Night Boat to Tangier

Pete T. lent me Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier (Doubleday, 2019) and I finished it yesterday evening. An interesting novel - Irish in subject matter and turning of phrase, a disdaining indented paragraphs like Alasdair Gray's Lanark; two men waiting for the arrival of a thirds person who is the daughter of one of the men (None bear the name of Godot.) while the child arrives without drawing attention to her; told in a prose that strikes me as close to a prose poem.

For almost five years he drifted almost in Spain in this way. He was a young man still, but he did not feel young at all. he ran from the hard faced gaatch of himself. The sense elements that were most vivid - 

the chemical tang on the wind that came across the beach by night in Tarifa

the cathedral stone that was hot to the touch in the evening sun of Salamanca

the migraine whine of gathered voices above the cafe bar at the estacion de autobuses in Granada

-  did not amount to a consciousness of that time but made the textures for it only. He no grip at that time. He moved on the breeze.

Chapter Ten: The Gesture Wound

I picked that out that passage at random. Barry does not bulk up his prose  it feels more sinewy. Sinewy has its own strengths 

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3/10/20