Overdoing the Synge-song
Terry Eagleton: Sebastian Barry, 22 September 2011
On Canaan’s Side
by Sebastian Barry.
Faber, 256 pp., £16.99, August 2011,978 0 571 22653 5 Show More
by Sebastian Barry.
Faber, 256 pp., £16.99, August 2011,
“... In the great lineage of classical realism from Stendhal to Tolstoy, a whole history is summarised in the fortunes of a particular family or set of characters. Individuals are portrayed in all their idiosyncrasy, but are made to represent more than themselves. Things are at once unique and exemplary. A belatedly flowering example of the species is The Leopard, in which the slow decay of a Sicilian nobleman coincides with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy ... ”