Barcelona by Mary Costello: rich food for thought

Barcelona

Author: Mary Costello

ISBN-13: 978-1805301837

Publisher: Canongate

Guideline Price: £16.99

“Beyond the boards the forest begins.”

The epigraph to Mary Costello’s new collection Barcelona comes from Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy, where a captured ape takes on human characteristics in an attempt to escape from his cage. It’s an inspired choice for a writer concerned with big issues of freedom, responsibility, power, inequality and suffering. In the nine stories that follow, most if not all of the protagonists are looking for ways to escape, from tired relationships, monotonous middle-age, cheating husbands, traumatic pasts. Costello writes compassionately about the various struggles, always mindful of what’s been lost.

As with Kafka, this consideration goes beyond the human world. Barcelona is notable for its affinity and empathy towards animals. If the short form is good at representing the voices of the marginalised, of those who would prefer to keep their stories to themselves, then Costello extends the logic to speak for those who cannot speak at all. For any readers contemplating vegetarianism, this collection will have a lasting impression. Those who are not may be forced to think again. One of the hallmarks of Costello’s writing is her ability to get up close to unpalatable truths and politely ask that the reader not look away.

The elegiac closing story The Killing Line sees a young boy’s outlook on life utterly change when he encounters a lairage: “The skip was full of hooves, bloodied feet freshly cut off just above the dew claw. I leaned in over the top and then heard something – a rumble – and jumped back. A clatter of hooves – fifteen, maybe twenty – came tumbling down a metal chute.” In the poignant title story, Barcelona, a woman takes a city break with her husband in the hope of rescuing their failing marriage but finds herself repelled as she watches him eat quail: “He peeled back the skin and teased a morsel of moist dark meat from the rib cage and raised it to his lips. She turned away. A terrible piercing loneliness entered her.”

Caoilinn Hughes: ‘I suppose it’s in our DNA, that instinct to leave and to move’

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Local history: a Wicklow tea room, ambitious Kennedys, New Quay secrets and Cork curiosities

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Translated fiction: Memory, history and the question of ‘sampling’ from other novels

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The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain; Ireland 1970-2020; Car Bombs and Barrack Busters

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In At the Gate, another long-suffering, mismatched couple are en route to see JM Coetzee at a literary festival in Kerry (an unnamed Listowel) when the narrator spots a meat supplier van outside a supermarket: “Whatever I suffer, I can trace to a single cause: the doomed lives of animals.” A later discussion of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello is one of many metaliterary touches across the collection. Kafka, Borges, Joyce, Cheever, Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Joseph Roth, Chekhov all get a mention, with the artist gender balance redressed somewhat by Virginia Woolf, and surprisingly, the singer Sophie Ellis-Baxter, who features obliquely in the collection’s slightest story, Groovejet.

Collectively though these are strong, memorable pieces of short fiction that go deep into the burdens borne by people, often at the expense of living well. Costello’s granular writing, and the casual way she imparts her wisdom, recalls writers like Elizabeth Strout, or closer to home Trevor and Lavin. Barcelona is Costello’s second short story collection and follows her debut The China Factory (2012), published by The Stinging Fly and nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent work, The River Capture (2019), was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Novel Prize and the Kerry Novel of the Year.

Costello has an innate understanding of loss as the foundation of the short story. Across the collection, there are often mini-stories, microcosms of loss alluded to in passing by the narrators: a cousin shot in the War of Independence, buried quickly by his fellow soldiers, only for his exhumed coffin to have scratches on the underside of the lid; a 12-year-old schoolgirl who died from a belt of a sliotar. In the standout story The Choc-Ice Woman, published last year in the New Yorker, narrator Frances is able to recount her husband’s tragic past, even as she mourns his infidelities: “At lunchtime, she sat under a tree in the little park behind the library, and felt the world shrink to nothing but the terrible quivering of the birch leaves above her.”

While certain themes recur throughout Barcelona, there is a pleasing variety of styles and perspectives, tenses and genders, voices young and old. Linking the narrators is an inclination to reflect, to ask questions of things that others would prefer to gloss over. Costello is a consistently elegant writer who knows when to indulge and to withhold. As her bereaved narrator Oliver puts it in that beautifully observed final story on loss and love and legacy, “I said none of it, but he knew anyway, because somehow these things are transmitted.”