Claire Kilroy is the author of three novels which loosely form a trilogy about the obsessions and exhilarations of art. Her debut, All Summer, a literary thriller about a stolen painting, was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire, a love story between a violinist and a masterpiece violin, was published to great acclaim in 2006, and was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year as well as the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her latest novel, All Names Have Been Changed, set in 1980s Dublin and centring around a great Irish writer and his Trinity writing class, was published earlier this year. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin.
Entrevista con la autora * Su sitio en la red
It was the Christmas of 1984 and I was home in Ireland for the holidays. I’d just that morning come up on the bus from Mayo to visit friends in Dublin when Glynn joined me at the pedestrian lights on the Ha’penny Bridge, also waiting to cross. There we suddenly were, standing side by side on the banks of the Liffey one brisk breezy afternoon in late December, regarding each other none too warmly. Seagulls with wingspans as broad as eagles wheeled and screamed above the great writer’s head, part of the aura he carried everywhere, the raucous extension of his mind into sky. Glynn protested a lifelong interest in the avian world, coastal species in particular: gulls of all types, terns, gannets, cormorants, guillemots – they feature prominently in his work.
Though I knew the contours of his face almost as well as I knew my own, I still did a double take to make sure it was really Glynn. He looked somehow contrived; not Glynn, but a man dressed up as him. Surely the real Glynn should not have to try so hard to resemble himself, and still not fully succeed? He was shivering despite it being an unseasonably pleasant afternoon, sunny enough to force us both to squint, or in his case, scowl. In retrospect, it seems likely he was enduring one of his health scares at the time. Mortality; another of Glynn’s great topics.
His navy coat was fastened to the throat, the collar turned up around his ears. It looked as naked as a shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie. No one had ever accused Glynn of possessing style. He hadn’t shaved in days and his cheeks, when he coughed wetly without covering his mouth, puffed out the mauve grey of the homeless. About his person, the various appurtenances with which we were to become so familiar: the umbrella, the high-grade hat and, in case there was any doubt as to his occupation, the old chestnut-brown leather satchel from his student days. Glynn had been a foundation scholar at Trinity in the early 1950s, an honour he shared with Wilde and Beckett.
A fair to middling crowd of bargain hunters had gathered at the lights, not one of whom had spotted the prodigy walking amongst us. Hibernia had been published three years previously to international acclaim. Glynn must have read the jumble of confusion and zeal on my face, because he regarded me with a harried eye, but it was also a speculative one. This was typical of the man, I would come to learn. Jaded by the attention, but nonetheless courting it. He seemed perpetually on the brink of issuing an observation of literary import, of producing poetic utterance. That’s how it felt to be standing next to him – braced for epiphanic articulation to burst into the world, hands cupped in readiness to catch it.
Glynn sighed impatiently and tapped his umbrella against his leg, urging it to giddy up and get him the hell out of there. He had a point: the lights were taking forever to change. The country should have shown him more respect. The circumstances, it occurred to me then, were unrepeatable. I could not, even on paper, have devised a scenario more accommodating to our first conversation. It was the casual nature of the encounter that was most striking. Two men of the world briefly detained by a set of pedestrian lights. One man, the younger, leans in to extol the work of the elder, and the elder is pleased to hear that his work remains relevant to the next generation. These are his people, after all. This is his country, is it not? Glynn put himself on the line with The Ashtray Chronicle, exposed the darkest thoughts, the most pitiful weaknesses, the apparently boundlessly abject nature of man. It wasn’t much to ask of me to issue a sentence or two of gratitude in return for such uncompromising honesty. There was another fierce outbreak of shrieking amongst the gulls, their hysteria louder than the thundering traffic. Glynn swivelled his bloodshot eyes upward, swaying on his feet, and I winced at the stale reek of last night’s stout.
From All Names Have Been Changed, by Claire Kilroy
