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Reviews |
| Secrets & Other Stories - main page | ... what makes this collection
memorable is the way it is charged with a sense of Ireland and reverberations
of Irish literature - Yeats, Joyce, Synge, Flann O'Brien - and Mr
MacLaverty sits perfectly comfortably with these august shades. William Boyd in The New York Times Book Review ( Nov 11 1984) Secrets is an unhappy, powerful book... and it
continues to demonstrate that MacLaverty may well be one of the
best writers of dramatic prose at work today. Secrets is a marvellously good collection of short
stories. Here is the pain, the guilt, the desperation depicted with
compassion and great humour. Bernard MacLaverty manages to slip
through that mysterious barrier that exists between good, serious,
well-written prose and art. Bernard MacLaverty is one of the most powerful
animators of ordinary Ulster existence now writing. His short stories
dwell with extraordinary compassion among ghettoised Catholic lives. In the best tradition of Irish short story
writing... every single story here is an object lesson in construction
and exposition, professional in the best sense. They read effortlessly
but it is the art that conceals art... small perfect pieces. |
