{"id":8420,"date":"2020-08-24T11:16:47","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T11:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8420"},"modified":"2020-10-21T11:15:49","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T11:15:49","slug":"modern-times-by-cathy-sweeney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8420","title":{"rendered":"Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 23 July 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

160pp, hardback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Stinging Fly Press in Dublin is one of the best promoters of new fiction talent.\u00a0 Writers such as Clare-Louise Bennett, Wendy Erskine, Colin Barrett and Kevin Barry have burst upon the literary scene with satisfyingly idiosyncratic stories for our times.<\/p>\n

Cathy Sweeney is the latest from this stable, writing for the most part short, sharp tales of disillusion and ennui<\/em> suffused with surreality.\u00a0 Some of her fantasies are more playful than others (reading \u2018Blue\u2019, a story about adultery in which the characters and their landscapes turn blue, the reader may well feel, why not<\/em> make up something like this) but all mix the fanciful with the banal in modern fairytale form. The results can be variously invigorating or dispiriting. At their best, they display a bracingly imaginative use of the absurd.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Flowers in Water\u2019, Sweeney makes a whole story out of a man\u2019s devotion to making invisible films.\u00a0 When he watches these with his estranged daughter, you believe that they are seeing the same things.\u00a0 In \u2018The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man\u2019, a revolutionary and perfectly effective solution to childcare is suggested.\u00a0 The married couple in \u2018The Chair\u2019 develop a routine that helps them to deal with their anger (Doris Lessing would have loved this one).\u00a0 There are Carteresque fables about a wolf in the woods, a sickly palace, a crazy birthday party.\u00a0 Characters long for second chances, settle for curious soothers (such as the dressed-down sex doll who keeps a widow company when her husband dies and her daughter leaves home for good), take illogicality as far as is necessary to keep them sane.<\/p>\n

Things happen in Sweeney\u2019s world \u2018through the fumes of memory and out the other side of a dream\u2019.\u00a0 In the final bluesey story, in which \u2018days rolled by like leaves\u2019, the protagonist considers having a baby:\u2018The light was draining from the sky, and along the highway cat\u2019s eyes blinked open, as rain spotted the windscreen.\u00a0 At slow speed the wipers sounded like someone giving head.\u00a0 Each time I looked, the clock had moved, until there was nothing left to think about.\u00a0 Black road, red tail lights, and line after line of white.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

In \u2018Flowers in Water\u2019, Sweeney makes a whole story out of a man\u2019s devotion to making invisible films. When he watches these with his estranged daughter, you believe that they are seeing the same things. In \u2018The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man\u2019, a revolutionary and perfectly effective solution to childcare is suggested. The married couple in \u2018The Chair\u2019 develop a routine that helps them to deal with their anger (Doris Lessing would have loved this one) […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8420"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8423,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8420\/revisions\/8423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}