![]() Yet beyond all these fully justified plaudits, Milkman needs to be recognized as a book that sounds the soul of the people and the place it portrays. ![]() Heralding its originality, its humour, its charm and seductiveness, as well as its bewitching “strangeness” and “eccentricity”, critics cite a series of forbearers that any author would be proud to claim, among them Swift, Sterne, and most frequently, Beckett.Īnna Burns with the cover of her novel Milkman, which has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. They laud its humanism, its condemnation of tribalism and inner-community surveillance and control, as well as its attention to the still underplayed dynamics of gender inequality during the Troubles, in particular women’s vulnerability to a predatory violence at once psychological and physical. Reviews have praised the effectiveness of its most notable characteristic: the erasure of specific names in favour of a surreally generic set of signposts. Whatever the result of the deliberations of the Man Booker Prize judges on Tuesday, the extent of the achievement represented by Anna Burns’s Milkman in Irish literature should continue to be hailed and celebrated. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |