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Fret Over The Sentence
FT.com / Life & Arts – The art of good writing.
I fret about writing a sentence: whether to make it concise, minimalist and pared-down or, exuberant and rhythmic to match the tone. Are the rules that dictate brevity and concreteness enduring? My new year resolution was to craft the best sentences I could.
Adam Haslett’s feature ‘The Art of Good Writing’ is one of the best pieces I’ve read about the sentence dilemma in the ungovernable activity of writing. He looks at the forthcoming book from Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.
He quotes from William Trevor’s story ‘A Day’ to illustrate how the aural effect and rhythm of a sentence matches the pathology of his character.
Haslett counts himself among those readers who fell in love with literature not by becoming enthralled to books but ‘by discovering individual sentences whose rhythm and rhetoric was so compelling they couldn’t help but repeat them’.
A half-dozen selection of Irish Short Stories
It was one of my books for Christmas. The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. And it was my recommended read for our book club this month.
But they’re a stubborn crowd, my book club lot. They know their own minds. What did they think of the book?
Took a long while to get into.
Some of the stories were lousy.
There are writers here I like, but they have better stories than what we got in this collection.
Some of the stories had no beginning or middle or end.
These can’t be the best Irish short stories of the last century!
It was time to turn the discussion around, get it working on a more positive vein.
Well, can we talk about the stories we DID like. Let’s see if we can select a half-dozen.
This did the trick. Lots of stories were enjoyed. We got a consensus on the top half-dozen Irish short stories from the Granta selection:
Claire Keegan’s ‘Men and Women’
From the 1999 collection Antartica, this story gets going with the great opening lines, ‘My father took me places. He had artificial hips, so he needs me to open gates.’ For our discerning lot, Claire Keegan’s stories, set in her rural mythic landscapes, are a triumph of writing.
Colm Tobin’s ‘A Priest in the Family’
We admired the grit, the dignity, the self-possession of Molly, mother of the child-abuser priest. After informing her of the devastating news, Father Greenwood adds, ‘I’d say people will be very kind.’ Molly replies knowingly: ‘Well, you don’t know them, then.’
Edna O’Brien’s, Sister Imelda
It’s almost 30 years since this story first appeared and it captures the boarding school world of bacon and cabbage, tapioca pudding, ‘fairly green rhubarb jam’ and the nuns’ ‘monotonous Latin chanting, long before the birds began’.
Eugene McCabe’s ‘Music at Annahullion’
Three siblings share a home on ‘thirty wet sour acres’ and their wretched lives are captured in words spoken in Annie’s dream: ‘I wish to God we were never born.’
Mary Lavin’s ‘Lilacs’
This piece goes back almost six decades to Mary Lavin’s collection Tales from Bective Bridge. The images of dung and lilac counterpoint the worlds of gritty reality and class aspiration with astute precision.
William Trevor’s ‘The Dressmaker’s Child’
The last story in the Granta selection and the master does not disappoint with this world of the greasy garage, the wayside weeping statue and the strange dressmaker.
We all agreed there were enough good stories in this collection to be getting along with – even if each of us had our hate list.
Patricia Byrne 
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