The Cuirt International Festival of Literature opened Tuesday evening with a launch at the bright, modern City Museum overlooking the Corrib River where it flows into Galway Harbor. Welcoming speeches, wine and canapes were the features pointing the gathered literature lovers toward a week of engaging readings and other events, and maybe took Irish minds off the tough taxes, levies and pension cuts announced in the emergency budget last week.
In the opening reading of the festival Joseph O’Neill and Timothy O’Grady read from their work. O’Neill read one five-page section from his novel Netherland, which of course has copped a lot of honors and accolades, to which I’ll add no remarks. Timothy O’Grady read selections from his book Divine Magnetic Lands, about a road trip he took through the United after thirty years of living in Ireland, London and Spain. The trip was in two stretches, the first, two months from New York to San Francisco by a northern route before the invasion of Iraq, the second, two months back to New York by a southern route after the war began. The book is a fine travelogue, interspersed with personal reminiscences and reflections on what the country has become, the ways in which it earns our affection and draws our exasperation. O’Grady read affecting pieces from a visit with Studs Terkel in Chicago, O’Grady’s birthplace, a meeting with a Salvadoran gang member in Los Angeles, and two episodes from Alabama. Unfortunately, the book, which takes its title from a Whitman poem, has been published only in the U.K. I’ll try to find out if U.S. publication is in the offing.
Filed under: By Dick
