eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781926845395 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Biblioasis |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 225 |
| File size: | 682 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Episode 1.
—There’s no way round it, I’m finding it very hard to be a widow, I told Grief, the counsellor woman, that Tuesday morning.
—Are you missing your husband a great deal?
—Not especially. I miss the routine of his demands it’s true, but am plagued day and night with thoughts I’d rather be without.
—Are you afraid to be in the house alone?
—Indeed I am.
—Are you afraid someone’s going to come in and attack you?
—Indeed I am not.
—And these thoughts, do they come when you are having problems falling asleep?
—No, I said, they are with me from the first sup of tea I take to this very minute, since three days after my husband was taken.
—Tell me about these thoughts?
—You’re sure you want to know?
—I’ve heard it all, she insisted, there is nothing you can say that will surprise me.
I disbelieving, asked again. You’re sure now?
—Absolutely.
—Men, I said. Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head.
—Well now, she said and fell silent.
She had to have been asking the Almighty for help, until finally she admitted she could think of no explanation and her recommendation was to scrub the kitchen floor very vigorously and see would a bit of distraction help.
—Pay attention to the floor and mebbe they’ll stop.
I recognized the potential a widow has to frighten people. I had frightened the poor woman something rotten.
The next week I returned.
—I have scrubbed the floor every day and I am still plagued by them.
Grief was silent another good while.
She had to be honest, she’d never come across a woman who’d experienced this. Usually a woman simply missed her husband without this interference.
—Are you turning to your faith?
—Oh God I am.
The two of us would now pray for some guidance because she was at a loss.
—Were they still the same images?
—Worse, I said. Even more of them and at filthy stuff together and now they all seem to be bald regardless of their ages. Did she think the devil might target widows?
—He might, Grief said. He very well might.
—Would it be worth looking into them Nigerian preachers, the black fellas I seen on the telly who can exorcise them from the place?
—It might, she said, it very well might.
*
The girls in my gang asked why wasn’t I going to the grief counselling anymore.
—There’s something awful morbid about her. She’s the sort who’d nearly put you off being alive.
And we all laughed about it, until Joanie said be careful now I think that’s so and so, whose married to so and so’s husband, who’s Patsy’s cousin and we’d never hear the end of it if it was to get back to her.
—It’s awful complicated being a widow, you’ve to be careful what you say, I told them, as I’ll tell you all now. If you are a widow, be careful what you say. I think it’s why they started talking about Jimmy in the bank.
Mebbe I said too much.
What People are Saying About This
"One of the season's best reads."—The National Post
"Quirky, raucous and utterly unconventional."—Reader's Digest
"A miracle ... move over, Molly Bloom."—Ann Kjellberg, Little Star
"This book got a lot of attention on my Twitter feed this year from many women I admire greatly. It’s about Our Woman, an Irish housewife surrounded by people she can’t understand, doing unmentionable things to each other. What is a woman to do? Well, just maybe try some unmentionable things herself."—Laurie Grassi, Chatelaine
"Malarky becomes truly compelling when Our Woman embodies an existential strangeness. In certain moments, we are not so far from Beckett's Molloy - Our Woman comes close to enlivening not only the political and the personal but also the human. Schofield has true promise for this kind of writing, and it is there that I hope she next turns her sizable gifts, in the book that will surely follow this resoundingly successful first novel"—San Francisco Chronicle
"Malarky is a book deeply rooted in the consciousness of a middle-aged Irish farmer’s wife and mother, Philomena, or ‘Our Woman’, who is grieving the loss of both her husband and son. Philomena’s story is remarkable for the way in which it immerses a reader in the extreme disorientation and overpowering sorrow of loss. The narrative is fractured and discursive; it loops and soars and doubles back. But if this sounds overly complicated or esoteric, it isn’t, mostly because Philomena is so brave and flawed and strange a character and her means of dealing with her losses so, well, human. This is a funny, raunchy, moving read, written in beautiful, brave prose."—Heather Birrell, The Next Best Book Blog
"A fascinating voyage into the mind of a woman embattled ... absolutely beautiful."—Toronto Star
"The immensely gifted Anakana Schofield’s vivid study of a middle-aged Irish housewife’s nervous breakdown has a huge heart and a fierce brain; Malarky is, by a wide margin, the most memorable fiction I’ve read this year."—Brian Lynch, The Georgia Straight
"A glorious, breathless romp through the mind of an immensely likeable woman"—Slightly Bookist
"One of the most vivid fictional creations to come along in years... Schofield starts at a pitch of inspiration most novels are lucky to reach at any point and remarkably sustains that level all the way through."—The Montreal Gazette
"This is a brilliant book. Finely drawn, deceptively muscular, and pulsing with warm intelligence and wit"—The Rover
"Schofield’s brilliant storytelling in Malarky is among the most engaging I’ve ever encountered."—The Longest Chapter
"Malarky is an exemplary read ... I look forward to the next of Anakana Schofield’s novels."—Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading
"Irish-Canadian literary critic Anakana Schofield's first novel is a tumultuous ride. Malarky asks questions without providing answers, chronicling the emotional, mental, and occasionally menial anxieties of Our Woman as she struggles with her own agency and desire. Set in contemporary Ireland, the book overflows with subtle and sometimes subversive allusions to James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, site-specific contemporary Irish art, and Catholic history. Yet Schofield's strong prose style and inventive approach to structure will likely reward readers unfamiliar with these cultural references."—Quill & Quire
"Delightfully offbeat ... Schofield shows a deft - and altogether welcome - comic touch."—The National Post
"The love of a mother for her son is the central theme of this novel. But the book has much to ask and much to say about many other topics as well, among them empowerment through sex, loneliness in marriage, the futility of war, the strains of immigration and the margins of mental health. Schofield's ability to tie all these together in such an original, quirky, tender and eloquent way is to be commended ... Malarky is an alternately beautiful, brilliant, profound, poignant and comedic work of literary fiction." —The Winnipeg Free Press
"I loved this book Malarky ... I was gobsmacked."—Sheryl MacKay, CBC Radio, North by Northwest
""Malarky is like nothing else, and what everything should be … This is a book that will leave you demanding more of everything else you read."—Pickle Me This
"Malarky is a wacky, dead serious book, and what stands out more than anything is its freshness in a sea of same-old, same-old novels.“—The Telegraph Journal
"A challenging but rewarding look at what happens to a mother when the bottom drops out."—The Vancouver Sun
"Head and shoulders above many of its peers."—The Georgia Straight
Interviews
A Conversation with Anakana Schofield, Author of Malarky
You have written a book about one Irish woman. What was it that drew you to her world?
I wanted to create a woman who refused to be sunk by what life served her and would choose to interrogate it instead. I also hoped to capture some of the warm humour of the women from rural Ireland who raised me. For one part of the narrative, though, I tried to think of the most disparate things I could — I came up with Syria and rural Ireland — and to unite them on the page. It was a nod to D.H. Lawrence, who could bring coal miners and Japanese wrestling together.
Grief is an immediate theme in the book — is grief a theme in your life?
I am very engaged by writings about mortality and grief has been a defining factor in my life since my father died when I was six. I also admire and find a degree of comfort in the Catholic rituals around death in rural Ireland. There are death announcements three times a day on the radio, people will flock to local funerals, there's a tradition of pausing outside the person's house or people blessing themselves passing the church (or graveyard). The culture is attuned to deal with death and a process kicks in over the days that follow. In someways I find things are more isolated in North America, but within diasporas I am sure there are many variables. I just sometimes sense an awful isolation and loneliness for people here when someone dies.
Grief is a different and much more extended matter. I am not sure you ever recover from the death of a loved one. It is perhaps the ultimate sadness a human being can know. I believe one's entire life may become an undertaking on how to face it. The finality of it then gives way to trying to carry on, with that finality at the forefront of your mind. We understand very little about grief and are busy trying to medicalize it. It needs to take its place within a culture, within a community and within an individual. We need to make space for it, not confine it to disappear with a daily pill. Perhaps if we were more aware of our mortality and it was part of a healthy daily discussion the grief-stricken would feel less alone. Fiction is a place where there's lots of space to explore these things.
Can you talk about the role of motherhood in Malarky?
I wanted to explore the darker or more turbulent side of motherhood. Malarky began as a parallel narrative. I asked the question: is it possible to love your child so much that you destroy them? and I invented two mothers in different situations and told their stories with the view that eventually their paths might cross. One mother however took over and I switched my attention to a close-up on the life of "Our Woman" Philomena, but this earlier idea lingered. That a mother might wish her adult child to be gone but certainly not to discover that the very thing that dispatched him would in turn ensure he never came back.
I was particularly struck by the pain of mothers during the invasion of Iraq, the mothers whose houses were terrifyingly invaded in the night by the military or bombs dropping all around them, the mothers who lost limbs and children and concurrently the mothers in small town America whose sons and daughters went off to Iraq. I felt for them all. I wanted to say something about the universality that co-exists in this horror. I had a relative who worked in Iraq as an anthropologist; I marched against that war with my very young child in a stroller.
Was it challenging for you to write the sexual content in your novel?
Immensely! I grew up with repressive Catholicism! I certainly never imagined I might write a novel such as this. I heard Anne Enright say in an interview with CBC's Writers and Company in 2008 she thought "Irish women are too nice and that it's difficult for an Irish woman to do something for which she would not be liked." It resonated with me and I decided to do the dirty work that this particular novel demanded rather than turn away from it. So I depicted an older woman with a healthy attitude, who actively enjoys sex. There aren't so many Irish women in literary fiction who are sexually assertive and not wincing in pain under the quilt cover. I also thought it was important to explore the notion of where people file the things they see. That we sometimes see things and have no place to put them and then witness how they return to haunt us. In this case the mother sees her son engaged in sexual acts with other men and it awakens an eroticism within her, which she is compelled to act (or re-enact) on.
Who have you discovered lately?
I recently discovered Helen Potrebenko's 1975 novel Taxi! (Lazara Press, Vancouver). This book has been profoundly important to me and changed my relationship to the city I now live in.
Lately I have enjoyed immensely Iain Sinclair's psycho-geographic/deep topography books and frankly could I could crawl into a mole hole for six months with his body of work and a good lamp. Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project is within arm's reach here and chronically delights me. Along with Beckett's letters, Andre Breton's Nadja, Michelle Bernstein's All the King's Horses, Mackenzie Walk's The Beach Beneath the Street and Marina Roy's Sign of the X.
Recently to prepare for a jury and a festival panel I participated in, I read plenty forgotten Vancouver literature. Some of the writers who have stayed with me are Betty Lambert, Irene Baird, and D.M. Fraser. I just read George Stanley's long poem Vancouver twice. There are so many Canadian women writers who I'd heartily recommend any reader discover, for starters: Annabel Lyon, Lynn Coady, Caroline Adderson, Jocelyn Brown, Gail Scott, Anne Fleming, Marina Endicott and Lisa Robertson.
An under-discovered Irish writer is Keith Ridgway. His works are bold, deeply invested, ambitious literary departures.
I also enjoy discovering writers who write criticism along with their fiction or non-fiction. Jenny Diski's work has been very important to me in this regard and I have great admiration for Claire Tomalin's work.
Here is an inventory of the current stack of books sat tall beside my couch: 4 of Iain Sinclair books, Kafka's The Blue Octavia Notebooks, What I Don't Know About Animals (Jenny Diski), The End of the Story (Liliana Heker), The Brave Never Write Poetry (Daniel Jones), a book about Shaker furniture, The Antagonist (Lynn Coady), The Little Shadows (Marina Endicott), and Nuri Does Not Exist (Sadru Jetha)
(So in summary you have titles that take on animals, hoarding, furniture-making, disaffected angry males, poetry, Canadian vaudeville and finally cranky grannies in East Africa.)