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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Fine story in current New Yorker that echoes Trevor

Good story, with a bad title (at least for American readers!, The Coast of Leitrin - which is the small Irish province where most of the story takes place) by Kevin Barry in the current New Yorker; superficially, it's a love story, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, I won't divulge the ending but will say that the last movement of the story felt rushed and more a matter of the author bringing his narrative to a conclusion rather than a conclusion that seems to develop organically, as a natural outcome of the interaction of the characters, background, style, and setting. That said, Berry does a great job establishing these characters, especially the protagonist, Seamus, 35, who seems like a next-generation version (coffee shops instead of pubs, the internet and Google searches instead of pub talk and gossip) of one of William Trevor's Irish "hill bachelors." He's living alone in a small farmhouse left to him by an uncle, despairing of ever meeting friends much less a girlfriend, and developing a huge crush, which for some time he does nothing about, on the Katarina, Polish barista (baristo?) in the local coffee shop (seems to be a Starbucks, yes, even in remote Ireland). At first this reminded me of one of the great Onion headlines: Source, barista is not flirting with you. But in this case, though she isn't flirting, it turns out that once Seams gets up the courage to ask, she's eager to go out on a date with him. Things work out surprisingly well, until they don't, and Berry is smart and insightful in his charting of their relationship, of giving us enough insight in the S' thoughts, fears, and obsessions and keeping K enigmatic enough to maintain our interest (and his). Berry is not well known yet in the U.S., but he's published a few fine stories in the New Yorker and it looks as if they're grooming him to fill Trevor's shoes, so to speak.

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