5.04.2010

a long long way



Last night I started Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way. I am already so enchanted with Barry's writing style. Here's a passage that I read before I fell asleep; I reread it 3 times, struck by the beauty of it.

Such a singing voice he had. His mother, who was a blunt woman enough, one of the Cullens herself, daughter of the coppicer on the Humewood estate in Wicklow, got only good from it. She set him on a chair to sing like any woman might, and he threw his small head back and sang some song of the Wicklow districts, as might be, and she saw in her mind a hundred things, of childhood, rivers, woods, and felt herself in those minutes to be a girl again, living, breathing, complete. And wondered in her private mind at the power of mere words, the mere things you rolled round in your mouth, the power of them strung together on the penny string of a song, how they seemed to call up a hundred vanished scenes, gone faces, lost instances of human love.
Heading back into the story now.
Good night.

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