book review a history of loneliness

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A History of Loneliness by John Boyne review – a denunciation of the Catholic church

"I reland is rotten. Rotten to the core. I'm sorry, but you priests destroyed it." These words are spoken by a young man who was sexually attacked in his childhood by an Irish priest, a friend of the family. They go to the heart of this novel's passionate denunciation of the role played by the Catholic church in the scandal over child abuse by the clergy. It is a study of the corrupting effects of power in an Ireland that came close to being a theocracy. Sexuality was strictly governed; contraception, abortion and divorce were forbidden; and yet the abuse of children went unpunished and was deliberately concealed by the church hierarchy for fear of damage to the institution. It is this cover-up, this shifting from parish to parish of offending priests, this determination to put the good name of the church – and its resources – above the sufferings of children that has caused such shock, shame and anger in Ireland, and many other parts of the world.

The central character in A History of Loneliness is Odran Yates, a Dubliner who enters a seminary at the age of 17. He believes that he has a vocation: his mother has told him so. The family has already been shattered by tragedy, and Odran doesn't know his own mind. His weakness opens a fault line that will deepen throughout the novel. He hides from himself what he doesn't want to see, and tells his own story with an apparently nonchalant fluency that omits a great deal. Boyne makes expert use of the gaps in Odran's narration. Inexorably, he proves that what Odran considers to be his own innocence may also be seen as wilful ignorance. In the seminary, Odran and Tom Cardle are "cellmates" for five years, and yet although Odran considers Tom his best friend, the two do not truly know each other. Tom will become one of those priests who stays only a year or two in a parish before being moved on, and Odran will close his eyes to the implications of this. The revelation that the altar boys in Tom's parish call him "Satan" appals, but fails to enlighten him.

This is a harsh, unsparing novel. Here is the church stripped bare of trust and affection between priests and people, with no credit given to its work for the poor and dispossessed. The portrait of Irish society is equally lacerating. Relationships are marked by coercion and physical violence, and the image of fathers destroying their children recurs. Tom has been forced into the seminary by his father, and has neither vocation nor religious faith. After challenging the priest instructing the class the teenager runs away, but is brutally punished by his father and later returned. Odran sees his friend's face: "the greenish colour around his right eye, the bruises diminishing at last; the nasty-looking cut on his lower lip. And did I mention that one of his arms was in plaster? Here was a boy who had been beaten black and blue." Biological fathers dominate their sons, while spiritual fathers rape eight-year-old boys. Bishops connive with cardinals to ensure that the message of concealment is enforced from the top down.

One section of the novel is set in Rome, and here Boyne loses his sureness of touch. Odran at the heart of the Vatican stretches credibility, but Odran privy to hidden details about the sudden death of John Paul I is a step too far, and it breaks the emotional focus and the tension of the novel. Similarly, Odran's experience of Norway (his sister marries a Norwegian) is somewhat idealised by the novel's need to create a society that is the opposite of Ireland.

St Thomas Aquinas considered "wilful ignorance" a grave sin against faith, and this is the indictment that Boyne builds against Odran, and against the priests who knew, might have known, must have known the reasons for some of their number being moved by the hierarchy "from Billy to Jack". Odran is named after a saint, the charioteer of St Patrick and first martyr of Ireland. This is surely ironic, for his namesake avoids confrontation wherever he can. The paedophiles are on trial at last, but the silent enablers of crime are also indicted. This scorching novel takes the reader to a wasteland, "a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, paedophiles and incompetents", as Odran finally admits that he has not been telling us the whole story, and that the confiding tone of his voice is not to be trusted. John Boyne writes with compelling anger about the abuses of power and the dangers of submission.

• Catholicism
• Christianity
• Child protection

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A HISTORY OF LONELINESS

by John Boyne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

There might have been more art in a subtler take on this Irish horror, but Boyne has conveyed well the message most needed,...

A priest in Ireland provides a lens on his brethren’s sexual abuse of young boys.

Best known for  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas  (2006), a Holocaust novel for children, Boyne here creates a character who remains stubbornly oblivious as he gets hints of homosexuality and sexual abuse from his youth through his seminary years and as a teacher and parish priest. In a story that jumps back and forth among different periods of his life, Father Odran Yates, the narrator, endures a family tragedy and tries to ignore his sister’s early-onset dementia, two of the rare elements in the book untinged by sex. Tom Cardle, his roommate in the seminary and then longtime friend, exposes Odran, at a distance, to sexual desire and then puzzles him as the ordained Tom is too rapidly transferred from one parish to another. Odran becomes a tea server for Pope Paul VI and the short-lived John Paul I during a pointed but implausible interlude in Rome, where he has his libido stirred when he falls hard for a barista. Other Boyne novels—he has written 13 for adults and children—present his take on historical incidents, as this novel does briefly with the 33-day papacy and broadly by putting two characters at the center of Ireland’s final unraveling of the complicity of church and police in the sexual abuse scandal. Boyne’s strength is dialogue, always sharp and flowing, especially abetted by Irish idiom. His weaknesses here are neon-obvious allusions and a somewhat clunky structure. In between those extremes, he shows a fine sympathy in some of the book’s best scenes for the change that good shepherds saw in their flocks, from worshipful respect to loathing.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-374-17133-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by John Boyne

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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SEEN & HEARD

WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “ You’ll get only one shot at this ,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “ Don’t botch it .” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “ That form is a deal breaker ,” he tells himself. “ It’s life and death .” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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A History of Loneliness

Written by John Boyne Review by Doug Kemp

Odran Yates narrates the story of his life in Ireland. As a young boy in the early 1960s through to the present day in a series of non-chronological chapters, Odran’s story represents the movements that have changed Ireland’s society so profoundly. It is a sobering and ultimately pessimistic story. Odran is a Roman Catholic priest, having been pushed towards the “calling” by his mother, who became obsessively religious following a deeply traumatic family incident when Odran was a young child. Having served some of his training in Rome, and then the Vatican, Odran finds a comfortable niche as a teacher to a boy’s school in Dublin. But his life is changed when he is moved to a parish, to fill a gap left by the abrupt departure of his seminary room-mate and best friend Tom Cardle. It is the reasons for Cardle’s departure that causes the unravelling of much that Father Yates believes in.

The reader very soon guesses what is behind Tom Cardle’s removal as well as an incident involving Odran’s nephew Aidan. Odran finally accepts that he has to address the lack of engagement he has with the world and the sexual scandals that are engulfing the Church in Ireland, in which he has been unwittingly drawn. Odran is naïve and rather likeable, but also somewhat to blame as deep at the back of his mind he was aware of what was going on but did nothing to raise awareness of the scandal.

There are a couple of possible historical errors, but this is a moving and rather shocking novel and, as ever with John Boyne’s fiction, wonderfully well written.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, a history of loneliness.

Although a novel, A HISTORY OF LONELINESS moves at times like a collection of stories, told to us in a non-linear path, as we come and go through the life of Irish priest Odran Yates. Odran is a benevolent yet conflicted man --- a man whose family he cannot reach and whose life calling, that of the priesthood, becomes corrupted when his closest friend gets too close to the young boys of the clergy.

Through our own already established notions, we understand more than is ever said. The subtleties presented here are masterful. Author John Boyne chooses to keep the focus on the results of molestation and what happens as the young victims, confused and changed irrevocably, go through life isolated in their pain. We see the effects, not the acts themselves --- a closed door or a hand on a shoulder lets our imagination do the work, and when we are taken to later points, we see the disparity and loneliness it creates. Through this, we are given a haunting and beautiful novel.

In one scene, Odran spots a young boy lost in a department store and escorts him outside to where he is told the child's mother is. Odran is a good man, but what he represents is perceived to be corrupt. The witnesses don’t know him, but they recognize that he’s a church man and are aware of what some priests have done. It’s an isolating experience for Odran, who has good values and grew up believing in the church, but is seen at face value by his white collar. Consequently, he is arrested and taken into custody for abducting the boy.

"A HISTORY OF LONELINESS is a haunting and heartfelt account, relaying the strong inner emotions of one’s life. It’s a surreal and beautiful journey through times that feel familiar yet fresh, but is also inexplicably sad in its handling of missed actions and painful reminiscing of realized mistakes."

This incident takes place in 2011 and follows a chapter set nearly 40 years earlier in 1973. That is the beauty of Boyne’s novel, as each chapter takes us into another place in time in the life of Odran Yates. Going back farther to 1964, we learn that Odran’s father quits his job and pursues an acting career, only to fail miserably and then take to drinking. The scenes here are beautiful and reminiscent of such great works as James Agee’s A DEATH IN THE FAMILY in their poetic stature and frank openness of death. They’re also heartbreaking in their hope, which soon gets dashed as Odran’s father comes to a fateful end and the family structure soon breaks.

Following his father’s decline, Odran’s mother becomes devoutly religious, and thus it is decided that Odran must become a priest. This is in 1972, after Odran, then a shy, naive youth, ends up with a girl in his bedroom. The remedy, his mother decides, is a visit from an old and abrasive priest, Father Haughton. This man of the cloth digs into Odran, getting him to admit that he liked being with a girl and interrogating him to tears. The heavy-handedness reaches to intimidation as Odran faints under the fear. It’s a powerful scene in a novel filled with moving moments. It is then decided by his mother that his vocation will be the priesthood, at which point he is shipped to a seminary school at Clonliffe College, where he begins his studies.

Odran is a soft-spoken and sympathetic character, yet is frozen by contradictions in keeping true to his devout life as a priest and doing what is just to help those who are hurt. He leads with his heart, having fierce opinions on priesthood and how it should be viewed. When the reputation of the church sullies good men such as himself, he inwardly becomes uneasy yet still internalizes --- numbed by guilt, and then failing to take action. If anything, he soaks in feelings, as he relates “The guilt. The guilt, the guilt, the guilt…” over seeing his friend, Tom Cardle, beaten, his father fade, the corruption of the church, and, finally, the broken hopes of those he loves.

From Odran’s life as a young boy to witnessing his sister's descent into nothingness after the tragic death of her husband, to his life in seminary, assistance to the pope and up-front corruption of his life’s institution, it all adds up to a superb novel. A HISTORY OF LONELINESS is a haunting and heartfelt account, relaying the strong inner emotions of one’s life. It is a surreal and beautiful journey through times that feel familiar yet fresh, but is also inexplicably sad in its handling of missed actions and painful reminiscing of realized mistakes. To read it is to become fully engrossed in the life of one man. What we learn through Boyne's work is that the silence of just one man can be the difference between a life lived and a life broken.

Reviewed by Stephen Febick on February 20, 2015

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne

• Publication Date: May 10, 2016
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 125009464X
• ISBN-13: 9781250094643

Books and other leisurely pursuits

Book Review :: A History of Loneliness

I say it is an interesting book to read at this time because just a few weeks ago, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report detailing horrific abuse of more than 1000 children at the hands of more than 300 Catholic priests. According to the report, “[p]riests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.” The report only covers six dioceses in one state .

This report comes 15 years after the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting team won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service after exposing their city’s widespread child sex abuse (and cover up) by a number of local and prominent Roman Catholic priests. That story was later turned into a movie, Spotlight , that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2016.

Set in Ireland, The History of Loneliness follows the life of Father Odran Yates who, after a difficult childhood, becomes a priest, serving a year in Rome that includes a special assignment for the Pope. Father Yates finds his most rewarding service in the library of a boy’s school but he is eventually sent to a local parish when the priest there, who also happened to have been Father Yates’ roommate in seminary, is suddenly moved out.

The story bounces around in time – from Yates’ childhood in the 60’s, seminary in the 70’s, and various points of his adult life during service to the church up until 2012 – which could have been difficult had it not been so effective a form in helping the reader come to understand, just as the narrator does, what is going on in the church.

As I mentioned before, the narrator is “innocent.” He is not, like his seminary roommate, a child abuser. But, as with the public’s outrage (and mine) over the real life examples, the novel explores the varying degrees of guilt of those around the abusers – those who know but believe the Church is subject to a different standard than the law; those who know but feel helpless to act; those who should know but ignore all signs.

Father Yates is in that last category – the most complicated of all positions – and it was somewhat cathartic to take the journey of understanding with him. That said, I’m an outsider to the Catholic Church and its victims. I would be interested to discuss with those who are not.

Regardless, Boyne’s writing is as beautiful as it is astute, and many well-drawn characters provide much to contemplate. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I listened to this book on audio, and the narrator Gerard Doyle was superb. 

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A History of Loneliness: A Novel

• By John Boyne
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
• February 27, 2015

A fictionalized exploration of a real-life church scandal, told through the eyes of an Irish priest.

Very early in John Boyne’s latest novel, A History of Loneliness , we are given the measure of Father Odran Yates, and it is the man himself who reveals it. His second sentence to us is, “I might start with the evening I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night when she first showed signs of losing her mind.”

He describes going to Hannah’s house for dinner almost a year since last being there after her husband, Kristian, died at only 42. It is just Hannah and her shy, awkward 16-year-old son, Jonas, there; the angry, older son, Aidan, has moved to London.

Odran describes the painful evening and how his beloved younger sister moves back and forth between lucidity and confused non sequiturs. And even as Jonas catches him on his way out and tries to articulate his concerns for his mother — during the same instance that Odran has asked whether everything is alright and says he and Jonas should talk more — we see Odran escaping out the door, cutting Jonas off and refusing to acknowledge that anything is amiss: “But I didn’t let him continue…I felt the guilt of it but could do nothing.”

If, at this point, readers are thinking, “How could you?” then they should get used to thinking that consistently throughout this story, with growing urgency and disbelief.

Odran is a middle-aged Irish priest working in a private school for privileged boys, teaching English, celebrating daily Mass, and keeping the library organized. He’s held this position since his ordination in Rome 27 years before, and he is safe and happy here. Not everyone has felt the same, though, because, as it turns out, one of the school’s teachers has recently been sentenced to six years in prison for sexual abuse of minors.

We learn this fact when Odran is summoned to a meeting with his archbishop, which he fears may be an interrogation about what he knew or suspected. Instead, it turns out to be something much worse: The archbishop is yanking him from his cloistered existence and reassigning him to a parish for the first time in his clerical career. The move is at the suggestion of Tom Cardles, the priest whose parish Odran will be taking over.

The reader spends most of the novel understanding far more of what’s going on than Odran, who, like a deliberate Forrest Gump, skates over the surface of his life, innocent and unaware, assiduously avoiding having to put two and two together. In choosing willful ignorance, Odran churns up a wake of pain and devastation, which cuts through his own family, while he plows along, unseeing.

For Boyne, Odran represents an entire denying populace. A History of Loneliness is a horrifying tale primarily for its truth, but it’s at its weakest when Boyne cannot find a way to channel his anger and vents it directly onto the page.

Archbishop Cordington — later made cardinal as a reward from “the Polish pope” for many years of service — embodies all of the brutal inhumanity of the Catholic bureaucracy, and therefore his character is a ridiculous caricature. The back-and-forth arguments and diatribes later in the book seem gratuitous and unnecessary; nothing will convince the church’s protectors that they were wrong, but for the rest of us, Boyne is preaching to the choir.

Odran tells us that he and Tom are best friends, but we never see what bonds them beyond proximity and time, and perhaps that is truly all that is there, and it is Odran who mistakenly equates time with closeness.

Certainly nothing recommends Tom to the reader. No matter how damaged we understand Tom to be — and we are sure to understand far more than Odran does — he is never a particularly sympathetic character. Thus, it seems odd when, later in the story after the extent of the abuse has been revealed, Odran denies knowing Tom three times in a row when he is called out in a hostile public situation, even though he has known Tom since their first day together in seminary.

Boyne uses the same device in The Absolutist , but the Christ/Peter analogy is far more apt in that story. Here, it’s a true head-scratcher as to what he wants the reader to think of his likening an unrepentant serial pedophile to Christ.

Through Odran, Boyne displays real affection for the newly elected Pope John Paul I, whose willingness to question Vatican finances and other apparent church corruption made him dangerous. When we finally learn what failure Odran committed the night the pope died, we are stunned by Boyne’s implication about historical events. Even after this, Boyne’s narrator, in true Odran fashion, retreats into self-absorbed obtuseness, noting that the events result in a black mark against him, effectively eliminating any hope of advancement in the church.

Odran isn’t despicable, and we are pressed to question how well we would do in his stead. In some ways, especially later in the book, I found myself thinking that Boyne might have done better developing a nonfiction treatise on inherent church corruption, and the protectionist attitude that has damaged the institution and all the people the institution betrayed. In particular, he highlights the endemic misogyny of the church to raise a thought that perhaps there’s a connection from that to its rampant pedophilia and tolerance of it.

Finally, Boyne argues that Ireland is particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse because it is so thoroughly Catholic. Indeed, it’s hard to find a parallel example: Italy, in comparison, may love the pope, but only about 10 percent of the population attends Mass. A History of Loneliness highlights the dangers of allowing one institution to wield that much power over a society. Even today, Boyne reminds us, the church runs 90 percent of the schools. It’s a chilling thought.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home (coming this April from Apprentice House) , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

OR click here to buy this as an e-book Or through Bookshop.org

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A History of Loneliness by John Boyne

• Publication Date: May 10, 2016
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 125009464X
• ISBN-13: 9781250094643
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New novel brings John Boyne closer to home: A History of Loneliness

Book review: a troubling work about clerical abuse.

John Boyne: has his finger on an array of Irish social issues. There is also an autobiographical element to his new novel, as Fr Yates has been teaching at Terenure College, Boyne’s old school, for 27 years. Photograph: Alan Betson

The ongoing crisis of Catholicism in Ireland has produced a substantial body of academic, documentary and fictional work. Books, television programmes, films and plays about the abuse of children and others by members of religious communities have attempted to expose, condemn or simply comprehend this criminal betrayal of trust. John Boyne's A History of Loneliness , the latest entry in the field, is "dedicated to all these victims; may they have happier times ahead".

Boyne is best known as the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , his Holocaust novel, which was made into a successful film. He is a prolific, feted and popular writer, with books translated into an astounding 47 languages. The History of Loneliness is atypical of these, in that it is his first book set in Ireland.

Often Boyne's writing centres on a well-known historical event or a period that is intriguing to readers: St Petersburg in the last days of the tsar, the London society of the prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson or, as in The Thief of Time , one of his earliest books, a number of well-known historical events relayed through time travel. Within these parameters he builds a fiction that is highly engaging.

The History of Loneliness tells the story from the perspective of Fr Odran Yates, who, although never guilty of abusive behaviour, did not speak out about abuse of which he was aware.

Yates is an entirely passive man, and his reticence in this regard is, importantly, of a piece with his personality and his personal history. We learn that his depressive father drowned himself and his son (Yates’s four-year-old brother) as a final vindictive act in a ruinous marriage. Yates’s mother, now dead, turned to religion maniacally after the tragedy.

His surviving family consists of a widowed sister with dementia and two nephews, one estranged and living abroad, the other a prominent writer and gay.

Obviously Boyne has his finger on an array of Irish social issues. There is also an autobiographical element, as Fr Yates has been teaching at Terenure College, Boyne’s old school, for 27 years.

Yates’s best friend from seminary days, Fr Tom Cardle, was an abused boy who became an abuser. He is being moved from parish to parish, and Yates doesn’t know why.

Chapters are not chronological but designated by year, ranging from 1964 to 2013. The narrative weaves among formative incidents in Yates’s life, allowing the writer to divulge the story’s secrets piecemeal and thereby retaining a degree of suspense. The flashback format also complicates our understanding of Yates’s degree of awareness, but the device can become coy. Yates as narrator alludes too often and ominously to his fall from grace in Rome in 1978, at the time of the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I.

The novel gains in complexity by presenting a nuanced, and at times very sympathetic, portrait of clerics and clerical life. Although some are recognisable types, few remain mere stereotypes.

The innocence of the times rings true, as does Boyne’s portrayal of the seminarians as just a bunch of teenage boys in some respects. Similarly the power of authority – the hierarchy, teachers, parents, gardaí – is demonstrated both forcefully and subtly.

It is difficult in any age to convey the dynamics of faith on the page, and the author’s efforts here are powerful and arresting. The loneliness of the title is the collateral damage of that dynamic.

Attention to detail can waver at times. For such a seasoned writer Boyne relies too heavily on product placement – Calvita sandwiches, Player’s cigarettes, box Brownies – to signal period rather than providing a full evocation of an era.

And, in a novel attempting an honest exploration of a grave subject, there are some dubious excesses. On a crowded train from Dublin to Galway Yates is offered a seat, in turn, by an officious matron who insists she will hold her son on her lap, an obsequious man old enough to be his grandfather and a heavily pregnant woman – all in ardent competition with each other.

Readers do know about the exaggerated deference paid to clergy in the past; one such character would have done to remind us and to illustrate the young priest’s unease.

When Yates admits that his vocation may result from an epiphany his mother experienced while watching The Late Late Show , or when the pope (a great fan of The Quiet Man ) breaks into a rendition of The Wild Colonial Boy , we might wonder why we've ventured so far into Father Ted territory in a book that sets out to cover very different ground.

Much more sensitively handled is a scene where Fr Yates tries to reunite a crying five-year-old with his mother on Wicklow Street and finds himself in Garda custody being treated like, and called, a paedophile.

Sean O’Casey is invoked often in this book because of a slender connection to the Yates family. The master of tragicomedy may be the author’s model here, but the subtleties of the form prove difficult to balance.

The History of Loneliness is a troubling book about a continuingly difficult and disturbing subject. Readers of Boyne's fiction who have followed him around the world now have a chance to see how he has applied his skills to a subject very close to home.

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The history of loneliness: by john boyne.

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The book follows the struggles of a few young men who, whether idealistic or resigned, were terrified of being different and sought conformity in the seminary. Some, like Tom, felt pressured to remain there even though they were unfit for the priesthood. Boyne illustrates the demands placed on those channeled into the clerical system, showing the indifference with which many were treated by their superiors. However, as an Archbishop responds to accusations levied against Tom, “you can go back to your precious school and teach the little bastards about respecting the church.”

Father Yates reflects that, “of course the shades in my profession changed as one advanced through the ranks, from black to scarlet to white; darkness, blood and a cleansing at the very top.” The ease with which Boyne intersperses an occasional analogy or image into the priest’s first-person narration convinces the reader of the priest’s self-awareness. Boyne lets the priest’s difficulties unfold gradually as he ponders the difficulties with his role. A childhood tragedy and the Yates family’s struggles digress from the novel’s clerical focus, but they emphasize the trouble the narrator has fitting in to an altered society.

Father Yates served the Vatican as a seminarian, and Boyne creates a Roman backstory for the priest set in 1978, the year of the three popes. This episode is clever but feels melodramatic, engineered to account for the Father Yates’ low rank in the Irish power structure. Near death, Pope Paul VI asks Father Yates, “What will we do with Ireland?” This question haunts the Irishman, as he faces a nation that no longer admires its clergy.

Inside the Vatican, Father Yates witnesses church corruption and later senses a “darkness stirring” about his own fault. “I had seen things and I had suspected things and I had turned away from things and I had done nothing.” Debating how to treat Tom’s transgressions, he wonders, “if I cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come to an end, what kind of a priest am I anyway? What kind of man?” Father Odran strives for decency, but he has done so too quietly. He has been spared many of the torments of some of his sexually frustrated or temperamentally warped colleagues, but he suffers too.

Journalists and historians have belatedly scrutinized the fall of the Church from grace. Boyne’s gripping, timely novel shows that Irish fiction is now ready to address this sad theme.

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A History of Loneliness

“I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.”

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Shortlisted for Irish Book Awards: Novel of the Year

Odran Yates enters Clonliffe Seminary in 1972 after his mother informs him that he has a vocation to the priesthood. He goes in full of ambition and hope, dedicated to his studies and keen to make friends.

Forty years later, Odran’s devotion has been challenged by the revelations that have shattered the Irish people’s faith in the church. He has seen friends stand trial, colleagues jailed, the lives of young parishioners destroyed and has become nervous of venturing out in public for fear of disapproving stares and insulting remarks.

But when a family tragedy opens wounds from his past, he is forced to confront the demons that have raged within a once respected institution and recognise his own complicity in their propagation.

It has taken John Boyne fifteen years and twelve novels to write about his home country of Ireland but he has done so now in his most powerful novel to date, a novel about blind dogma and moral courage, and about the dark places where the two can meet. At once courageous and intensely personal, A History of Loneliness confirms Boyne as one of the most searching chroniclers of his generation.

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The History of Loneliness

By Jill Lepore

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April, together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches, out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia, in the monkey house, where it was just the two of them, they had become “accustomed to sleep at night in each other’s arms on a blanket on the floor,” clutching each other, desperately, achingly, through the long, cold night.

The Philadelphia Zoological Garden was the first zoo in the United States. It opened in 1874, two years after Charles Darwin published “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in which he related what he had learned about the social attachments of primates from Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Society of London:

Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behavior of two chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much protruded lips; and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. They then mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths, and yelled with delight.

Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four chimpanzees in America, and when she died human observers mourned her loss, but, above all, they remarked on the behavior of her companion. For a long time, they reported, he tried in vain to rouse her. Then he “went into a frenzy of grief.” This paroxysm accorded entirely with what Darwin had described in humans: “Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements.” The bereaved chimpanzee began to pull out the hair from his head. He wailed, making a sound the zookeeper had never heard before: Hah-ah-ah-ah-ah . “His cries were heard over the entire garden. He dashed himself against the bars of the cage and butted his head upon the hard-wood bottom, and when this burst of grief was ended he poked his head under the straw in one corner and moaned as if his heart would break.”

Nothing quite like this had ever been recorded. Superintendent Brown prepared a scholarly article, “Grief in the Chimpanzee.” Even long after the death of the female, Brown reported, the male “invariably slept on a cross-beam at the top of the cage, returning to inherited habit, and showing, probably, that the apprehension of unseen dangers has been heightened by his sense of loneliness.”

Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it. And yet, long before the present pandemic, with its forced isolation and social distancing, humans had begun building their own monkey houses. Before modern times, very few human beings lived alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for your health. In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K. appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition, doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?

I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I cannot tolerate being so alone. I feel as if nobody really understands me. I am no longer close to anyone. There is no one I can turn to. I feel isolated from others.

In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?

“Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state of profound distress. Neuroscientists identify loneliness as a state of hypervigilance whose origins lie among our primate ancestors and in our own hunter-gatherer past. Much of the research in this field was led by John Cacioppo, at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago. Cacioppo, who died in 2018, was known as Dr. Loneliness. In the new book “ Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World ” (Harper Wave), Murthy explains how Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory of loneliness has been tested by anthropologists at the University of Oxford, who have traced its origins back fifty-two million years, to the very first primates. Primates need to belong to an intimate social group, a family or a band, in order to survive; this is especially true for humans (humans you don’t know might very well kill you, which is a problem not shared by most other primates). Separated from the group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness,” Murthy writes. We breathe fast, our heart races, our blood pressure rises, we don’t sleep. We act fearful, defensive, and self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually want to help, and tend to stop lonely people from doing what would benefit them most: reaching out to others.

The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little. These drives backfire.

Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and even political polarization. Murthy writes with compassion, but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow, not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties, when “homelessness” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say than “poverty”—and saying it didn’t help. (Since then, the number of homeless Americans has increased.) Curiously, Murthy often conflates the two, explaining loneliness as feeling homeless. To belong is to feel at home. “To be at home is to be known,” he writes. Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar. Loneliness is the feeling that no place is home. “In community after community,” Murthy writes, “I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.” Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.

In “ A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion ” (Oxford), the British historian Fay Bound Alberti defines loneliness as “a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others,” and she objects to the idea that it’s universal, transhistorical, and the source of all that ails us. She argues that the condition really didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, at least not in a chronic form. It’s not that people—widows and widowers, in particular, and the very poor, the sick, and the outcast—weren’t lonely; it’s that, since it wasn’t possible to survive without living among other people, and without being bonded to other people, by ties of affection and loyalty and obligation, loneliness was a passing experience. Monarchs probably were lonely, chronically. (Hey, it’s lonely at the top!) But, for most ordinary people, daily living involved such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying. The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely. One exception is “Hamlet”: Ophelia suffers from “loneliness”; then she drowns herself.

Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for.

Alberti’s book is a cultural history (she offers an anodyne reading of “Wuthering Heights,” for instance, and another of the letters of Sylvia Plath ). But the social history is more interesting, and there the scholarship demonstrates that whatever epidemic of loneliness can be said to exist is very closely associated with living alone. Whether living alone makes people lonely or whether people live alone because they’re lonely might seem to be harder to say, but the preponderance of the evidence supports the former: it is the force of history, not the exertion of choice, that leads people to live alone. This is a problem for people trying to fight an epidemic of loneliness, because the force of history is relentless.

Before the twentieth century, according to the best longitudinal demographic studies, about five per cent of all households (or about one per cent of the world population) consisted of just one person. That figure began rising around 1910, driven by urbanization, the decline of live-in servants, a declining birth rate, and the replacement of the traditional, multigenerational family with the nuclear family. By the time David Riesman published “ The Lonely Crowd ,” in 1950, nine per cent of all households consisted of a single person. In 1959, psychiatry discovered loneliness, in a subtle essay by the German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it,” she wrote. She, too, shrank in horror from its contemplation. “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life,” she wrote, “and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.” People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely, afraid that the condition might be contagious. And people who are lonely are themselves so horrified by what they are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed—“it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.

“During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment,” the sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote in “ Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ,” from 2012. “For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.” Klinenberg considers this to be, in large part, a triumph; more plausibly, it is a disaster. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, the percentage of single-person households grew at a much steeper rate, driven by a high divorce rate, a still-falling birth rate, and longer lifespans over all. (After the rise of the nuclear family, the old began to reside alone, with women typically outliving their husbands.) A medical literature on loneliness began to emerge in the nineteen-eighties, at the same time that policymakers became concerned with, and named, “homelessness,” which is a far more dire condition than being a single-person household: to be homeless is to be a household that does not hold a house. Cacioppo began his research in the nineteen-nineties, even as humans were building a network of computers, to connect us all. Klinenberg, who graduated from college in 1993, is particularly interested in people who chose to live alone right about then.

I suppose I was one of them. I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.

This experience might not fit so well into the story Klinenberg tells; he argues that networked technologies of communication, beginning with the telephone’s widespread adoption, in the nineteen-fifties, helped make living alone possible. Radio, television, Internet, social media: we can feel at home online. Or not. Robert Putnam’s influential book about the decline of American community ties, “Bowling Alone,” came out in 2000, four years before the launch of Facebook, which monetized loneliness. Some people say that the success of social media was a product of an epidemic of loneliness; some people say it was a contributor to it; some people say it’s the only remedy for it. Connect! Disconnect! The Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.” The epidemic only grew.

This is not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Living alone, while common in the United States, is more common in many other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Australia, and Canada, and it’s on the rise in China, India, and Brazil. Living alone works best in nations with strong social supports. It works worst in places like the United States. It is best to have not only an Internet but a social safety net.

Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday? ♦

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A History of Loneliness Audio CD – Unabridged, May 10, 2016

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The riveting narrative of an honorable Irish priest who finds the church collapsing around him at a pivotal moment in its history.

Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland when priests are highly respected, and Odran believes that he is pledging his life to “the good.”

Forty years later, Odran’s devotion is caught in revelations that shatter the Irish people’s faith in the Catholic Church. He sees his friends stand trial, colleagues jailed, the lives of young parishioners destroyed, and he grows wary of venturing out in public for fear of disapproving stares and insults. At one point, he is even arrested when he takes the hand of a young boy and leads him out of a department store while looking for the boy's mother.

But when a family event opens wounds from his past, he is forced to confront the demons that have raged within the church and to recognize his own complicity in their propagation, within both the institution and his own family.

A novel as intimate as it is universal, A History of Loneliness is about the stories we tell ourselves to make peace with our lives. It confirms John Boyne as one of the most searching storytellers of his generation.

• Language English
• Publisher Brilliance Audio
• Publication date May 10, 2016
• Dimensions 5.5 x 5.5 x 0.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1501220322
• ISBN-13 978-1501220326
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (May 10, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501220322
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501220326
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 5.5 x 0.25 inches
• #56,867 in Books on CD
• #131,623 in Religious Literature & Fiction
• #206,624 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. The winner of four Irish Book Awards, including Author of the Year, he is the author of fourteen novels for adults, six for younger readers and a collection of short stories. The international bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was made into a Miramax feature film and has sold more than eleven million copies worldwide. His novels are published in 58 languages. He lives in Dublin. www.johnboyne.com.

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5 comforting books about loneliness and solitude

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Health officials have been warning about an "epidemic of loneliness" for years now. The isolation of quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic and its lasting effects on overall mental health have put a point on how severe an issue loneliness can be. At the same time, many people learned to embrace being alone, finding solace in their solitude. Whether you're seeking ways to navigate out of loneliness, looking to commiserate about isolation or finding the beauty in your own company, here is a list of relevant books to keep you company. 

'Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection' by Jeremy Noble, MD, MPH (2023)

While working as a primary care doctor, Jeremy Noble noticed that loneliness could be a serious health issue. He discovered a trove of research on the harmful impact loneliness has on mental and physical health, and made "loneliness-busting" the focus of his academic work. "Loneliness is a signal, like thirst," Noble told Harvard Public Health. His latest undertaking, "Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection," is an offshoot of the signature "UnLonely" initiative at his nonprofit, the Foundation for Art and Healing. In the book, Noble explores the roots of widespread isolation and proposes ideas for treating loneliness while lessening its social stigma. "Drawing on extensive experience and illustrative examples, Nobel offers practical remedies to a fundamental social problem," Kirkus Review said. Order here. 

'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness' by Kristen Radtke (2021)

Even though Kristen Radtke started her graphic novel "Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness," before the Covid-19 pandemic, it came out when the country was still reckoning with the isolation of social distancing. "I started writing about loneliness by accident," the author noted in an essay for The New York Times. In "Seek You," her second nonfiction graphic novel, Radtke melds images, cultural criticism, personal anecdotes from herself and others, and research from her exploration of American loneliness. Radtke "portrays loneliness not as innate or natural so much as socialized, filtered through and irradiated by culture, politics and media." Kady Waldman said in The New Yorker. Order here.

'The Lonely City' by Olivia Laing (2017)

Another book that infuses research and culture is Olivia Laing's "The Lonely City." The memoir explores urban isolation in one of the most bustling cities in the U.S., New York City. Laing approaches the subject of loneliness through the lens of art, the creative people behind the work, and her personal experience as a New York transplant. Laing moves "effortlessly between subjects," using "everything from biochemistry and urban theory to art criticism and technology" in her exploration of loneliness, Jason Heller wrote in a review at NPR. The author "invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the internet," Publishers Weekly added. "For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering." Order here.

'Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World' by Michael Harris (2017)

On the flip side of solemn isolation you can find the joys of solitude, something Michael Harris considers in his book, "Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World." Harris investigates how newer technologies like social media have encouraged an obsession with constant connection, and how that has influenced people's behavior in real life. Harris relies on neuroscience, the life stories of creatives and humor to explore the benefits of embracing stillness and spending time alone. Waterstones described Harris' book as "elegant, thoughtful and beautifully argued," and said it "makes a compelling case for why time spent in solitude is more crucial than ever in our hyper-connected world." Order here.

'Bluets' by Maggie Nelson (2009)

In her essay at the Times, Kristen Radtke said one of the best descriptions of loneliness she read was from Maggie Nelson's "Bluets." Loneliness, Nelson wrote, "is solitude with a problem." Another experimental take on autobiographical themes, Nelson's work is a stirring collection of prose poetry meditating on love, grief and the color blue. The Atlantic's Ruth Madievsky called the book "meditative, devastating and unexpectedly funny." Nelson chronicles her mounting obsession with the color blue as she navigates the pain of lost love. "The color does not replace the speaker’s aloneness, but it becomes its container," Madievsky added. Order here.

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Heather McCalden: The Observable Universe review - reflections from a damaged life | reviews, news & interviews

Heather mccalden: the observable universe review - reflections from a damaged life, an artist pens a genre-spanning work of tender inconclusiveness.

Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the subsequent loss of her maternal grandmother, Nivia, who raised her. It’s a fragmentary work, but the medium (half-memoir, half-essay) responds to the author’s own sense of disconnection and uncertainty, and at its heart is an aching feeling of loneliness and grief.

Initially, the book seems to present the reader with the story of McCalden’s parents and her relation to them, but this is complicated by the mystery surrounding their lives (and deaths) and her own feelings around their absence. It becomes far more about Nivia, as she might be perceived alongside discussions on the development of the internet (and, later, viruses) and the simultaneous spread of HIV/AIDS . McCalden is clear that she is using metaphor throughout and turns frequently to consider her own use of rhetoric, including its limitations: “I have no sense my parents are dead. I simply have no sense of anything at all. What might the metaphor for that be?”. She attempts to find her family, then any family at all, watching episodes of familiar shows in order, perhaps, to understand these connections, which feel, in the end, like they will only deepen her feelings of estrangement.

But there is also something interesting in the way McCalden has written an AIDS memoir – always held at one remove. Derek Jarman’s Kicking the Pricks and David Wojnarowicz’s diaries are full of the rage and despair of living and dying with an illness that was worsened by the prejudice and ignorance. McCalden, on the other hand, is speaking from a distance. It is a distance felt through the passage of time; but it is also registered at other levels, and with regard to other aspects of her life: through, for instance, her feelings of ambivalence towards her parents. When she does track down details of her father (on the internet, as it happens), she finds out that he was a holocaust denier. She tries to find a PI to uncover information about her mother and father, but the actual hiring of a detective to do this is repeatedly postponed, giving the sense that she doesn’t really want to know, after all. McCalden delays, mediates, obfuscates, diverting down apparently random alleyways in order to both prolong and process the knowledge of her family.  When she does find a woman to help her, the investigation is as confused and disjointed as McCalden’s feelings towards this seem to be. There is a sense that she is, in many ways, resistant to her own desire to understand her life and the world around her.

The book effectively culminates with McCalden in an internet café, being told via Skype, the briefest things about her father. But when she cries, it’s about her grandmother. She has tried to reach for information, for what little can be found via the medium of the internet and a computer, but she has failed, or perhaps this wasn’t really the point. "[M]emories," she writes, "don’t constitute a narrative, or a presence, except you feel it just the same." It is more a book about process, and difficulty of looking clearly at the facts that make you who you are, than a tidy narrative summation: life is made of many endings, but very rarely do we reach conclusions. 

• The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99)
• More book reviews on theartsdesk

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