This is a book that I could definitely hand sell at the bookstore, especially for my literary fiction folks. .

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“At thirty-five years of age, Seamus Ferris was by no means setting the night on fire at the damp old pebbledash cottage on Dromord Hill, but he had no mortgage nor rent to pay, and there was money from when the father died, a bit more again when the mother went to join him, also the redundancy payment from Rel-Tech, and some dole”

Kevin Barry is an Irish author I had not yet read, and seeing the short stories available on NetGalley, I took the opportunity to read them. The two which I found most enjoyable were Ox Mountain Death Song and Old Stock.

The author has a delightful lyrical tone. I am looking forward to reading his 2019 Booker nominee, Night Boat to Tangier, which I have waiting for me on my Kindle.

3 out of 5 stars

Many thanks to NetGalley and publisher Double Day for an ARC of That Old Country Music in exchange for an honest review.

Published January 12, 2021
Review posted to Goodreads 3/02/21

I was on the Zoom call with Kevin Barry and Peter Orner for the launch of this short story collection. Kevin Barry mentioned reading William Styron, who is not a writer I am that familiar with. Kevin had a super tall and long bookcase spanning behind him, while Peter looked like he was calling in from a closet!

I guess I did not realize that this was short stories.
I'm not huge on short stories so this wasn't for me.

First published in the UK in 2020; publsished by Doubleday on January 12, 2021

Most of the nine stories collected in That Old Country Music are set in western Ireland. They are sweet and sad, funny and tragic. Many are stories are of people in transition surrounded by an unchanging landscape. When a Roma child who speaks no English runs away from Dublin, she loses her fear after meeting an aging hermit in the Ox Mountains and adopts his contemplative life of books and solitude.

Many of the characters are ungrounded. One narrator tells us: “Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.” Others, like the hermit, know exactly where they belong.

One story tells of a song that the narrator hears an old man sing in a nursing home — a song of heartbreak and meanness that tells a story of “erotic wickedness and greed.” Another offers a bartender’s perspective on an overheard conversation between an elderly woman and her aging son — the latest iteration of the same conversation that they have been having for years, until it comes to a bad end.

It is difficult to pick a favorite from this variety of gems, but here are a few that are memorable:

A girl of seventeen (“She was almost eighteen and aching to have a fuck before it”) seduces an English junkie who has gone “astray in the head.” Despite the fierceness of her father’s judgment when word of the scandal leaks, she feels empowered by the knowledge that the man was made to leave the town and will think of her when he “seeks again the needle’s tip and solace.”

A garda, three weeks from retirement, fears that a young nemesis who has been spreading babies across the Ox mountains, not always with the consent of the women he impregnated, will feel no constraints after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. The garda senses that a killing is imminent, but who will the victim be?

A man in Limerick is a “connoisseur of death,” reporting the news of every local who dies, lamenting them all as his city disappears around him. He chats about celebrity deaths, points out potentially fatal hazards, causes people who do not want to confront the inevitable to cross the street when they see him. He is “impressed by death” and by the knowledge that the only death he will be unable to report to others is his own.

The most darkly amusing story is “Roethke in the Bughouse,” set in 1960 when the American poet Theodore Roethke was committed to a psychiatric hospital in western Ireland. Roethke was troubled by the “bits of sheep everywhere” on the island where he stayed, a “mutton necropolis.” The poet was tormented by long nights filled with occult music, but perhaps he was tormented most of all by the words that demanded escape from his body.

As is often true of Irish writers, Kevin Barry has a gift for language. His sentences are those of a skilled artisan. “He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feelings.” “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only a specter of losing it.” “He had the hunted look of rural poverty.” “Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music.” A wandering man tells his life story to an unkempt dog, “a dog that has seen some weather.”

I loved Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier. I suspect he labors long over each sentence he creates. He may not be the most prolific Irish writer, but he’s among the most exquisite prose stylists.

RECOMMENDED

No rating. Last year I read this book that was sadly shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Here the Dark: A Novella and Stories. I completely panned it for being sexist, misogynistic and plain distasteful. The stories in That Old Country Music read the same. Why is this published to critical acclaim? Why do men get a pass for this shit? Some of these stories were downright creepy to read. Ew. Needed a shower after reading to cleanse my soul.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC of this well-observed book of short stories that sits squarely in the Irish tradition.

Kevin Barry's That Old Country Music brings us 11 stories set mostly in the far west of Ireland, with lonely characters, some depressed, all searching for something, seemingly shaped by the "clay" of the land. The dialogue, when there is dialogue, is marvelously compressed and illuminating.

My favorite story, for it's charm, it's extraordinarily dark humor, and deep, deep sadness, is Toronto and the State of Grace, in which a lonely barkeep serves an elderly mother, and her son a prodigious amount and variety of alcohol, throughout which the pair recount their lives, loves, and sorrows.

I really don’t have a great review for this one. That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry is a collection of short stories inspired by the landscape of Ireland as well as its many, many songs. Irish songs, often popularized as pub songs, are generally several stanza ballads encompassing love and loss, as well as magic and the mundane. This collection aims to combine the oldest of Irish traditions with a modern Irish populace, all set against the never-changing background of the Irish countryside.

Sounds incredible, right? But I was... bored. And I didn’t get it. I don’t know if it was just that the short story format didn’t connect with me or what, but besides the first story in the collection, I felt like everything flew above my head and I was missing references left and right. It’s definitely the type of book I needed to read with a professor and a group.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with Kevin Berry, you should definitely try his debut novel, City of Bohane, which has A Clockwork Orange-type vibe. I absolutely loved that book and found his dystopian interpretation of Ireland interesting. But this one just didn’t do it for me. However, if you like lyricism, grey areas and short stories, it might be for you!

That Old Country Music is out in early January — thank you to @netgalley for the e-ARC!

Disclaimer I am not usually a fan of short stories but I am definitely a fan of this author. Both claims remain true. He started very strong with my favorite story in this collection, "The Coast of Leitrim", which is a modern love story, and ended with my next favorite "Roethke in the Bughouse." There is an excellent sense of atmosphere and humor that Barry always excels at. I would definitely recommend, but first I would encourage new readers to this author to check out "City of Bohane" which remains my favorite by him, or "Night Boat to Tangier". Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this drc available through netgalley.

Any Kevin Barry is good Kevin Barry, even if you've read it before. This collection has a bunch of stories that I've already read sometimes several times -- but there are new pleasures and Barry's voice is ~always~ a delight to spend time with. Coming off NIGHT BOAT, the formal invention/play isn't really there, but this is a good way to build on his recent success and potentially bring folks along to his stories who maybe missed his very excellent early collections.

What a fantastic collection of short stories. Kevin Barry’s prose makes everything in the world effortlessly interesting, and his way of conveying the world of the stories—all of it filtered through absolutely individual characters’ particular and strange quirks—allows for an immersive drop into County Sligo.

While I don’t have much opportunity to assign whole collections of short stories in my intro to creative writing class, I would absolutely use “The Coast of Leitrim” and “Roma Kid” in the classroom for their handling of place, dialogue, and character building. (I feel that way about all of them, honestly, but these two rise as my favorites in the collection.)

The wry humor that underpins so much of the collection, too—nothing so much arrives as a joke so much as a scent, a waft of the thing. This is not to say that the stories are not about serious things—they are, indeed, all the most serious things, like love and death and family—but they don’t take themselves too seriously, which is to say the characters don’t, because they feel like living voices.

Each sentence is a journey, and each sentence carries a kind of surprise with it. From “The Coast of Leitrim”: “Along with its delicacy, Seamus’s mind had, too, a criminal tendency—this is often the way—a kind of native sneakiness, though he would have been surprised to have been told this.” Not only does the reader get a new piece of information about the main character, but the narrator’s insight—always greater than Seamus’s here—arrives at the insight in a way that makes it feel a bit like a bit of gossip. These are stories that invite the reader to lean in, to listen, more than anything.

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer in the very best sense of word. The rhythms and melancholy of Irish banter and the lush beauty and stark isolation of the Irish countryside is always part of his novels.

It is, I think, no accident that he ends his new collection of short stories with a tale about the American poet, Ted Roethke, who spent time with his wife off the coast of County Galway. The poet, whose work was also characterized by intense lyricism and love of the natural world, says at the end of the tale written about him, “…brokenheartedness is the note that sustains always and this he can play at will.”

There is brokenheartedness in these stories as well as yearning and longing that, in sometimes leads to self-recognition. In the opening story, we get a sense of what’s to come when a young man meets a girl who seems too good to be true and manages to blow it (or at least, it appears that way): “He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy ending.”

We meet a vagrant crouching near a lonely old dog in a Spanish love-starved town and a tiny old man with the smell of the woodlands who rescues a poor knacker child In one of the more humorous stories, we encounter a man named “Who’s-Dead McCarthy” who is obsessed with death and moves out from reporting on actual occurrences of death to considering in advance the shapes it might yet assume. We come across an old folk singer who narrates a song about a love-possessed herdsman who is cruelly played by the object of his desires. And in “Old Stock” we discover Uncle Aldo, a neer-do-well, whose nephew “inherits” his magic that has “broken the hearts of nuns and blind girls.”

Part poet, part gnome, part chronicler of a timeless yet changing Ireland, Kevin Barry never disappoints. A big thanks to the publisher Doubleday and NetGalley for providing me with a sneak peak of this new collection by a favorite author in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you, NetGalley and Doubleday, for providing me with an uncorrected proof of "That Old Country Music" in return for an honest review.

Credit where it's due: this collection is named after its best story, a stream-of-consciousness account of a pregnant girl stranded in rural Ireland while her much older boyfriend botches a gas station robbery. A lesser writer would make a point of juxtaposing the desperation of her situation with the magnificence of the scenery, but Mr. Barry makes it a continuum, not a contrast.

Criticism where it's due:: The title story does not belong in this book. The rest of the pieces are about lonely men in the west of Ireland. (Okay, one of his protagonists is intriguingly gender-neutral.) If that sounds a bit repetitive, rest assured that Mr. Barry find plenty of variation on this theme: comic, erotic, mournful. If Mr. Barry's muse for the excellent "Night Boat to Tangier" was mortality, his inspiration here is solitude, although death appears as a punchline in the bleakly hilarious "Who's-Dead McCarthy." Unity of theme, breadth of tone. Not a bad achievement.