Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: <\/p>\n
W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona<\/em>. How she would have liked that name; how she would have pranced round introducing herself with ‘Hi, I’m Wall Suddenly Cara.’ (p 45)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
People keep getting her wrong: someone misspeaks her name as Tara; a journalist spells it as Ciara; queer acquaintances argue at their memorial for her, disagreeing about her personality traits and what motivated her, what she really was like. And then there’s Pen, her girlfriend, the narrator: her memories and fantasies and dreams, nothing a neutral observation, not after a thirteen-year on-and-off relationship. Pen’s funny and sarcastic and tender and nurturing and an endearing narrator, and it’s interesting to read her story, her story of her years loving Cara and her story of the week of Cara’s funeral, intermingled. Pen’s story in its particulars is more interesting to me than the larger milieu of Ireland from the ’70s through the ’90s, Church and family and feminism in a Catholic country, and queer feminism in a Catholic country, though that’s all there, layered. This makes me want to read more of Donoghue’s novels: I’ve only read her short story collections before, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits<\/em>, which I didn’t like, and Kissing the Witch<\/em>, which I did. She’s a graceful writer, whether she’s describing sex or the woods at night or the city scenery, like this: <\/p>\n
On a long wall on Leeson Street was stamped, over and over, Dublins beautiful keep it clean<\/em>. I though of adding Language is beautiful; keep it punctuated<\/em>, then sighed at my teacherly intolerance and looked away. Dublin was undeniably beautiful today, the sun bringing out the red of the brick terraces, catching the fan-lights over the Georgian doors. Even the odd burnt-out building looked rather decorative, as if left over from a film set. (pp 183-184) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona. How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}