What They’re Reading: What Irish Eyes Are Reading

Few cities in the world enjoy a richer literary history than Dublin. So what are the Irish reading these days? FP spoke with Vincent Cahill of Waterstone's bookstore, and found that the reading list looks much the same as it did half a century ago.

By Nonna Gorilovskaya

October 19, 2009, 9:51 PM

Foreign Policy: Are there any particular topics -- political or otherwise -- that usually do well in Dublin?

Foreign Policy: Are there any particular topics — political or otherwise — that usually do well in Dublin?

Vincent Cahill: There are some books on the Good Friday Agreement, but books on political topics don’t really sell in any kind of massive quantities.

FP: Which Irish books and writers are the most popular right now?

VC: You know the way sometimes when authors die, their books get a push? John McGahern [The Barracks, The Dark, Amongst Women], died recently, so his back catalogue has started to resell quite well. It’s the 100th anniversary of [Samuel] Beckett’s birth, so there is a lot of stuff going on around the city. It’s been 50 years since Flann O’Brien died, and his books are selling again. The humor is very surreal, but it has aged quite well.

FP: Does the success of older works suggest that Irish readers are somewhat unhappy with the writers of their generation?

VC: You don’t see many people writing at that kind of level now. Perhaps if you look back in 50 years, there might be people who slipped under the radar. John Banville, who won the Booker Prize last year for his book, The Sea, would look down at what he sees as [modern] frivolous writing that he calls, well, false. He considers himself an artist and what he does, art. But you tend to have that debate every time there is one of those bigger prizes. For every Philip Roth, there are a hundred people who fall long short of that level.

FP: And what about the other newer writers?

VC: In terms of lighter fiction, Marian Keyes has a new book that’s doing OK, called Anybody Out There? Also, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s largest literary prize, just released its short list. There’s Colm Toibin’s book, The Master, which is a fictionalized account of Henry James’s life. There’s Northern Irish writer Ronan Bennett’s Havoc, in Its Third Year, which is a plea for tolerance set in mid-17th century England, when you had the anti-Catholic fever going through the country. He draws a few parallels with what is going on now.

Nonna Gorilovskaya is a Washington, D.C.-based writer.