The Islandman Book

I had the great privilege to visit the Dingle peninsula earlier this summer, and obviously there's something to be said about visiting the place where a historical memoir takes place. I was able to picture the teeny island, miraculously pinned down in the constantly seething ocean, to see from the mainland the dots of white and brown that are the remnants of the houses the Blasket people once inhabited.
That was the thing about the Dingle peninsula (and a theme in OCronan's book): the water is alive there. This is not a place where "calm" is a word you'd use to describe the sea - rather, choppy, buzzing, foamy, angry, active, and crashing would be my words of choice.

To have this understanding of Blasket before reading The Islandman became a crucial element of my experience. That's not to say, of course, that the novel doesn't hold up on its own: I believe that it does. But it was such a different type of reading experience from any I'd ever encountered that my sense of Tomas' world, however vague, wound up being a huge asset.

Tomas O'Cronan is a storyteller - an oral storyteller. Although the style of the novel seems foreign at first, it was only when I realized that it was the perfect written transcript of a long, hugely entertaining nighttime story that I was really able to click right into it. What an amazing privilege to get such a personal sense (because what makes O'Cronan an amazing storyteller is that he pours such amazing vulnerability into his stories) of life in a place so - hate to use the word here - foreign from our own. All that was missing from my experience was a cheery fire, cup of ale, and raging storm outside.