when their paths cross again by accident (and eventually again by her intent), a relationship of sorts is formed, and it is revealed that not only is she missing a father in her life, but he is estranged from a daughter just a year younger than her. How psychological.
you know
it was too late and
all of a sudden, I was that became
a person who has done the worst thing
is that even a person anymore?
Eventually, we also learn that they are both hiding a history of having been molested as children, and while that might have explained her initial fear of sex, for him, it explains twenty years of self-harming behaviour. Over the course of sixty pages, he tells her everything he has never told anyone before, and while on the one hand I appreciated that this story was much more believable and touching than the strainful eye-rolling induced by A Little Life, on the other, because he is just straight talking and talking for pages, the writing is just straight talking and talking; all the charm and inventiveness of McBride's language is suspended for this long stretch (and again near the end when he tells her another story). Happily, story overshared, there is room again for her reaction:
It scares me, I say. I know, I can see. It was a terrible way to behave and way to be in. But looking down on me now, he also looks young and frightened. Together at least in the fear of it. Hedging round the light. Can I touch you? he says then and I cannot think of anything I want more. So go put myself against him. Feel him all around me. I'm sorry, so sorry, he says I can't imagine what it's like for you to hear these things. And what it's like is I've pushed my fingers right through his skin, caught hold of his ribs and must now fall with him. Down through the world while he grasps at everything. But we make the same rattling sound I think. And so keep close together until we are calm. Can let go, finger by finger. Then sit back down. Person looking at person. Like shy and new again.
At one point, he tries to end things by saying that now that he knows that love is possible – that he might even yet marry and have a proper family – he knows that she has a life to live before settling down; that it would be proper for him to set her free. And I like that moment of self-awareness of how icky this affair really is: I can totally buy that he was damaged and felt worthless and she came along just at the right time to give him what he needed, but if he really was healing and ready to grow the hell up, he would do better to challenge himself with a fully grown-ass woman. On the other hand, this story is told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old, and boy do I remember eighteen; and if I had been in love with a thirty-nine-year-old at that age, no one, not even he, could have told me that I didn't know exactly what I was doing. What elevates this story above Nicholas Sparks-type romance is that the reader knows better; the storyline might be soap opera-ish, but we learn exactly what made these characters behave the way they do, and if it appears to be a happy ending, that's merely because McBride decided to end the story on a happy day.
So, while I could have done without the long storytelling sections from him that interrupted the flow, when it was flowing, so were my tears; tears of recognition and identification with truth. And that's my very favourite thing to discover while reading.
February 2, 2025
At the halfway point I was poised to give up on this book. I'm quite pleased I stuck with it, as things pick up at around halfway when Stephen, a 39-year-old professional actor, reveals to Eilis, the 18-year-old Irish student with whom he is in an on-off relationship, the dark secrets of his childhood.
'The Lesser Bohemians' is undeniably inventive, well written, credibly evokes 1990s London and the dysfunctional love affair at the heart of the book, and yet, overall, I found it more annoying than anything else, and I was very relieved once I'd finished.
I would probably never have picked up 'The Lesser Bohemians' had it not been chosen by a member of my book group. It should make for an interesting discussion though, as much of the narrative is written in a fragmented, discontinuous, modernist style that, whilst initially hard to follow, becomes much more accessible as the book progresses.
I doubt I'll ever read anything else by Eimear McBride, however I can now see why many rate her work highly.
3/5
'The Lesser Bohemians' is undeniably inventive, well written, credibly evokes 1990s London and the dysfunctional love affair at the heart of the book, and yet, overall, I found it more annoying than anything else, and I was very relieved once I'd finished.
I would probably never have picked up 'The Lesser Bohemians' had it not been chosen by a member of my book group. It should make for an interesting discussion though, as much of the narrative is written in a fragmented, discontinuous, modernist style that, whilst initially hard to follow, becomes much more accessible as the book progresses.
I doubt I'll ever read anything else by Eimear McBride, however I can now see why many rate her work highly.
3/5
August 25, 2022
Na początku pomyślałam: grafomania. Za dużo pretensjonalnych metafor, dziwnego rytmu, zaniechań. A potem jednak mnie wchłonęło. Przyzwyczaiłam się do stylu, nieustającej szarpaniny, zaangażowała mnie drobiazgowo rozpisana toksyczność, wiarygodna perspektywa młodej aktorki, puls Londynu. Nie zgadzałam się z postaciami, często mnie wkurzały, ale chciałam czytać dalej i dalej. Niespodziewanie.
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