Word: mcgahern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...John Mcgahern...
Good writers are often compared to great ones, and the Irish fiction writer John McGahern surely falls into one of these two categories. He has been compared to Joyce and Proust, to Carver and Faulkner, and he has been called Ireland's finest living fiction writer. It is, perhaps, the human impulse to categorize, to judge, to say that this art is great and that is not. Certainly Mr. McGahern's voice is an extraordinary one, one that immediately announces itself as distinctive and recognizable, and his fiction creates a quietly graceful universe that we can watch and believe...
...McGahern, the question of overarching literary value is more or less a futile, comic exercise, as he said in a recent interview with the Crimson. His definition of good writing is a simple one. "The best guide," Mr. McGahern said, "to what's good writing is what interests us or gives us pleasure. It's not the only guide, but I think it's the least fallible...
...McGahern's Collected Stories, released in paperback in March, speak to the difference between an abstract greatness and what we like. When Tipperary, a character in the story "Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass," asks the narrator if he thinks Shakespeare was all that he was bumped up to be, the narrator answers that people say so, and it is people who do all the bumping up or bumping down. "Who is people?" asks Tipperary. "People is people," says the narrator,"...they might even be ourselves...
That is what Mr. McGahern is interested in, what he called "our own lives, the only lives we'll ever have." It is an enormous task, one that he must approach one life at a time, because rather than telling stories to make a point, he is simply telling stories. In "Strandhill," the Sea," another character labors to prove that Shakespeare must provide lessons for the modern world. He wants literature to be education, from the Latin educo, "to lead forth...