Máirtín Ó Cadhain - In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection

Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille, Trans. by Alan Titley. Yale University Press, 2015.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves.
In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.

All of the characters in “The Dirty Dust” (Yale University) are six feet under. Lying in a graveyard in Connemara, Ireland, in the early 1940s, they have not a moment of rest. They’re always squabbling, gossiping, complaining, joking, or telling stories. This is the first English translation — by Irish Times columnist Alan Titley — of Máirtin Ó Cadhain’s satiric Irish novel in dialogue. Like Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood,” “Dirty” is a cacophony of voices that reveal a place and its people. Its world is sad and beautiful, and the talk is endlessly entertaining. - JAN GARDNER

 "The blessed itch" is how one character in Mairtin O Cadhain's The Dirty Dust (translated by Alan Titley, Yale, £16.99) describes the urge to write. You would have expected the characters' desires and opinions to be behind them, buried as they are in the clay of a Connemara graveyard. However, their gossip and backbiting is the lifeblood of this novel, which consists almost entirely of dialogue. Published in Irish in 1949, set during the 1940s with war in the background, Colm Tóibín considers it "among the best books to come out of Ireland in the 20th century." Titley says in his introduction he wanted "to get some of the tone and vivacity of the original across without sounding too bizarre". He succeeds and, while there's little plot, it bristles with black comedy: "I wonder what kind of funeral I had? I won't know that until the next corpse comes." - Max Liu

From Yale University Press comes the first-ever English translation of “the most important prose work in modern Irish.” A deeply satirical novel, The Dirty Dust is reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, in that Cadhain’s characters are all already dead, yet they speak to us about their lives and the lives of their fellow townspeople. Written entirely in dialogue form, The Dirty Dust imagines a world in which the dead continue to take an interest in the living and one another. - bookriot.com/2015/03/07/translation-march-fiction/


If, by some fluke of fate, you managed to dodge your Irish language requirement in high school, fail to visit rural western Ireland or even, heaven forbid, forget the great mass of Gaelic you surely had to have learned as a youngster, you'd be forgiven for not having heard of Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Sadder still, you're likely never to have read his best-known novel, The Dirty Dust. That is, I must admit: I hadn't.
That's because, despite Ó Cadhain's stature in Ireland — and even his popular success there — most of his books still haven't been translated into English, even more than four decades after his death. He wrote exclusively in modern Irish. And though he engaged in much the same leaps of language, formal invention and plain-old ambition of his countrymen and contemporaries, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, his works have been left to, well, gather dust — in the English-speaking world, at least. The Dirty Dust stands as the first English translation for Cré Na Cille— which has also been called "The Churchyard Dust," or "Graveyard Clay."
Perhaps Ó Cadhain, in spite of himself, might have found some grim pleasure in this confusion of tongues. He certainly seems to relish the flapping of gums: the petty chatter that gives this novel its shape and substance. Frankly, with a handful of exceptions, there isn't anything in the novel but chatter, as the book consists of nothing more than dialogue — no narration, no exposition, no stage directions, even.
And nobody alive, either.
I'll let a corpse explain the predicament: "Christ's cross protect me!" raves Caitriona, the newly deceased, early on in the book. "Am I alive or dead? Are the people here alive or dead? They are all rabbiting on exactly the same way as they were above the ground!"
The gaggle of characters who step into and out of The Dirty Dust's driving conversation have nowhere to go, as they've already been tucked into caskets in the local graveyard. But death hasn't deprived them of their voices; they've still got plenty to say, bickering over the cost of their plots, slandering their families, even running (so to speak) in elections — and stewing on their favorite topic of all, life. As each body gets buried, the newly dead becomes something of an emissary from the world above, plied with questions about the latest developments in years-old grievances.
Death, in Ó Cadhain's telling, is just life distilled into its purest elements: gossip, jealousy, resentment and speculation — and the complex phenomenon those elements make up, a community of neighbors who care (perhaps too much) about each other.
A word to the wise, though: The comparison to Joyce and Beckett is a useful one, not just in style and era, but often in difficulty too. By stripping away many of the conventions of the typical novel — neglecting dialogue tags, interrupting narratives, burying important details beneath ellipses, robbing the graveyard of vital visual clues — Ó Cadhain doesn't lay a whole lot of mile markers behind himself as he goes. In effect, it feels at first like getting tossed into a crowd of strangers jostling each other in a pitch-black room. From the din of shouts and mutterings, a voice or two will surface for a speech, only to subside all too soon.
But out of this racket, strangely, an orchestra emerges, in which each voice acts as an instrument. Absent any explicit labels, the voices instead take on the timbre of their own complaints and pet causes, so that a casual reaction or even a single word can become a kind of verbal signature — an unmistakable sign of that person's presence in the conversation. In this way, monologues become solos, discussions whole movements. In repetition, interruption and echo, they cobble together a different kind of plot, shaped less like an arc than a guttering flame.
As trivial as it might seem, I'd be remiss not to mention the impressive variety and innovation of the insults slung between our not-so-friendly corpses. Ó Cadhain, and in turn his translator, Alan Titley, have dredged up more names for one's fellow beings than Adam himself, just about all of them unfit for the Bible — or a family publication like NPR. Somewhere between a "gnat's fart" and a "sailor's bicycle," you'd find the rest of Ó Cadhain's countless invectives beneath a censor's stripe. And that's a shame, because this grotesque and creative lexicon isn't simply an adolescent's dream; it's a kind of a linguistic play that's constant throughout the book, a joyful disrespect for "decency" that allows its author an unvarnished look at those who'd otherwise hide behind it.
This, then, is perhaps Ó Cadhain and Titley's great feat: By breaking with conventions and trying to invent their own, they diminish the distance between ideas, like decency and disrespect, we often think of as opposites. Pride and shame; care and loathing; and yes, even life and death — divvied as they are among many different voices, these oppositions become meaningless, mere fodder for more hearsay. Somewhere between Sartre's famous adage, "hell is other people," and the hell that was middle-school gossip, The Dirty Dust imagines an afterlife still filled thick with words — and one well worth prying open. - Colin Dwyer

The Dirty Dust is a different kind of underground-tale: it is set entirely in 'The Graveyard' and its characters are all dead and buried. Technically lifeless, the deceased nevertheless retain considerable consciousness -- as well as the ability to communicate amongst themselves. As Caitriona Paudeen, the newest arrival in the graveyard when the novel opens and more or less the central character, wonders when she finds herself down under: 
Am I alive or dead ? Are the people here alive or dead ? They are all rabbiting on exactly the same way as they were above the ground ! I thought that when I died that I could rest in peace, that I wouldn't have to work, or worry about the hopuse, or the weather, that I would be able to relax ... But why all this racket in the dirty dust ?
       Of course, Caitriona soon realizes what's clear to many of the others assembled here: 
I'm not a blabbermouth. Anything that's my own business, anything that I saw or heard, I took it into the clay with me. But there's no harm talking about it now when we are gone the way of all flesh ...
       Old rivalries and arguments flourish here eternally, as everyone has all the time in the world to make their case and claim again. Whether about how Peter the Publican and his daughter handily ripped off some of their clientele, that one pound that Caitriona borrowed from neighbor Kitty but never got back, or the refusal to believe that Galway could have lost to Kerry in the All-Ireland football final in 1941 ("But you were dead. And I was looking at the match" one dead man tells the other, but the other refuses to believe it), the debates, complaints, and recriminations continue endlessly.
       Initially, Caitriona's main concerns are to determine just how fine her funeral was -- the novel opens with her wondering whether she's in: "the Pound grave, or the Fifteen Shilling grave" (or whether, god forbid, she was plonked in the Ten Shilling plot) -- and how good a cross they'll raise on her grave. Eagerly she asks each new arrival about her own funeral -- after the initial disappointment of finding that the latest arrival is, yet again, not her daughter-in-law, who she is rather overeagerly expecting to join her much sooner, rather than later.
       Not everyone can oblige Caitriona, as Ó Cadhain fills up the graveyard with a colorful cast of characters who remain lifelike in their own quirks and interests. There are some efforts at getting things organized too, though not everyone is on board:
     -- All that vile vituperation will only vulgarize your mind. I will have to establish a relationship with you. I am the cultural relations officer for the cemetery. I will give you some lectures on "The Art of Living."
     -- You, son of a bloody gun, ... "The Art of Living" ? ... What next ? 
     -- A progressive section of us thought we had a duty to our fellow corpses, and so we set up a Rotary ...
       The mix of dead -- many finding themselves again far too close for comfort to those they thought they could keep their distance from -- makes for lively (if also often obsessive) conversation.
       Politics intrude, too, including concerns about Hitler ("The postmistress is all up for Hitler. She says that Postmistress is a highly valued position in Germany"). And there's a foreign presence too, the Frenchman with little command of the language -- not that that keeps him taking part ("C'est l'histoires des poules, n'est-ce pas ?").
       Some of the nine chapters include a sort of prelude-section, the 'Trumpet of the Graveyard' providing a bit of background and overview of this unusual situation, but almost all the novel consists of the wide-ranging (if often also circling back on themselves) exchanges among the dead, with things livened up by new additions bringing the latest news (and disappointments). And despite the seemingly ceaseless blabbering, even here there are plaintive cries: 
Let me speak ! Let me get a word in, please ! ...      
 A classic Irish novel, the translation of The Dirty Dust was long overdue. Alan Titley's vigorous translation fits the dialogue-intense work well, and Ó Cadhain's creative use of language comes across well in the English too.
       Certainly an unusual work, with relatively little 'action', The Dirty Dust does a great deal within the limits of its inspired premise. Good -- and surprisingly not in the least morbid -- entertainment.
- M.A.Orthofer

The most important prose work in Modern Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille has never before been published in English. This 1949 novel, as Alan Titley introduces his blunt, bold rendering into our language as “The Dirty Dust, carries the flow of chatter you might hear outside a door when everyone inside is tearing themselves apart; or in a country churchyard in the light of day.” The title resists easy equivalence, although “churchyard clay” has long served as as its English echo for critics. Titley, a skilled writer and critic in Irish, prefers the biblical resonance of ashes and soil, for this narrative takes place entirely in a Connemara cemetery, as its interred bicker and boast among themselves.

It was inspired by a report in the author’s native West of Ireland where a woman was buried inadvertently atop her rival one day when it was too rainy for the gravediggers to bother with niceties. An onlooker mourned: “Oh holy cow, there’s going to be one almighty gabble!” Ó Cadhain set his novel, akin to what Titley calls switching channels between various conversations on a radio, in townlands he knew well in County Galway, near the Atlantic shore among its Irish-speaking community.
Then, that language was still connected to those in the 19th century who had spoken no other. The author did not hear English until the age of six. Rich in imagery, curt in tone, this dialect of Irish can be difficult for those who encounter it today. Titley prefers a conversational, casual tide of chat, cursing, and reverie to wash over Ó Cadhain’s characters. This eases the reader’s challenge. The author plunges us immediately into a fictional tale told in dialogue and interruption.
Yet, even if Caítríona Paudeen’s new arrival among the dead makes her by default the protagonist, the buried characters surrounding her six feet under crowd her out. Many of her neighbors resent her airs. It’s best to let this rattling narrative roll on, rather than resist its banter or weary of its nagging. As a downed French pilot now and then complains in his own native tongue (untranslated): these scolds bore him. He had hoped to find peace in death, but the tomb seems not to be dead at all. Rather, the foreigner, struggling to figure out the meaning of the babble around him, finds it betrays the same old ennui. Sympathizing with his plight, I found myself drifting along as the voices resounded and receded. It’s not hard to give way to them as background noise rather than scintillating exchanges.
The liveliest portions open most chapters. The “Trumpet of the Graveyard” summons souls to a reckoning. Ó Cadhain contrasts the joys of the living with the dread of the dead. He also here evokes the intricacy of Irish-language verse by departed bards: “But the flakes of foam on the fringe of a surge of a stream are slurping in towards the shallows of the river where they slobber on the rough sand.” The alliteration and end-rhyme give way as they ebb into brutal phrases, and a sudden stop.
Meanwhile, without fresh news to filter into the soil, insults and laments repeat. No effort at organization lasts long; a Rotary Club, an election, a cultural society all flounder. Jonathan Swift’s prediction of “a road on every track and English in every shack” threatens the isolation of the village. Its cadaverous inhabitants debate a medieval prophecy attributed to St. Colmcille about the signs of the world’s end.

This sense of doom deepens in the novel’s vague duration during the middle of the Second World War. The corpses debate, as did their real-life counterparts, the comparative merits of the Germans and the British as allies for officially neutral Ireland. The Antichrist’s return is rumored.

The dead are uncertain if D-Day has occurred. Only with the internment of the newest arrival, Billy the Postman, do the rest learn that none of their graveside crosses are made of Connemara marble. The dead had asserted this, each trying to put down the others, so as to boost their own status. That incident concludes this novel. Its recurring themes of discontent and rivalry dominate whatever moments of tenderness and solidarity remain after village life has given way to common death.

In this sobering depiction of a determined counter to the stereotypes of Irish rural relationships, native son Maírtín Ó Cadhain in his native language sought to correct myth with truth. As ably translated by Alan Titley, the results recall Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh’s play, both of which feature this same milieu, as they include too the telling phrase of “a skull in Connemara”. -John L. Murphy

I can’t speak or read Irish, so when I read that Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille was “the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language,” as Colm Tóibín wrote, I regarded the accolade as impressive but practically untestable: the same way I would regard a statement like “the best gelato shop in Mongolia.” I have no reason to think that Mongolians are bad at making gelato, nor do I have reason to think that Irish speakers are lousy novelists, but it was really the second part of Tóibín’s appraisal that caught my eye: the novel was “amongst the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century.” The thought that I had missed out on a work comparable to the modernist masterpieces of Joyce and Beckett left me feeling estranged from my Irish heritage, and like a provincial monoglot. It’s only now, more than sixty-five years after Cré na Cille’s 1949 debut, that the novel is available an English translation, Alan Titley’s The Dirty Dust.
The book shares some of Joyce's and Beckett’s narrative experimentation, melancholy humor, and occasional incomprehensibility. The Dirty Dust begins moments after the main character, Caitriona Paudeen, a woman singularly possessed by pettiness, is buried. Like the other members of the graveyard, her ability to speak is unaltered, as are her concerns: She spends the first minutes of eternity worrying aloud about whether she has been placed in the respectable “Pound grave” or the lesser “Fifteen Shilling grave,” and thereafter complaining about her sister Nell, “the bitch," who survived her.
Ó Cadhain’s decision to dispense with narration in favor of naked dialogue is striking; it evokes the experience of blindness, as if the reader was just another body in the graveyard listening to the idle chatter. The many unattributed and unconnected voices––there are more than a dozen principal characters and many more secondary ones––can be disorienting and occasionally frustrating: like reading a Dostoyevsky novel pared down to contextless quotations. But the narrative choice does more than mimic the experience of the dead for the reader; it comments on the possibilities and limits of oral histories, and of talk, which played a central role in the Gaeltachts, the small Irish-speaking communities that formed in a larger English-speaking country. Talk is not only the “principal character in this book,” as Titley writes in his translator’s note, it is the book.
Isolated from the living, the dead socially reconstitute their world through speech, disputing particular details that no one in their grave can verify—a process not unlike the continual revisions of oral histories. Their world is fluid. Caitriona’s sister-in-law Nora, for example, who was apparently something of a philistine above ground, reinvents herself as a cultured, literary woman in the Dirty Dust (to Caitriona’s great frustration). Even when packets of information about the world above fall from the sky in the form of freshly dead bodies, it becomes clear that every truth in that world of conjecture and gossip is compromised by ignorance and desire. The newly dead often tell the others what they want to hear: Caitriona is informed of multiple, contradictory stories about the things most important to her, like the fortunes of her living son Patrick, her funeral, and the dubious installation of a cross of marble to mark her grave. “Having a cross here,” it is said, “is like having a big slate house aboveground."
There’s a symmetry of life and death in Ó Cadhain’s novel. “The people here […],” remarks Caitriona, “are all rabbiting on exactly the same way as they were above the ground!” The Christian idea that the soul rises above the body after death is refuted forcefully. The souls of Ó Cadhain’s characters are not tethered to material concerns incidentally, but essentially, unalterably. When the characters aspire to something higher, they are overcome with trivialities. Even the Old Master, a cultured, or at least literate, school teacher, spends his time instructing Nora until he is consumed by paralyzing suspicions that his widow is having an affair.
Against the backdrop of eternity, though, efforts to better oneself appear as comic and meaningless as concerns over the composition of one’s gravestone. A French pilot who chanced to crash to his death in Connemara spends his time nobly studying the Irish language and is eventually able to translate phrases into the local dialect: “Qu’est-ce c’est que jobbers? What the fuck are jobbers?” he asks. There is also a disastrous attempt to hold an “Interred Election.” And cataclysmic world events are assimilated into the petty disputes of the grave. When Caitriona hears that her living sister supports Churchill in the “War of the Two Foreigners” she allies herself with his enemy: “Up Hitler!” she exclaims. “Do you think there’s a chance . . . that he’ll flatten her new house down to the ground?” The war may have been similarly unreal for many members of the living Gaeltacht, who remained largely uninvested in global politics, save for how they related to nationalist movements.
The characters in The Dirty Dust may be confined to a remote, immaterial world, but their interactions are lively and complex. Their world is a pure social construction. The Dirty Dust seems to have captured some of the purported social vibrancy, humor, and strangeness of the original. Titley’s translation has rescued an Irish classic from what might as well be the grave––for provincial monoglots like me, that is. -Darragh Mcnicholas
This book is considered as the classic novel written in Irish. It has been made into a radio play, a stage play and a film (which I can highly recommend - it has English sub-titles.) Ó Cadhain apparently was not keen on having it translated into English. However, it was first translated into English in 1984 by Professor Joan Keefe of University of California, Berkeley as her Ph.D. thesis but never published. It now appears in English sixty-six year after its first publication in Irish. It is a most interesting work in many ways. Firstly, all the characters in the book are dead. Secondly, the Irish used is very colourful, both by being rich in colloquial expressions as well as by using the rich array of swear words Irish has. I suspect their translation, with the standard English obscenities, is less colourful though just as blunt. Keefe translated the title literary - Churchyard Clay. Alan Titley, in this version, admits in his introduction, that he struggled with the title and lists a whole host of possibilities that he considered but chose Dirty Dust, so as to conform with Ó Cadhain's alliteration. Personally, I prefer Churchyard Clay, which, alliteration apart, conforms more with Ó Cadhain's intent. Though he makes it clear that he is not going to anglicise Ó Cadhain's name, he does anglicise the names of the characters. The main character, for example, is Caitríona Phaidín in the original but Caitriona Paudeen in this translation, while her friend Muraed Phroinsias become Maggie Francis. Bríd Thoirdhealbhaigh gets reduced to Breed Terry. Some of the names are translated into English, which makes some sense but means that they lose their Irish resonance.
As I mentioned all the characters are dead. The action takes place in an Irish country graveyard, actually inside the grave, where the dead arrive and seem to more or less carry on the way they did, when they were living, in the sense that they talk and gossip and bad-mouth all and sundry. At the start of the novel Caitriona Paudeen has just died and entered the grave. Caitriona has a bad word for virtually everyone but there are two people in her life she has had a particularly dislike for, her younger sister, Nell, and her daughter-in-law, called only Nora Johnny's daughter. Her mother, Nora Johnny, is in the grave, having predeceased Caitriona.
Caitriona's dislike of Nell seems to be long-standing (Caitriona was seventy-one when she died) but primarily dates from when Jack the Lad preferred Nell to Caitriona. Caitriona had her heart set on Jack and was bitterly disappointed when he chose Nell. She has taken some satisfaction in the fact that Jack was a poor provider and Nell and Jack did not live well. Indeed, Caitriona, so she claims, helped to look after their son, Peter. Another source of contention is their elder sister, Baba. Baba moved to the United States and never married. However, she did work for a rich lady and, apparently, when this lady died, she left her money to Baba who is therefore now rich. When Baba came back to visit Ireland, she initially stayed with Caitriona but then move out and stayed with Nell, when Patrick did not marry the woman she wanted him to marry, and left from Nell's house. The two sisters have been waiting for their sister to die, in the hope that she, rather than her sister, will inherit. Caitriona is now very bitter that Nell will now inherit.
Caitriona did marry but we know little about him. They had one son, Patrick, (though three daughters died) and Caitriona had high hopes for him and so she was very disappointed when he married Nora Johnny's daughter, as was her sister The couple and their young daughter, Maureen, have been living with Caitriona. She feels that she came from a poor family and has slovenly ways. She is now even more bitter, as she feels that it is her fault that she, Caitriona, is only buried in the fifteen shilling grave and not in the one pound one. Indeed, during the course of the book, she will learn what has not happened at her funeral and on her grave site, for example, the promised marble cross or, indeed, any cross, has not materialised. She is also concerned about the land owned by Fireside Tom, a first cousin once removed, which she hoped to get her hands on before Nell.
While the focus is certainly on Caitriona, there is a whole host of characters residing in this grave. We hear many of their stories as well. Often their issues are trivial. Kitty, for example, is determined that she is owed a pound by Caitriona (who denies it) and makes something of an issue out of it. Indeed, many of the issues seem trivial. Several people feel that Peter the Publican had cheated them, overcharging them for drinks. They were afraid to raise the matter then but are not afraid to mention it now. Nor are they afraid to now mention the fact that the postmistress made a habit of opening people's letters and, allegedly, not sending or delivering of ones she did not approve of. There is even an (illiterate) storyteller whose stories start but do not always finish and are often off colour. There is also a Frenchman, who speaks French (though he is trying to learn Irish - he stumbles somewhat over their slang) and keeps mentioning Winston Churchill's promise to liberate France. Local gossip is to the fore but they also talk about politics (there are one or two who favour Hitler, presumably because of their hatred of the English), sport, agriculture and going to England. They eagerly seek news from new arrivals, with Caitriona, in particular, hoping for bad news for her sister and daughter-in-law. When Jack the Lad dies and arrives, she is particularly gratified.. However, oneupmanship is the game they mainly play, how their funeral was better than the next person's or how their child has gone on to do better than their neighbour's.
The book works very well because Ó Cadhain is a superb storyteller. The novel consists entirely of dialogue and we have to follow a series of different conversations and remarks, though it is generally not too difficult to get an idea of who is talking. This is definitely one of those books that you wish that you could read in the original, as I have no doubt that the Irish is rich and colourful, something that must be very difficult to convey in translation. It is not just a good story but a very bitchy satire, mocking the rural Irish and all their foibles. From Swift via Synge and Flann O'Brien, satire has played a key part in Irish literature and this book is certainly a worthwhile addition to the tradition. - www.themodernnovel.com/irish/ocadhain/cre.htm

Máirtín Ó Cadhain believed that talk was the best way to reveal character, and while there are so many people in this novel that it’s difficult to get a rounded picture of any, some become more prominent that others.
There is the huckster shopkeeper who will do anything to turn a few shillings; the bar owner who waters the whiskey; the schoolteacher who rails against his wife, who may be having a good time while he is dead; the guy who steals seaweed; the insurance salesman with the silver tongue who will turn any situation to his own advantage; the woman who discovers “culture” in the graveyard; and the men who argue about football.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970) is considered one of the most significant writers in the Irish language and among all writers of the twentieth century. A lifelong language-rights activist, he invigorated the Irish language and Irish literature as well as modernist literature at large. Alan Titley, a novelist, story writer, playwright, and scholar, writes a weekly column for The Irish Times on current and cultural matters.