Readers Place

Joseph O'Connor interview/review

1. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer — and why?

As a child I always enjoyed books and storytelling, but when I was seventeen my first girlfriend gave me a copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the gift of that novel changed my life. I would give any younger person unconvinced by the joys of literature a copy of this book. I simply can’t imagine anyone not being thrilled, charmed, entertained and moved by it.

It is both laugh-out-loud funny and wrenchingly affecting. The book is almost completely plotless, but the longsuffering, sardonic, uneasy voice of the adolescent narrator, Holden Caulfield, is so distinctive and real as to make the story utterly unforgettable. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer myself. In ways, I sometimes think that everything I’ve ever written is an attempt to emulate the perfection it represents. I still make a point of re-reading it every couple of years, and whenever I do, it yields up new delights. The best book ever published about being young.

1. What are your ten favourite books, and what makes them special to you?

This is an almost impossible question to answer, but here is my attempt:

Anything by George Orwell — The ultimate touchstone; he set a standard by which all writing should be judged. Last year I read his complete works in chronological order, and it was the most enriching reading experience I’ve had in a long time.

Most writers dream of producing one book that earns a central place in the culture and changes the way its readers look at the world. With 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell managed it twice.

And even the imperfect, lesser novels — Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Coming Up for Air — are better than many of his successors’ major works. George is not fashionable in this era of the millionaire celebrity author; but anyone who cares about literature, politics, or the English language will find enlightenment, laughter, moral purpose and sheer pleasure in his work — all the more so, I think, if approaching it for a second or third time.

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee — An astounding work, by the greatest living novelist. A copy of it was given to me by the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, at a time when I was having doubts about writing at all. It just fills you with wonder at what words can do; the pictures they can conjure, and the small miracle that is fiction.

Collected Stories by John Mc Gahern — The first writer whose work I truly loved as a teenager, and one of only a handful of contemporary Irish authors whose novels will be still be read in a century.

The Ballroom of Romance by William Trevor — Perfectly balanced sentences, quietly powerful insights. A master of un-flashy but deeply haunting prose, he is also the one of the few Irish authors who can write convincingly about people from any social class.

Elephant by Raymond Carver — The last piece in this book, about the death of Checkov, rivals Joyce’s “The Dead” as the finest short story ever written.

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle — A book that turned a key for the subsequent generation of Irish novelists. It conveyed a sort of permission to write about the real Ireland of the suburbs, rather than the entirely fictitious country which features in many previous Irish novels.

The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford — Just a wonderful, evocative and tightly focused novel that combines thriller-ish elements with extraordinarily sharp insights.

A Good Man is Hard to Find (or anything) by Flannery O’Connor — Simply because nobody whose writing I know has ever achieved more. Beautiful, brave, funny and wise. The most powerful metaphors, always: they just keep deepening the more you think about them. An exactitude in the writing that is absolutely exemplary.

Collected Stories by Guy de Maupassant — For their hardness, lack of sentimentality, and merciless fidelity to the truth.

The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew — The best new American novel I’ve read in many years. William Faulkner meets Woody Guthrie, with Biblical echoes and prophetic tones. Absolutely brilliant storytelling and densely beautiful characterization.

1. If you had a book club, what would it be reading — and why?

James Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake — because it’s such a mind-numbingly difficult piece of work (though often very beautiful) that the support of a group might be helpful in getting through it. And if we didn’t get through it, we could talk forever about why not. I often think of this as my desert island book. It’s a beautiful, mysterious, maddening thing, more like a strange abstract symphony than a novel.

Indeed, it only truly comes to life when it’s read aloud. While it contains passages of extraordinary magnificence and clarity, it is often so obscure as to be almost impenetrable. In fact, I think the only place I could read it would be a desert island, but I’d need the encouragement of my fellow shipwrecked passengers to be able to face it. As to whether I would bother to take it home with me when I was rescued, I don’t know.

Taken from Barnes and Noble.