Start Reading The China Factory Crafted By Mary Costello Formatted As Bound Copy

is technically a reread, but I didn't post a review when I initially read it, so I'll write one now,

Noteperfect collection of short stories, Costello does what I like so much in a writer: creates beautiful prose out of the original language of close observation, All of these stories are memorable and a fewthe title story, "And Who Will Pay Charon", "The Sewing Room"are absolutely arresting, Costello's voice inhabits a variety of characters naturally and empathetically and explores wide emotional territory fearlessly, Love this book, can't wait for a new one from her, Short story collections dont come much better than Mary Costellos The China Factory,

First published in, then reprinted in, this volume containsstories, each of which is richly evocative and deeply moving,

There are recurring themes of longing, of missed opportunities, of loneliness and guilt all told through the eyes of ordinary people, from a teenage girl about to embark on her first summer job to a teacher on the brink of retirement.


To read the rest of my review, please visit sitelinkmy blog, another great irish short story writer, apparently,

correct, another great Irish short storywriter, I am being a little generous with the here, as one or two stories may be a little under, but I did engage fully with this book, just my thing.
Often about the usual unwanted pregnancy, retirement, infidelity, an email romance that is 'spoiled' by becoming 'real life', a shy man who steps forward in a difficult situation causing reappraisal it's the mature, steady way the stories are handled that impresses and gets under your skin.
This approach makes the lyrical passages soar more, and the uncertainty, longing, dreams hit home, The daytoday, flies, skies, cats and dishes, are unfussily, beautifully described, and often lead to wider considerations e, g. a dead fly: its legs in the air, its thin wafery wings lying flat, The heat of the sun will dry its body outright, He thought he could smell its deadness, and the smell of warm dust that never leaves that room, Some nights he thinks it's his own dust that he smells, that specks of him rest on the shelves and the windowsill and on the spines of books.


A wonderful debut collection, looking forward to her next, Relatively quiet stories where not that much happens, Lots of interiority and contemplation and sighing, Characters on the brink of decisions that they are tentative to make, Enjoyable writing, although individual stories tended to vanish after the next one began, A sameness of tone.

I'd like to read more of her work, Perceptive stories that feature highly observant protagonists and shine a light on relationship connections and often the moment that breaks them, the cracks, the rupture, the inability to move on, the consequence of absorbing the knowledge without acting on it.
My favorite was "Who will pay Charon" and the Sewing room,
This is a collection ofshort stories by an Irish writer, all stories set in Ireland, Very sad stories that stay with you after you've closed the book, Lyrical and thought provoking. I will leave this book on my nightstand and read one or two stories now and then, "No more dying. " Frank O'Hara wrote that prescription in his "Ode to Joy, " Mary Costello's The China Factory is a collection of short stories by an author who decided not to take his advice, This book consists of a dozen tales, and many of them are drenched in mortality the way baba au rhum is drenched in, well, rhum.


I found myself wanting to invoke a stereotype that Irish writers tend towards dourness, Well, there is James Joyce's Dubliners, and you tend to remember the way "The Dead" colors all the other stories in that collection.
And Beckett, of course. It doesn't get much darker than Beckett's fetishization of absurdism, Yeats can be pretty dour when he's not levitating in love, You could go down an Irish checklist and say "dark heart, dark heart, dark heart, " But then there are writers to disprove a sloppy generalization like that, Oscar Wilde. Well, the plays. Much of the poetry might bolster the argument, And then even the darker Irish writers have that black Irish humor that must be mother's milk in that soggy climate, that oppressive greyness.
But there have been more recent Irish novelists whose bestsellers break the paradigm, maybe suggesting that much of the darkness was due to darker times when stifling provincialism and colonialism and poverty and Catholic repression played strong roles in coloring the literature.


Costello's collection is a gathering of dour stories, And they don't resort to black humor to offer the reader any comic relief, But because they are, for the most part, wellmade stories, and because they have worthwhile things to say, you tend not to mind the bleakness.
Or I tended not to mind,

Here is a brief breakdown of my impression of the stories with synopses following their order in the collection,

The title story sets the tone for the rest of the collection, A young woman "with a future" works briefly in a china factory near her home, She mixes with people who may not match her future station in life, But she wants to fit in, to "pass, " She dissimulates. Carpooling with two older nearneighbors, a man and a woman, she comes to be invested emotionally in the life of the older man driving her to work each day.
But only in a rather voyeuristic way, He is a loner in life and an outcast in the workplace, the china factory, A traumatizing event happens in the workplace, People are on the verge of being killed by a madman, The outcast saves many lives and receives no recognition for this, The young woman moves on to her next phase of life, Later, she learns of his lonely death, This inability to speak one's mind, one's soul, will afflict many characters in the stories which follow, It's probably the dominant theme of the collection: emotional paralysis,

I found the second story, "You Fill Up My Senses," to be one of my favorites in the book, A young girl narrates her family life, She lives on a farm with her mother, father, grandmother, and a younger sister and brother, The hardness of farm life is brought home and there is a magical sort of connection the young mother shares with her children, almost as if she were another, wiser sibling.
This story felt almost like a description of farm life from centuries ago, But there would be occasional mentions of technology to indicate the tale takes place in our time, It was the rhythm of the prose matching the rhythms of farm life and chores which made it feel timeless and almost anachronistic, but in an interesting way.
The child begins to feel a psychological break with her family with regard to their treatment of animals, The story is ultimately about the impending loss of the mother and the child's reckoning of this, So two divides open up at once, It was darkly beautiful and difficult to process because of the verisimilitude,

"Things I See" is another tale about emotional paralysis, A wife and mother to a young girl is in a relationship which has reached a difficult stretch, Her sister stay over for an extended period as a house guest, The sister is an accomplished cellist and a free spirit, The reader senses where this tale is going, or at least one part of that "going, " The adultery is foreseeable. But Costello isn't really interested in surprising you with plot twists in any of these stories, She's much more interested here in crafting studies in often excruciating passivity, The tale marshals its energy to create taut prose which runs on the tension between extreme passivity and an extreme adulation of someone who is doing you wrong.
The reader ends up feeling trapped inside that paralyzed body, which can only see and not react or speak out, I wonder if this tack might lead to some readers experiencing emotional claustrophobia themselves,

"The Patio Man" is about a random stranger, a gardener, suddenly being thrown into the midst of a woman's miscarriage, He is the one who must drive his employer a virtual stranger to the hospital when the tragic event occurs, I didn't feel this tale was as fleshedout as the others, but it had a different feel which might have added to the gestalt of the collection.


"This Falling Sickness" is a doublydark tale in that it is about the problematic death of an ex how does one grieve this which is inextricably bound up with the memory of the loss of a child which the remarried protagonist once had with that ex.
This is a tale where Costello really works well with the images which tell her tale, There are weird echoes and resonances with the theme of falling in this story, The death of her young son in an auto accident is indelibly scored on her mind as the image of him falling after the arc of his thrown body surrenders to the pull of gravity.
Her ex dies by falling while mountain climbing, After her ex's funeral, a young epileptic with "the falling sickness" has a tragic episode by the grave, This tale might be accused of wallowing a bit, particularly in the final passages, But if one is going to "write death," this prose certainly does that well, It casts a definitive and opaque pall,

"Sleeping with a Stranger" is another tale about emotional paralysis, Here it is a tale of a middleaged man seeking respite from a long marriage gone cold, Maybe it is surprising to find this tale being told so sympathetically, The man is smitten with a young teacher whose class he must audit, He finds her youthful idealism, her freshness, intoxicating, Nothing comes of his initial attempts to become familiar with her, Years later, he encounters her again, now married, perhaps jaded herself, Now she is receptive to him, No affair comes of the man's ministrations and attention, but instead a rather unsatisfying fling in a hotel room, The man is also tending to his mother in a nursing home as she is nearing death, The man's distance from his mother who has dementia seems just another echo of his distance from the other women with whom he has attempted to bond.
The tale ends with the mother's death and on a weirdly optimistic note that doesn't really seem borne out by the preceding events,

"And Who Will Pay Charon" is again a tale of emotional paralysis, A man might have pursued love, a shared life, with a woman who gave him a gentle ultimatum before leaving the country, But he declined her offer, She went off to work as a nurse in London, He became a bachelor academic and grew to old age in solitude, It seemed mostly to agree with him, Years later, she returns to Ireland and he sees her about now and again, She seems disturbed, wild. Late in life, after the death of his old flame, he learns she was raped by monstrous sadists in England, He cannot process this. He sneaks into her home after her death and studies her belongings, The tale ends with this impossible new knowledge weighing the previously welladjusted man down, The man questions whether he could have turned fate as one turns a river, if he had accepted her offer all those years ago.


"The Astral Plane" is actually the ethereal world of online romance in this tale about a woman falling in love with a complete stranger through the vagaries of chanc.
A man finds a woman's copy of a book accidentally left behind after an author's reading, She had written her email in the back of the book, I didn't find this tale to be rewarding at all, There was the usual emotional paralysis of the central character but the level of the writing wasn't quite up to Costello's other tales, The tale didn't find a satisfying ending for me, and really nothing of substance happened, It's okay if nothing of substance happens, as long as the writing is beautiful, right But I didn't find anything like that here,

"Little Disturbances" is another mortal tale in which a family man with grown children and a somewhat patient wife finds that even with all the characters in place to grieve you, death can still be a damn lonely road to walk.
This is a tale of a prodigal daughter, although actually that metaphor might not be so apt, Rather, one of the daughters was driven away by the father's sternness and pride, many years ago, The tale ends with a hope for reconciliation but with darkness still percolating through everything, Proofer's note: this tale has "Jimmy Stewart" as "Jimmy Stuart" on page, but I'm guessing that's a U, K. spellcheck program that did that, Damn Royals!

"Room in her Head" is about a woman sharing what should be jovial time with her spouse and another couple and feeling completely isolated from the group.
I kept waiting for somebody to almost unconsciously with no real mens rea kill someone else, because the emotional paralysis and passive aggressive loathing was so overwhelming.
I felt like this was a decent study in depression but little more,

"Insomniac" had a nice hook to it, You think here is another tale about another person under emotional duress who cannot get relief, This time it's insomnia. But this tale takes a weird turn, The insomniac goes out into the night and encounters a police woman who takes him on a wild ride, Nothing sexual happens, as one might expect, But when the man returns home, his wife is horrified, This story points a direction I hope the author might go in the future, allowing characters to do things we might not expect them to do.


"The Sewing Room" is a very wellturned short story, A woman who gave up a child for adoption when young ends up alone and childless in old age, She becomes a school teacher and ends up educating the children of the man who fathered her own reluctantly relinquished boy, The story takes place on the day when the teacher is being feted upon her retirement, She encounters the man again on this very day, as well as his wife and children, This could be a maudlin tale, but it is not told in that way, There is a cold clarity to everything, A sense of balance. But there is still the pinch of cruelty in the words and the fate,

Some samples of Costello's prose:

"Her mother's home was called Easterfield, She remembers it from when she was very small, a big house with tall windows and a wide lawn facing the wrong wayfacing out to the fields instead of to the roadand a gravel yard with barns where her father parked the car.
And upstairs long landings with creaking floorboards and rooms with no light bulbs, and the creepy backstairs at the far end, She has a faint memory of her mother's father with snowwhite hair and round glasses sitting by the range holding a red plastic back scratcher in his hand.
The house is all closed up now, On the day of her mother's fourth birthday a blackbird flew into the dining room and tore a piece of wallpaper from a spot above the window.
The wallpaper had swirling ivy and serpents, and was very old, She sees her fouryearold mother standing in the room looking up at the blackbird, Suddenly her thoughts turn dark, She is getting too close to the sadness of her mother's life, "

from "You Fill Up My Senses, "

"Then it was over and he was lying in his white vest and open trousers on top of her, He pulled away but his face had darkened, After he had put on his shirt he looked down and saw that he had buttoned it wrong and a look of unbearable sadness came on him.
They did not say anything and he went back to his fishing and she to her book, and she was filled with terror and shame at what had just happened.
But then later, as they were leaving, he said, 'I'm going to get you a pup, for next summer,' and he took away some of her shame.
She would have liked him to hold her hand or kiss her hair, or something, before they went back down the mountain, "

from "The Sewing Room, "

"The sickness had been inside him for months, In early spring he walked through the land, going deeper into the fields to the last hill, He moved up the slope and stood on the summit and was caught suddenly by the ground shifting, He began to list as if on a ship, He turned his head and saw the dark mouths of foxes' dens along the ditch, Once, when he was baling hay late on a summer's evening,

he saw a vixen approach her den, A clutch of young cubs peeped out, anxious, and at the sight of the mother, came scrambling over each other, not orphaned at all.
He imagined them all moving underneath him now, loosening the earth, tumbling through dark tunnelsa teeming world of foxes inside the hill, In winter they'd sleep, curled in a tight circle, The hill began to pitch that day and the sky spun, The bile rose up and he retched onto the summit, He longed for the cover of trees then, to stand under the beech tree and feel rain falling on the leaves, "

from "Little Disturbances, ".