New Voice

We at New Voice like a good essay, and so welcomed Declan Kiberd’s essay in the Irish Times yesterday. In fact, in the ‘Weekend’ section of the IT yesterday we were treated, not only to Kiberd, but an interview with Banville and a review of Brian Dillon’s new book about hypochondria and creativity. If the book is as enjoyable, well written and interesting as the piece in the ‘Guardian Review’ the Saturday before last, it is certainly worth buying.
Back to Professor Kiberd. His essay was a riff on a theme those of us fortunate enough to have taken English in UCD over the last ten years or so will recognise. (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection – Part 2

by David O’Connor

     There is great attention to detail in many of the shortest stories.  Often only a paragraph or a page or two in length, these offer meditations on the minutiae of daily life, slowing down lived experience, framing and isolating aspects of that experience.  This technique may be elucidated, perhaps, by looking at “The Mice”, in which the domestic scavengers of the title are unable to find food in the dirty kitchen as there is “something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it.”  The mice are overwhelmed by overabundance, incapable of taking it all in, of finding their way amidst such plenitude, just as we cannot process all that surrounds us, the unassimilable superfluity of sensual, emotional and cultural material to which we are (over-) exposed.  (continue reading…)