Mike McCormack (1)Recensioni

This felt a detached and slightly sinister story of Nealon, who has been in detention for eighteen months pending a trial that doesn’t begin due to some procedural irregularity.
He returns home to the farmhouse he has inherited from his father on the west coast of Ireland, to find his wife and child of six years have left. However he keeps receiving unsolicited phone calls from an unnamed man, asking for a meeting, which is in some unnamed small city on the east coast of Ireland, a couple of hours drive away.
After some time he goes to meet the unnamed man in a hotel foyer (a place of transit) and has a meandering conversation, whilst a national security emergency commences in the background.

That’s it.

It’s well written, initially engaging, somehow similar to (but not the same as) his previous book, Solar Bones (which I really enjoyed). But it doesn’t arrive and, for me, became knowing pretentious navel gazing.
Oh, I wish I could have enjoyed it, as I did so like Solar Bones.

I should have taken Nealon’s advice, but I was already two thirds through the book: “Keep talking in riddles like this and I will be out of here in two minutes.”

I can't remember much about this book, after all the years since I read it.

This book captivated me with its use of the language and its keen observations on life. If you like traditional structure and can’t bear a punctuation mark to be missing, forget it; it’s one long sentence. One long surprisingly readable, poetic, long sentence that somehow manages to convey the intricacies, heartbreaks and humor of life with its look at everything from politics to economics to construction on the smallest of scales. It’s definitely not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but honestly, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s going to win the Man Booker. Given my feelings on Lincoln and the Bardo (love), that’s saying something.

In a small town in Ireland on All Souls’ Day in 2009, Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and reminisces about his life. His thoughts touch on his family, work as a civil engineer, political views, epidemics, and economic conditions. He reflects on his two children, Agnes and Darragh, when they were young and now that they have grown.

It is told in stream-of-consciousness without traditional punctuation. I am not generally a fan of writing that does not provide natural breaks for the reader. However, if you are like me in this regard, I heartily recommend the audio performance by Tim Gerard Reynolds. The prose is poetic and flows beautifully in the narration. There is a reason for the unusual structure, which will eventually become apparent. I own a copy of the e-book, so I was able to appreciate the author’s artistic intent.

Solar Bones is a 2016 novel by Irish fiction writer Mike McCormack. The novel's plot revolves around Marcus Conway, a deceased middle-aged engineer who has returned on All Souls' Day, and is reminiscing about his past life's events while sitting at his kitchen table.

P28. ....reminds me, should I ever forget, that my childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends has remained intact over four decades...

...this circular dreamtime of chaos...

“... why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium, the light superimposed on itself so that all things are out of synch and kilter, things as themselves but slightly different from themselves also, every edge and outline blurred or warped and each passing moment belated, lagging a single beat behind its proper measure, the here-and-now beside itself, slightly off by a degree... “ p. 91

Excellent, visceral collection of short stories. Not all zingers, but all of them with a hefty punch in the plot, and plenty of them will resonate and rest in my mind long after reading. Thematically focussed on Irish life, with often surreal or fantastical events that invade mundane circumstances.

a story and social criticism
  that covers themes of political engagement, locality, time, and family life,
  that on paper might seem simple, aside from its nonlinear structure and its being one continuous sentence from start to finish,
  but there is a lot
  that makes this one of the most beautiful, poetic, striking, humerous and engaging books that I have ever read and
  that is in unlocked by its simplicity,
  although maybe, being from the west of Ireland,
  it also cuts a little close to the
  sod

Marcus Conway hears the bell of Angelus while sitting at his kitchen table waiting for his wife to come home on All Soul's Day. He speaks to the reader in a stream of consciousness remembering his town and past. Marcus is a middle-aged civil engineer with a lifetime of stories and struggles. He sees the world from the point of an engineer, and it provides a split in his world. Much like modernism's creation when the world broke in two, Marcus' world is also deeply divided. Politicians and engineers create the divide in his world. There seems to be a battle between votes and where money and improvements go. The boom-bust cycle in Ireland in the early 2000s is taking its toll in construction and even in the maintenance of the water system. It also creates friction between doing things right and politicians keeping workers happy. This split will also bring problems to his family.

Reading this book the reader may feel like he is in the early twentieth century. The language flows, and there is the influence of Joyce or even Woolf in the words and style. The reader is pulled back into modern times with mentions of the internet and cell phones. Time passes for Marcus not only does he age but so does his father. His children become adults. The news bulletins on the radio continue after the tone to mark the top of the hour as it has done throughout Marcus' life, dividing his day. It is a reminder of time passing much like the Angelus bell marks the time at the beginning of the book. Time moves on carrying us with it and in the end, like Marcus, there never seems to be enough. An excellent novel that captures the spirit of modernism in the present day.

This book is written in a unique format that feels more like reality than most books. I felt I was there living life with the characters. The story itself was not so interesting now that I am finished, but while reading it was very engaging.

De Ierse schrijver Mike McCormack (°1965) is uiteraard niet de eerste die zich waagt aan een extreem lange interne monoloog. Zijn illustere landgenoot James Joyce en ook Virginia Woolf zijn maar twee bekende voorbeelden. Maar McCormack is er toch in geslaagd zijn eigen draai aan het proçédé te geven: het hele boek zitten we echt voortdurend in het hoofd van Marcus Conway, die over 260 bladzijden gespreid terugblikt op recente en minder recente fases uit zijn leven en mijmert over de meest diverse, soms erg triviale problematieken. Conway is uitvoerend ingenieur op een gemeentelijke dienst in het westen van Ierland, en is een bezorgde echtgenoot en vader. Op het eerste gezicht lijkt deze vriendelijke man onmogelijk het geschikte voorwerp van een interessante roman. En toch.
McCormack slaagt erin onze aandacht gaande te houden, ook al is zijn stilistische aanpak niet gemakkelijk: er staat geen enkel punt in dit boek, technisch is het dus één enkele zin, maar er vallen uiteraard markeringen te plaatsen, want de interne monoloog van Marcus verloopt associatief, met telkens grote inhoudelijke blokken over de meest diverse voorvallen of onderwerpen.
Opvallend is het terugkerend thema van opbouw en verval: de ingenieur Conway heeft een bijzonder oog voor het wonderlijke van bouwwerken en machines, menselijke prestaties waarin zelfs goddelijke kracht weerspiegeld wordt; hij haalt zelfs de leuke boutade aan dat God na de Schepping het werk bewust heeft overgedragen aan ingenieurs. Maar evenzeer zoomt hij in op de talloze tekenen van verval om hem heen, met uiteraard de financiële crisis van 2008 (die in Ierland tot een catastrofale instorting van de economie leidde) als hoogtepunt, maar ook de geheimzinnige watervergiftiging die zich in zijn stad voordoet (sterke verwijzingen hier aan La Peste van Camus) en waarvan zijn vrouw mee het slachtoffer wordt.
Niet alle fragmenten zijn even geslaagd of zelfs gelaagd (soms worden gewoon telefoonconversaties weergegeven), maar het geheel beklijft wel. En dan is er vooral de slotpassage, zo’n 30 pagina’s lang die werkelijk weergaloos is. McCormack is zeker niet voor iedereen, dat waren Woolf en Joyce evenmin, maar met deze ‘Solar Bones’ is mijn leesjaar 2020 echt wel met een luide ‘knal’ van start gegaan.½

I had already bought a copy of this book before the Booker longlist was announced, because it won the Goldsmiths Prize and was well received by reviewers whose opinions I trust.

The whole book is a single sentence monologue, which tells quite a conventional story of a mid-life crisis but is rather more interesting than that would suggest, since the topics it covers are wide-ranging and universal. The narrator is a middle-aged engineer, who works for a local council in Mayo. I was aware that there was some discussion last year about an apparent spoiler on the cover of the Irish original, which does not appear on the UK Canongate edition. Apparently the author intended the reader to be aware of this, and there are certainly plenty of hints, not least in the opening.

Given its unconventional structure, the book is surprisingly easy to read, and despite the lack of full stops there are plenty of line breaks, either to indicate reported speech or to suggest possible break points. The competition is such that I think this one is unlikely to win this year's prize, but it was an interesting one to read.

Marcus Conway is a ghost. On All Souls Day, he sits at the dinner table waiting for his family to return, and unspools a stream-of-concious monologue about this life written in a single sentence (this is the second single-sentence novel I've read recently!). The single sentence isn't as apparent in the audiobook - deftly narrated by Timothy Reynolds - but I do notice that he starts phrase with "and" a lot, adding a certain rhythmn to the prose. Marcus talks about his own father's death, his sometimes troubled relationship with his wife and children, and his work as a civic engineer. Local politics also plays a big part of his story, from voting to a politicians thickheaded insistence on building a school that's not structurally sound, to even the awful stomach virus that infects his community - including his wife - caused by bad sanitation. Over time, Marcus unravels the details of his own death and comes to terms with his mortality. The thing about this novel is that for all the experimental nature of its narrative, Marcus is a perfectly ordinary person doing ordinary things. McCormack's writing unveils the fascinating stories within the everyday person.

I appreciate what the author is trying to do here, but it's not the kind of gimmick I can get into. It's not an enjoyable or immersive reading experience for me.

If your work has substance it does not require a gimmick. That is my firm belief.

This book was written in one sentence from start to end. It’s a story of a middle aged engineer in Dublin sitting at his dining table waiting for his wife and children to come back from his funeral, contemplating about his life. The story lacks true substance and meanders around.

This was long listed for the Booker’s prize. I really question the award itself now.½

one book. one sentence. creative writing. take a moment to get used to it. a story like gentle waves.½

There is plenty not to like about SOLAR BONES. It is disorienting, especially the beginning when the narrator, Marcus Conway, sits at his kitchen table reminiscing about his life following his death; the inexplicable idea that the dead can become flesh for one hour every year; the unconventional narrative style that abandons a coherent plot for free-association; and the fact that the novel is just one continuous sentence—that’s right, no periods. With that said, McCormack gives us quite a remarkable reading experience.

Conway is an everyman who remembers a pretty mundane life with many regrets but no ability to change anything—remember he’s dead. He mulls over what he has experienced in his profession as a middle-aged civil engineer living in rural County Mayo: the tension between the precision and definability of engineering versus what he perceives as an essentially chaotic world. “What really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and alignment.” A childhood memory of a broken down tractor revives his sense that the natural world just teeters on the verge of chaos, “the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected.” Similarly, Marcus recalls visiting a torture museum in Prague where elegant machines were designed just to inflict horrible pain. “The highest technical expressions of their age, the end to which skilled minds had deployed their noble gifts.”

As a man who spent much of his life as a civil engineer concerned “with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines,” Marcus can’t reconcile a world in disarray and seemingly spinning out of sync. Chaos scientists invoke a concept they call the “butterfly effect” to explain why chaotic systems like the weather can't be predicted more than a few days in advance. It postulates the poetic notion that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil may be capable of setting off a cascade of atmospheric events that could result the formation of a tornado in Texas. Although he never cites the “butterfly effect”, Marcus acutely senses that it was in force during his life.

Family life provided solace to Marcus, although this also had its chaotic moments. He seems to have a settled and fulfilling relationship with Mairead, his schoolteacher wife. Darragh is his wisecracking son, who communicates via Skype as he backpacks in Australia. Agnes, his daughter, is an edgy artist whose debut installation features her own blood. Marcus’ realization that Agnes used her own blood in her debut show brings on a panic attack. Marcus recalls a painful time when Mairead left him but later returned. Chaos intervenes once again when Mairead becomes severely ill from a contaminated water supply. Municipal political corruption, brought on by the Irish building boom, also tests Conway’s ethics.

This remarkable book is timely because it gives the reader a strong sense of how misguided is our sense of control in a very fragile world. Certainly the most compelling argument is our increasing realization that humans may have irreversibly destroyed the planet, resulting in the loss of species and habitable places. In the face of all of this, we can only gaze in wonder and feel as helpless as Marcus Conway does on All Soul’s Eve in County Mayo, Ireland.

The 2017 Man Booker judges were clearly in the mood for something a bit different or adventurous. Hence the winner 'Lincoln in the Bardo', shortlisted 'Elmet', and longlisted 'The Underground Railroad', all of which I found to be potentially interesting rejected after hearing reviews which described their structure and approach. If only I had read reviews of 'Solar Bones' I might have saved a couple of hours out of the last remaining days of my life. This book is around 250 pages long and doesn't contain a single full stop as far as I can see. Oh sure, there is punctuation - I reckon a comma appears about once per page on average. Forget the Nancy Pearl rule, I threw this across the room after only 20 pages.

if a tree falls
if a tree falls
in the forest and no one is present
does it make a sound
and if a string of words
has no end punctuation
is it a sentence
these are questions void of question marks posed by a reading of Solar Bones questions of purpose why make a novel out of one sentence—if one may call it that—and why make it stream of consciousness and are either of these labels being placed on this novel accurate
no
not at all
because this book is neither stream of consciousness or one sentence but that doesn't mean it fails, it is not stream of conscious truly because no one—or so I believe, maybe just very few—think in such complete complex thoughts we are creatures whose minds bounce around from one incomplete thought to another rarely stopping to return to—what was I saying—this novel is better classified as a slightly rambling experiment in form, a term that is as muddied as it sounds, perhaps it's better to call it interior monologue lacking grammatical accuracy, which is often confused with stream of consciousness, neither is this novel one sentence because, as I hope we've established by now, if you've made it this far and actually are understanding this rambling experiment in form that I call a review, a sentence isn't a sentence without the
tangy taste of
Miracle Whip
that comes in the form of
end punctuation of some kind
but Solar Bones doesn't fail in story which is important since I guess you could say the point of a story is to tell a story or something, this gets confusing and the fact that Mike McCormack could write like this for more than two-hundred pages shows that he's either really skilled or that once you start a bad habit it's easy to stick with it, like
what if McCormack's intention wasn't to create something experimental, but what if he's just a bad typist
the fact I'm going off on tangents may lead a reader to believe that I am writing in stream of consciousness but I'm not
I'm just rambling
stream of consciousness would look more like, squirrel this is
nuts how did McCormack write for 224 pages like this but
once again I stray from the review at hand
which is difficult because all I want to talk about in this review is style and the definition of stream of consciousness and pointing out that a string of words without end punctuation is merely a string of words, all this should indicate how significant style is to this work and it begs questions like
why did McCormack elect to use this style
I can only venture a guess that it's because our narrator is a spirit, a fact that I don't think was made clear enough in the opening pages and that this lack of proper grammatical sentences is a case of I-don't-give-a-fuck by our ghost friend which speaking of language
reminds me how lilting the language is throughout this story, it's poetic haunting and crass, initially it's a little hard to get into the style and
I'll be honest here, I'm probably not doing it justice, but once you get used to the voice, it sort of flows easily but take too long of a break, a day or two spent in another book and
the rhythm is thrown completely off, you have to get back into the book relearn the rhythm that is the voice of Marcus Conway, spirit
if you actually read all of this review, I wish I could buy you a cup of coffee but digital coffee sucks and I'm poor, but I hope you enjoyed it and if you didn't because you found the style irritating then you may not like this book because it is written in a similar manner though it truly does grow on the reader after ten pages or so but
if for some reason it doesn't Solar Bones may drive you
may drive you
may drive you nuts

"...and it was part of their whole Christmas thing to leave food and drink on the kitchen table for Santa Claus and Rudolph, something to keep them fed on their big night's work, usually cake or a sandwich and a carrot, and it was my job, before going to bed to eat some of it - or at least to leave teeth marks in it - to show that Santa had indeed sampled our hospitality so that, the following morning, when they had got over the delight of their initial presents they would stand beside the table to examine the remains of the food and the whiskey glass lying sideways on the table because obviously, with a drop taken in so many houses along the way, Santa must have been well slewed by the time he got to our door and it was a wonder at all he managed to leave the right presents in the right houses and there was Agnes standing by the table in her pyjamas listening to me saying all this, weighing it up, while Darragh was already surging ahead , examining the carrot and cake but still not saying anything so that I began to wonder if I had slipped up somewhere in my story and given something away that would spoil the whole thing and I was about to open my mouth again but Mairead (his wife) was looking at me from across the table, shaking her head, wearing that expression, both fearful and dismayed, which was telling me without words to
stop now, before you go too far
stop now
so I stopped"

This was really good. I had checked it out from the library in print, not knowing anything about it - it was calling to me from the "new fiction" section. It's written in stream of consciousness, but don't let that scare you as it is perfectly done. No capitals or periods or quotations, but it works just fine because of how they formatted it. I had started reading it and was thinking that it had such a lovely flow to it, an internal rhythm that I thought would be perfect as an audiobook, so I checked, and sure enough it was available on audio. Narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds, it is so beautifully rendered that it was a pleasure to listen to, and I was sad when it ended. So why not five stars? Well, I though it dragged just a bit in the middle, keeping it from being a perfect read - such a small quibble, really, as the book is only 217 pages. Anyway, highly recommended, and if you do audio at all, go with that format - I listened to it at 1.25x speed, and it was sublime.½

I’ve been looking forward to this novel since the Booker longlist was announced, although I can’t exactly tell you why. I don’t gravitate to Irish-set fiction, I’d never heard of the author, and the entire text is one long sentence (more on that later). That should be at least two strikes against it. But something in the description grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

Marcus Conway is a middle-aged engineer who lives in County Mayo, in a small village near the coast. The book opens with him listening to the Angelus bells tolling at noon. The reader knows (from the blurb on the back of the Irish version) that Marcus is dead, but Marcus doesn’t seem to. He stands in his kitchen, thinking about his life and his family. The rest of the text is made up of his memories of various events, although they often have an immediacy that makes them feel as if they’re happening in the present. Maybe when you’re no longer alive time doesn’t work the same way.

Anyway, Marcus reflects on his various roles: as a son, a father, a husband, and a civil servant. He’s mostly performed these roles very well, although he’s fallen down hard a few times. His marriage has weathered some storms but he and his wife, Mairead, have a strong, loving, and still passionate relationship. His daughter Agnes is an artist with a promising future ahead of her, and his son Darragh is off spending a year working his way through Australia and other countries far from home. Through Marcus’s recollections we get crisp images of each family member, as well as of some of the politicians and businessmen he clashes with as part of his job. McCormack does a phenomenal job of immersing the reader in Marcus’s life. At one point I was almost afraid to keep reading because I didn’t know if one of his family members would pull through, and I really didn’t want anything bad to happen. This is the power of fiction: in a hundred pages I was fully invested in people that I had no idea I’d even be interested in.

This book struck me as the structural inverse of Reservoir 13: Whereas Reservoir 13 takes a distanced view of a village and slowly draws you into individual lives, community relationships, and the natural world, Solar Bones takes one man’s life experiences and pans out to encompass the surrounding community. Both juxtapose quotidian events with large-scale change (especially environmental hazards and how we are changing our natural and built surroundings). The main characters are imperfect but humane and caring. Ordinary people turn out to be much more than their simple descriptions suggest, and McGregor shows how love of science and appreciation for art, spontaneity and meticulousness, can coexist in the same personality.

Much has been made of the single-sentence structure of this novel, but once you fall into the rhythm you don’t really notice it and it’s not intrusive, although I did have to remind myself to take breaths in the first part of the book! There may not be full stops, but there are paragraphs, and if you look at where the line breaks occur you can see they’ve been carefully thought out.

This is such a beautifully conceived and crafted book. It’s about the world we live in, how we live in it, and what we’re doing to it, as well as about the ways in which apparently mundane relationships and connections are rich with emotion and meaning and intensity. I can see why it has already won awards.

This is such a beautiful, rich, and rewarding book. On the surface, SOLAR BONES presents a middle-aged man's reflections on his work and family life. The meditation unfolds one early afternoon in November--the month of All Souls, when ghosts restlessly flit about--while the man is alone in the house he's lived in since he married 25 years ago.

Marcus Conway is an engineer with a deeply metaphysical bent. In due time, the reader learns that his original intentions had been toward the priesthood. Having spent two years at a seminary as a young man before a voice told him to “cop himself on” (smarten up), he is deeply grounded in the humanities: poetry, philosophy, literature. Now, on this November afternoon, he muses about how all things tend towards entropy. The energy of the sun makes possible--infuses--all life on this planet, and it seems that part of the work of humans is to impose rhythm and meaning on existence, create structure, give life its "bones". However, all things eventually wind down: they move from order and structure to disorder, dissolution, diffusion--oblivion. This process is working within Marcus himself as he looks back on his life while anxiously awaiting the return of his wife and children who might hold him in their gaze and affirm his existence.

McCormick's work also thoughtfully explores the tension between politics and engineering. This may sound dull, but In McCormick's capable hands, it works--beautifully. Marcus reflects that an engineer, taking the long view, can withhold approval for a building that rests on unstable, unreliable foundations, knowing that it is only a matter of time before that the building will fail or fall--injuring, maiming, or killing the vulnerable. A politician's view, on the other hand, is fuelled by the desire for quick results which will keep him basking in his constituents' approval and propel him to ever higher office and power. Marcus’s working life was characterized by repeated wearing encounters with fractious elected officials eager to throw caution to the wind and present voters with pretty public works projects.

A large section of the book is devoted to Marcus's thoughts on a cryptosporidium water-contamination outbreak that leaves many in the Galway vicinity, including Martin's wife, Mairead, disabled for weeks by diarrhea and vomiting. It is a small matter perhaps, but McCormick refers to this illness as a virus when it is actually infection and inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract by microscopic parasitic organisms called Protozoa. As well, his descriptions of Mairead's bedridden days--the bouts of illness in which bodily fluids pour from one end or the other--run overly long. These seem to be fairly minor quibbles with an otherwise accomplished, impressive piece of stream-of-consciousness writing whose form embodies and serves its themes so well.

For me, SOLAR BONES provided a wonderful, unusual reading experience. I look forward to reading McCormick's other works.

Rating: 4.5 rounded up to 5

This novel may take a little initial effort to start, due to its "stream of consciousness" continuous narrative, but once accepted, I got caught up in the flowing nature of the story as the narrator passes from one memory to another, describing events, thoughts and experiences in a not unusual life - married with two children, working as a civil engineer in the west of Ireland (Louisburgh and Westport, County Mayo).
But although the narrative drive of the story might sound slight, I found myself caught up in the stories, ordinary stories, interspersed with humour and moments when I thought the narrator an idiot, but a believable human idiot.
The narrator talks about family, art, economics and politics - one train of thought flowing into another story in an interesting, intriguing fashion. I wanted to know where it was all going and I felt sad, very sad, to leave Marcus Conway and his stories.

This novel is long-listed for the Man Booker 2017, and having already read several of the other long-listed books this year, I would hope that it has a good chance of at least making the shortlist, as this deserves to be more widely read.

To quote from the start, to give a flavour of the style:

the bell
the bell as
hearing the bell as
hearing the bell as standing here
the bell being heard standing here
hearing it ring out through the grey light of this
morning, noon or night
god knows
this grey day standing here and
listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out through the grey light½

Solar Bones is the much celebrated winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form”. Previous winners have included A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) by Eimear McBride (which I have never wanted to read); How to Be Both (2014) by Ali Smith (which I started but abandoned); and Beatlebone (2015) by Kevin Barry which somehow escaped my radar. But I’ve read enthusiastic reviews from the LitBlogSphere about Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones so I bought a copy but forgot I’d bought a copy, and #SmacksForehead thus agreed to take a review copy via Allen & Unwin when it was offered to me. As it turns out, I’m glad I read the Canongate edition, as you shall see.

The first thing to say is that I hesitated when I ticked the Experimental Fiction category, because – much as I liked it – Solar Bones didn’t seem to me to be opening up much in the way of new possibilities for the novel form. The concept of a stream of consciousness novel tracing a single day, harvesting memories from the past en route, isn’t new. Neither is the choice of narrator, about which I shall say nothing, nor is abandoning punctuation, especially since there are commas and dashes, but also line breaks and new paragraphs that start exactly where you’d expect them to if you were reading the text aloud and came to a full stop. *chuckle* Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher by trade and have read countless unpunctuated student texts that drift artlessly from one topic to another but I had no difficulty reading this book, and I suspect that even confirmed pedants would soon learn to ‘see’ the invisible full stops just as I did.

So. Compared to the experimental fiction I’ve explored, Solar Bones is tame but not lame, because it’s an interesting novel to read anyway. The difficulty is how to review it without revealing matters which should be left for the reader to discover for herself. For this reason I recommend this Canongate Edition rather than the Tramp edition I bought, which is notorious for its careless blurb. I am lucky to have forgotten any memory of it by the time I came to read the book.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/26/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack/

Whoof.
What a book.
I picked it up with both dread at the prospect of reading a gimmicky one sentence long book and hope that it would turn out every bit as the reviews and praise and awards had said it was.
I don't want to overhype it, but I thought this was a beautiful book, a lovely reflection on family and a real sense of place that defines a person's life and love of all sorts. I could imagine Michael Joyce writing a book like this, it's that poetical and elegiac.
I have dozens of page edges turned down for little moments that were funny, poignant, touching, or just so well written.
What a book.