BlissAndConversation.com

      I begin with Ireland because the stories I heard as a child of mixed ancestry about my Irish forebears were the most intriguing.  With books and theatre in my blood, I felt attuned to a literary culture that’s one of the richest in the English-speaking world.   You can learn how that came about in “How The Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill.  In Irish monasteries, monks used their island refuge to preserve history and literature ravaged by the warrior hordes cutting a swathe across Europe in the Middle Ages.  Cahill does their history proud in this fascinating book.  

        The psychology of the Irish people is nowhere better dissected than in Sean O’Faolain’s classic, “The Irish”.

            A good guidebook is a must.  Fodor’s, Eye Witness Travel, Rough Guide all have their pros, cons and fans, but I’m never without The Cadogan Guide.  This series is written by native writers and includes details, local lore and legends missing in other series.

Contemporary Irish novelists include John Banville who won the 2005 prestigious Mann-Booker prize for his absorbing novel “The Sea”, in which a widower turns to childhood memories as a coping mechanism.  The scope of another Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle ranges from the comedy of his Barrytown Trilogy (“The Commitments”, “The Snapper” and “The Van”, all filmed) to his latest novel, “Paula Spencer” about a women who overcame her attachment to an abusive husband.  William Trevor’s “Fools of Fortune” (also a film with Julie Christie) is an intense and evocative novel set in one of Ireland’s “Big Houses” between the civil strife-torn years of 1918-1983.

And let’s not leave out the ladies.  Edna O’Brien, now 77, began in her 20s with “The Country Girls”, a trilogy about the lives of young Irish women which was banned in Ireland then, and has chronicled her broken heart and bleeding country ever since, most recently in “The Light of the Evening” (2006).  Here a dying mother and her estranged daughter, whose novels are notorious, meet on the last lap of their life together.

Journalist Nuala O’Faolain has written a wonderful semi-autobiographical novel, “My Dream of You”, in which her heroine’s search for love and self-worth leads with humor through pain to a place where past and future can meet.  Marian Keyes is the irrespressible Irish chick lit goddess, whose books (“Sushi for Beginners” “Anybody Out There?”)  capture the conflicts and passions of contemporary young Irish women.

Into each trip pure escapism must fall and I indulge it with a little mystery, perhaps a historical from Peter Tremayne’s wonderful Sister Fidelma series, whose sleuth is a 7^th century dalaigh (lawyer) of the Breton Court.  Or a fast-paced contemporary from  Ken Bruen, whose Jack Taylor series (“The Dramatist”) set in Galway on Ireland’s Gaelic west coast,.features an ex-cop who can’t keep away from crime and the bottle.   

           James Joyce’s classic “Ulysses”, a glorious tintinnabulation of wordplay, follows  Leopold Bloom through a long day’s journey into a scatological Dublin night.  It’s neither a quick nor an easy read but it’s the fascinating place where Joyce breaks conventional forms and then remolds them.  Here you’ll meet Buck Mulligan, based on Joyce’s then friend, Oliver St. John Gogarty, a surgeon, Irish senator and writer (“As I Was Going Down Sackville Street”).

Buck Mulligan severed Gogarty’s camaraderie with Joyce but he maintained his friendship with poet William Butler Yeats who honeymooned at Gogarty’s Renvyle House (now a hotel) and held a séance there. 

As to the works of Mr. Yeats, my suggestion is to give the Collected Poems a perennial place at your bedside.  Those who dip into them find images that linger long after a voyage ends.  His philosophy echoes in lines from his poem “A Prayer for Old Age”.

“God guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone;

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow-bone”