![]() He goes into town once a week, briefly, to run essential errands. He’s stopped going to church and keeps to himself amidst his mountains of books (“spines and spines and spines, raised to towers on the coffee table, queued into rows along the skirting boards”). ![]() The late-middle-aged Ray whom readers encounter in these pages has had lots of practice feeling like a pariah, and decades of social exile have taken their toll. Because his father thought Ray “wasn’t a right-minded little boy … wasn’t all there,” he never sent his son to school. He spent his days working in a factory Ray never saw and, by keeping mostly quiet on the matter, led Ray to believe that his mother’s death was linked to his birth-in other words, that he was guilty of doing inadvertent harm to others from the get-go. The father, readers discern, was a rather absent presence (or worse) during his life as well. Ray wears his father’s ill-fitting slippers around the house he hangs two towels in the bathroom. But he remains very much a presence in the otherwise solitary life of his son. Ray, the narrator, is a 57-year-old man who lives alone in a coastal Irish village in what he still thinks of as “my father’s house.” His father is dead, a sausage segment having “stoppered his windpipe” at breakfast one morning several years earlier. ![]() Baume ( who is also a graphic artist) proceeds like a collagist, but here are the basics. ![]()
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