presents six short stories and one novella about the residents of a small rural town in Ireland, Here are sad, lonely and disappointed people whose lives didn't turn out quite like they'd hoped, There's not much to do but hang at the pub, looking for adventure, love or at least a temporary thrill,
The stories are dark and happy endings rarer that a sunny day, yet an underlying comic tone keeps the mood from becoming too bleak,
This is an excellent debut by a writer with a bright future, The stories have an elegantly terse style and there is much to be admired, but one cannot make a chamber orchestra by playing one, or at best two, instruments.
Barrett is short of insight about life, particularly those outside his age group, He dismisses the elderly, and women, with pejorative nicknames he relegates them to the shadows of his stories except for two Mad Sweeney typesold men who still are only cameos.
He's got the bleak rural Irish town setting right but this volume does not depict its full population,
A good start, Now that he's finished the MFA in the ivory tower, life may top him up like putting the finish on a pint that has halfsettled, Making a remarkable entrance onto the Irish and UK literary scene with rave reviews in The Sunday Times and The Guardian, Colin Barretts Young Skins is a stunning introduction to a singular voice in contemporary fiction.
Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and boozesodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub.
Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars, Amongst them, theres jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmys sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tanseys boot kicked it in and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job.
In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of Irish society unforgettable characters whose psychological complexities and unspoken yearnings are rendered through silence, humor, and violence.
With power and originality akin to Wells Towers Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Claire Vaye Watkins Battleborn these six short stories and one explosive novella occupy the ghostly, melancholic spaces between boyhood and old age.
Told in Barretts vibrant, distinctive prose, Young Skins is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a brilliant new writer, A strong collection about drunks and criminals going nowhere, One has to appreciate the young male writerly tendency to use nouns as verbs in order to get through most of these stories, For example one "heels" the kickstand of the motorbike,
When overdone this calls attention to the writing and detracts from the story, Hopefully it is a phase one can grow out of, or perhaps will become once more seen as faddish, One of best collections of short stories to come out of Ireland in a decade or more, Striking in terns style, language, voice and vision, The stories capture the hunger of the human soul while the writing delivers for the most part in what is a gutsy debut, Deservedly the winner of Frank O'Connor Award for,.Quite a few good stories by this up and coming Irish writer, Stuck in a Irish town with boarded up windows for store fronts and little or no job opportunity besides hanging, playing pool etch these young men and women spend endless days trying to outwit boredom and the nullifying effects of sameness.
Some hang on to long to past relationships and dreams, others kind of step in place, just going through motions, preserving, denying their bleak outlook, What saves these scenarios are some cunning witticisms, dark humor and despite the hopelessness, a sense of perseverance and a touch of hope, .stars This is another book Ive wanted to read for ages, the time finally arrived!
“Young Skins” is a collection of short storiesstories andnovella a debut which won several impressive book awards including The Frank OConner International Short Story Award and The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Colin Barretts stories, although each very different, have a running theme throughout: failure is hiding in the shadows of these men and women who live in the small town of Glanbeigh.
a fictional town in Ireland, . . their discomforts, resentments, disillusionment, longings, loss, and defeats between the youth and adults,
The town Glanbeigh itself is a very bleak place its not a town where peoples lives are thriving and inspiring, unless of course drinking cocktails, with red syrup and crushed ice concoctions are the highlight of your day,
Dreary is as dreary is!,
Crazy wonderful deadpan characters with names that fit their basic dispositions BAT, TUG, NUBBIN TANSEY, ARM, DYMPNA, MINION, etc, These characters are bored do little drink a lot of beer dont expect much hope for their future and what plays on our thoughts is just how real this image is of life for many twenty somethings today in pockets all over the world.
Profanity, violence, humor in the context of darkness,
. . gorgeous lyrical elegant prose!
A very talented young author! Cheers for the Irish!
Gritty is the only word to describe these wellwritten short stories.
I liked some, but not all, So, for me, its a mixed bag, I look forward to reading his latest short story collection, Homesickness, soon, An extraordinary debut of contemporary short stories by Irish author, Colin Barrett, winner of the Frank OConnor Irish Short Stories and the Rooney Prize, Set in Glanbeigh, Ireland, his characters show the downtrodden side of Irish society, Barretts prose is sharp, vibrant, and moody, Crass at times, but brilliant,
What a very fine voice to enter the contemporary Irish literary world,
Highly recommend.
out ofIn the vein of authors like Donal Ryan and Lisa McInerney, Colin Barrett has a gift for conjuring quiet scenes from smalltown Irish life that bristle with a kind of dormant tension.
sitelinkYoung Skins is a collection of seven short stories that all take place in the same town, and often the same pub, with a few overlapping characters, but which mostly stand on their own.
Each story focuses on a male protagonist, usually young, all in some way navigating working class life, postIreland's financial collapse,
It's very rare that I give a short story collectionit's to be expected that in a collection like this, certain stories are going to shine and certain others are going to fade into the background.
Though I loved Barrett's prose throughout,
this collection really wasn't an exception to the rule there are stories I loved and stories I found to be rather forgettable though thankfully none I outright disliked.
The Clancy Kid was a strong opening, introducing us to the gritty, bleak backdrop of young love turned to heartbreak that characterizes so many of these stories, as well as the kind of violence that permeates male youth culture.
Bait is a tricky one I'd been loving it, up until the very end where it takes an, . . incongruously supernatural turn that I still haven't fully made sense of, If you've read this story, please tell me your thoughts on the ending,
The Moon didn't leave much of an impression on me, though this is where Barrett states a lot of the collection's thematic conceits rather plainly, which makes it a solid addition a young, flighty woman says to our protagonist at one point "Galway's not that far, but it might as well be the moon for people like you.
" And I thought Stand Your Skin was maybe too thematically similar to The Moon, though Stand Your Skin is the one I preferred.
Calm With Horses, the collection's magnum opus, is more of a novella than a short story, nearingpages, In my opinion this story stands head and shoulders above the rest, and it's not just because of its length, I think this is where Barrett is able to really stretch his legs and show us what he's capable of, Various characters and subplots weave in an out of this one and all dovetail in a satisfying, heartrending conclusion, I really hope Barrett has a novel in the works,
Diamonds I think is solidly the weakest story that doesn't offer much that we can't already find elsewhere, And Kindly Forget My Existence is a fitting ending, where Barrett eschews his young protagonists in favor of two middle aged men who sit down at a pub and discuss their own youth.
So, as with most short story collections, a mixed bag, but it's worth the price of admission for the stunningly tragic Calm With Horses alone, and the rest of the stories mostly hold their own as well.
Dismal and hopeless as this collection is on the whole, there's an assured beauty to Barrett's prose that I found very striking, especially for a debut, and I can't wait to see what he does next.
Opening lines:
I left the city with my connections scorched and my prospects blown, looking only for somewhere to batten down for the winter to come.
I left in a bright morning in August, dozing fitfully as the train drifted through the purgatorial horizons of the midlands heading west,
You may read online at sitelinkThe Guardian, This author's got talent, and grit, and a feel for characterization and form and usually natural dialogue and all the other things that go into crafting a solid short story.
But the fact is that no story in this collection is especially memorable, Overhyped. A good read for the authors first book of short stories, The stories themselves are current, often humerous tales of life in rural communities in Ireland, I could relate to some of the stories where on a Sunday evening, nothing else to be doing except driving around town with your friends, ending up in the local pub playing pool.
His writing needs a bit of refinementor editing but definitely one to watch This short story collection, set in the fictional Mayo town of Glanbeigh, won the Guardian First Book Award in, as well as two other major awards, so it was one that I was looking forward to reading.
I have to admit that it wasn't really until the third story that I got into the collection, but from then on became invested in the narratives of the varying characters.
Glanbeigh is portrayed as a bleak place, a place where anyone successful in education leaves, and most of the characters portrayed haven't had great success in their lives.
Alcohol, drugs and violence all loom, either large or in the background of the majority of the tales, and the characters mainly come from the edges of society or broken families.
Sounds depressing, And to be honest, I'm glad that I wasn't reading this in the depths of winter, Given that the book is in short story form, we get fleeting glimpses into the characters' lives, but I think that Barrett shows great promise in how he's able to convey the bleakness of the setting and some of the situations, while still giving the reader a sense of each personality and their psyche, and his descriptive prose is consistent with someone with a background in poetry as he has, without being too flowery.
I'm not a big fan of the short story form, but I, like many others, will be keeping an eye out for Barrett's debut novel, when it arrives, to see if this promise is realised.
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Colin Barrett