Reading Matters - Galway Independent

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Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 15 August 2007

“Everyone should have a library to love……”

Galway Public Libraries for BOOKS and IDEAS.

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

Smile, by Paul Smail
This astonishingly direct and fresh novel caused a sensation in France when it was first published under a pseudonym in 1997. The narrative, which is structured as a series of diary entries, concerns Paul Smail, a young man of Arab origin as he tries to make his way in the seedy and down-at-heel suburbs of Paris. Although he is a literature graduate (who peppers his story with references to his heroes Conrad, Melville and Stevenson) the casual, everyday racism of society means that Paul is trapped in menial, low-paid jobs: night-watchman and pizza delivery-boy. When he does get a job slightly more suited to his education, as a bookshop assistant, he clashes with the bigotry underlying polite society and is able to keep neither the job nor his new-found girlfriend, Myriam.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, by Georges Simenon
An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven, from moment to moment, from bedroom to bedroom, to improvise the most unexpected of love stories, a tale of suspense where risk alone offers salvation. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, closely based on the story of his own meeting with his second wife, is his most passionate and revealing work.

The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth
Roth's nostalgic idealization of Emperor Franz Joseph's rule received its clearest expression in Radetzky March. Here he "turned his attention for the first time to the vanished world whose collapse he had witnessed, almost as if he wished to ascertain, by analyzing and describing that world, what values had been lost and why." The narrative advances a family saga through three generations, from a soldier of peasant origins whose heroic actions on the battlefield win his elevation to the nobility, to his grandson, an effete product of a decadent society. The family's decline parallels that of the monarchy and of Austrian society, and the novel "retrospectively portrays the historical ‘inevitability’ of social decay and decadence." It is said that ‘Roth foresaw the total and totalitarian catastrophe that occurred after he died.’

We invite you to visit your library in Athenry, Ballinasloe, Ballygar, Carraroe, Clifden, Dunmore, Eyrecourt, Glenamaddy, Gort, Headford, Inishbofin, Inisheer, Inismeain, Killimor, Kilronan, Leenane, Letterfrack, Loughrea, Moylough, Oranmore, Oughterard, Portumna, Roundstone, Spiddal, Tiernea, Tuam, Westside, Woodford, and the Mobile Library.

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