The difficulty and the rewards of reading Anna Burns's Milkman - life in time of trauma

Glad I took the advice of M and of friend KK and returned to Anna Burns's Booker-winning novel, Milkman, as reading just the first 30 pp. or so does not give you time to inhabit the strange world of this novel. The narrator, a woman looking back at her youth (probably about 18 years old?) in the 1970s in Northern Ireland tells her story in the strangest possible manner, a meandering narration that jumps about among topics and settings from a narrator that seems completely unaware of then niceties of social interaction, much less of conventional storytelling. For one thing, she never uses names (even her own, I think), but calls her boyfriend her "maybe boyfriend," calls her brother-in-law something like "husband of third sister," calls her stalker "Milkman." Something in the narration reminds me of early Pynchon - perhaps the strange monikers, perhaps the sense of a cadre of friends and neighbors all of them odd - "the whole sick crew," as Pynchon called it. It definitely takes some time to get into the narrator's frame of mind, but as that happens we begin to realize that this is a smart and complex story about a society in fragments, the days of "the Troubles," or, as the characters call them in this book, "the Sorrows." So these young people are trying to lead ordinary lives with the usual interests of the young of their set - love, sex, cars, drinking - but everything in their lives is colored by the hatred and violence all around: why you can't walk in some neighborhoods, can't draw attention to yourself, all part of the fabric of lives in time of trauma. Amidst all the flotsam and seemingly unrelated detail are some fantastic scenes, notably the narrator's father's dying words - about abuse he endured as a child - and the strange scene in the French-language class when the teacher explains to the students that the sky is not always "blue" - a metaphor for this entire novel, which shows that everything is not "black and white" but there many shades and coloration to all aspects of life, once examined.