POOLBEG spews out so many new novels in the course of a year that even keeping up with the list of titles causes the head to spin. Who on earth gets round to reading all the actual books?
However, I've become addicted to the blurbs that accompany them when they're sent out for publicity purposes. The authors, you see, are asked to tell the likes of me all about their childhood, youth, relationships and literary aspirations, and this they do at some length. I think Poolbeg should collect these slices of autobiography and publish them in a special book, because they make fascinating if sometimes uncomfortably personal reading.
The latest, for instance, comes from Mary McCarthy, a 45 year old Dubliner who teaches in the Holy Faith convent school in Glasnevin, and whose first novel, Remember Me, is officially published on July 1st. This 700 page doorstop concerns the traumatic lives of five women, and for all I know it may be I'm afraid I never got beyond the author's accompanying auto biographical essay.
This tells me that the school she teaches in was the one that educated her, that as a teenager she used to practise the violin in the bathroom, that she once sang a duet with a classmate on an RTE children's show, and that as a student in UCD she met future actor Gabriel Byrne, who borrowed all her lecture notes and lost them in a pub. (However, they're still good friends).
I'll skip over some of the sad details about deaths and illnesses in her family, which seem to me nobody's business but hers, and come to her account of the book's publication. She submitted it to Poolbeg four years ago, rewrote the ending on the advice of her then editor, but eventually the book was rejected.
Enter Patricia Scanlan, a colleague of one of her old university friends. Patricia asked Poolbeg's Kate Cruise O'Brien to read it and, according to Mary, Kate "liked the writing style, but the book depressed her for days. She said that Hamlet was only in the halfpenny place! We met and negotiated and I agreed to, lighten the story ... a whole lot."
A happy ending, in other words, both for Mary and for her novel, and there's a lot to be said for it if perceptive editors had engaged in some straight talking with other Irish writers, we'd have been spared John McGahern's rural gloom and John Banville's agonised astronomers, that nasty little Butcher Boy would have found a nice girl to sort him out, and instead of stupidly walking into doors Paula Spencer would have discovered true love with a caring assistant bank manager from Raheny.
IF you're a fan of that extraordinary international bestseller, Sophie's World, you may care to go along to Hodges Figgis at 2pm today when its Norwegian author, Jostein Gaarder, will be signing copies of his new book, The Solitaire Mystery (Phoenix House, £16.99 in UK). Myself, I read all the rave reviews that compared Sophie's World to Alice in Wonderland and A Brief History of Time, and I tried to plough my way through the wodges of philosophy that make up much of its length, but my brain just wasn't up to it.
Perhaps I'll have better luck with the new book, which, according to its blurb, "throws up endless questions about the way the world works, and why we are here". Now there's something I've always wanted answered.
FROM happy endings to delirious beginnings. Jean Crowell from Pennsylvania was 13 when she conceived the idea and characters for a novel, and now, at the age of 18, the finished book has netted her $640,000 in pre-publication rights.
Entitled Necessary Madness, it's a love story set in England and the fact that the author has never been to England is irrelevant she based her research on British television sitcoms, so there.
She wrote the book during her final years in school, and all the hype about her youth should ensure that when it's published next year, she'll quadruple the advance she's been given, though as one Manhattan observer remarked. "It's hard to believe that a kid can be worth that much." Well, that's publishing nowadays.