The pedophile Dublin priest who built a swimming pool in his back garden-in drizzly Ireland!-so that little boys could swim with him. The book contains funny and terrible things, details and episodes so pungent that they must surely have been stolen from a fantastical artificer like Flann O’Brien. The novel gladly rushes in where the angel of history fears to tread.īut the novel has no monopoly on historical correction, and reading Fintan O’Toole’s new book, “ We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” (Liveright), is like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel, rich in memoir and record, calamity and critique. And recorded history struggles to capture not only unwritten lives but unwritten thoughts, very often leaving a void around private existence, interiority. History is full of destruction and certain death, but fictional people may live forever, in an eternal redemption.
It was subtle of Penelope Fitzgerald to use this as the epigraph for her historical novel about the poet, “ The Blue Flower,” implying, as it does, the novel’s best powers of restoration. “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” Novalis said. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
