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Article: Squinting at the absolute: the vision of John McGahern.(Obituary)(Biography)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- May 5, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A few months ago, I was fortunate to hear a BBC radio abridgement of All Will Be Well: A Memoir, read by the Irish novelist, John McGahern, who died of cancer at the end of March. A light tenor voice, scarcely betraying his seventy-one years, offered a rural idyll of County Leitrim, place of the writer's birth and retirement. The lyrical evocation clashed with a somber formative story of childhood loss and fear--fear of the trembling sort.
In All Will Be Well (Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 289 pp.), McGahern combines the unabashed longing of a child for his mother (also a victim of cancer) with ambivalent awe of his bullying policeman father. His book's title registers a ...