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    Solar Bones
    Solar Bones
    Solar Bones
    Audiobook9 hours

    Solar Bones

    Written by Mike McCormack

    Narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland's most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father's deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway's thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the "vortex of his being," surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires. Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 12, 2017
    ISBN9781501965494
    Solar Bones

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    Reviews for Solar Bones

    4/5

    102 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is written in a unique format that feels more like reality than most books. I felt I was there living life with the characters. The story itself was not so interesting now that I am finished, but while reading it was very engaging.
    • 5/5
      I had already bought a copy of this book before the Booker longlist was announced, because it won the Goldsmiths Prize and was well received by reviewers whose opinions I trust. The whole book is a single sentence monologue, which tells quite a conventional story of a mid-life crisis but is rather more interesting than that would suggest, since the topics it covers are wide-ranging and universal. The narrator is a middle-aged engineer, who works for a local council in Mayo. I was aware that there was some discussion last year about an apparent spoiler on the cover of the Irish original, which does not appear on the UK Canongate edition. Apparently the author intended the reader to be aware of this, and there are certainly plenty of hints, not least in the opening.Given its unconventional structure, the book is surprisingly easy to read, and despite the lack of full stops there are plenty of line breaks, either to indicate reported speech or to suggest possible break points. The competition is such that I think this one is unlikely to win this year's prize, but it was an interesting one to read.
    • 4/5
      Marcus Conway is a ghost.  On All Souls Day, he sits at the dinner table waiting for his family to return, and unspools a stream-of-concious monologue about this life written in a single sentence (this is the second single-sentence novel I've read recently!).  The single sentence isn't as apparent in the audiobook - deftly narrated by Timothy Reynolds - but I do notice that he starts phrase with "and" a lot, adding a certain rhythmn to the prose.  Marcus talks about his own father's death, his sometimes troubled relationship with his wife and children, and his work as a civic engineer.  Local politics also plays a big part of his story, from voting to a politicians thickheaded insistence on building a school that's not structurally sound, to even the awful stomach virus that infects his community - including his wife - caused by bad sanitation.  Over time, Marcus unravels the details of his own death and comes to terms with his mortality.  The thing about this novel is that for all the experimental nature of its narrative, Marcus is a perfectly ordinary person doing ordinary things.  McCormack's writing unveils the fascinating stories within the everyday person.
    • 3/5
      If your work has substance it does not require a gimmick. That is my firm belief.This book was written in one sentence from start to end. It’s a story of a middle aged engineer in Dublin sitting at his dining table waiting for his wife and children to come back from his funeral, contemplating about his life. The story lacks true substance and meanders around.This was long listed for the Booker’s prize. I really question the award itself now.
    • 5/5
      one book. one sentence. creative writing. take a moment to get used to it. a story like gentle waves.
    • 4/5
      There is plenty not to like about SOLAR BONES. It is disorienting, especially the beginning when the narrator, Marcus Conway, sits at his kitchen table reminiscing about his life following his death; the inexplicable idea that the dead can become flesh for one hour every year; the unconventional narrative style that abandons a coherent plot for free-association; and the fact that the novel is just one continuous sentence—that’s right, no periods. With that said, McCormack gives us quite a remarkable reading experience.Conway is an everyman who remembers a pretty mundane life with many regrets but no ability to change anything—remember he’s dead. He mulls over what he has experienced in his profession as a middle-aged civil engineer living in rural County Mayo: the tension between the precision and definability of engineering versus what he perceives as an essentially chaotic world. “What really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and alignment.” A childhood memory of a broken down tractor revives his sense that the natural world just teeters on the verge of chaos, “the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected.” Similarly, Marcus recalls visiting a torture museum in Prague where elegant machines were designed just to inflict horrible pain. “The highest technical expressions of their age, the end to which skilled minds had deployed their noble gifts.”As a man who spent much of his life as a civil engineer concerned “with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines,” Marcus can’t reconcile a world in disarray and seemingly spinning out of sync. Chaos scientists invoke a concept they call the “butterfly effect” to explain why chaotic systems like the weather can't be predicted more than a few days in advance. It postulates the poetic notion that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil may be capable of setting off a cascade of atmospheric events that could result the formation of a tornado in Texas. Although he never cites the “butterfly effect”, Marcus acutely senses that it was in force during his life.Family life provided solace to Marcus, although this also had its chaotic moments. He seems to have a settled and fulfilling relationship with Mairead, his schoolteacher wife. Darragh is his wisecracking son, who communicates via Skype as he backpacks in Australia. Agnes, his daughter, is an edgy artist whose debut installation features her own blood. Marcus’ realization that Agnes used her own blood in her debut show brings on a panic attack. Marcus recalls a painful time when Mairead left him but later returned. Chaos intervenes once again when Mairead becomes severely ill from a contaminated water supply. Municipal political corruption, brought on by the Irish building boom, also tests Conway’s ethics.This remarkable book is timely because it gives the reader a strong sense of how misguided is our sense of control in a very fragile world. Certainly the most compelling argument is our increasing realization that humans may have irreversibly destroyed the planet, resulting in the loss of species and habitable places. In the face of all of this, we can only gaze in wonder and feel as helpless as Marcus Conway does on All Soul’s Eve in County Mayo, Ireland.
    • 1/5
      The 2017 Man Booker judges were clearly in the mood for something a bit different or adventurous. Hence the winner 'Lincoln in the Bardo', shortlisted 'Elmet', and longlisted 'The Underground Railroad', all of which I found to be potentially interesting rejected after hearing reviews which described their structure and approach. If only I had read reviews of 'Solar Bones' I might have saved a couple of hours out of the last remaining days of my life. This book is around 250 pages long and doesn't contain a single full stop as far as I can see. Oh sure, there is punctuation - I reckon a comma appears about once per page on average. Forget the Nancy Pearl rule, I threw this across the room after only 20 pages.
    • 4/5
      if a tree fallsif a tree fallsin the forest and no one is presentdoes it make a soundand if a string of wordshas no end punctuationis it a sentencethese are questions void of question marks posed by a reading of Solar Bones questions of purpose why make a novel out of one sentence—if one may call it that—and why make it stream of consciousness and are either of these labels being placed on this novel accuratenonot at allbecause this book is neither stream of consciousness or one sentence but that doesn't mean it fails, it is not stream of conscious truly because no one—or so I believe, maybe just very few—think in such complete complex thoughts we are creatures whose minds bounce around from one incomplete thought to another rarely stopping to return to—what was I saying—this novel is better classified as a slightly rambling experiment in form, a term that is as muddied as it sounds, perhaps it's better to call it interior monologue lacking grammatical accuracy, which is often confused with stream of consciousness, neither is this novel one sentence because, as I hope we've established by now, if you've made it this far and actually are understanding this rambling experiment in form that I call a review, a sentence isn't a sentence without the tangy taste ofMiracle Whipthat comes in the form ofend punctuation of some kindbut Solar Bones doesn't fail in story which is important since I guess you could say the point of a story is to tell a story or something, this gets confusing and the fact that Mike McCormack could write like this for more than two-hundred pages shows that he's either really skilled or that once you start a bad habit it's easy to stick with it, likewhat if McCormack's intention wasn't to create something experimental, but what if he's just a bad typistthe fact I'm going off on tangents may lead a reader to believe that I am writing in stream of consciousness but I'm notI'm just ramblingstream of consciousness would look more like, squirrel this isnuts how did McCormack write for 224 pages like this butonce again I stray from the review at handwhich is difficult because all I want to talk about in this review is style and the definition of stream of consciousness and pointing out that a string of words without end punctuation is merely a string of words, all this should indicate how significant style is to this work and it begs questions likewhy did McCormack elect to use this styleI can only venture a guess that it's because our narrator is a spirit, a fact that I don't think was made clear enough in the opening pages and that this lack of proper grammatical sentences is a case of I-don't-give-a-fuck by our ghost friend which speaking of languagereminds me how lilting the language is throughout this story, it's poetic haunting and crass, initially it's a little hard to get into the style and I'll be honest here, I'm probably not doing it justice, but once you get used to the voice, it sort of flows easily but take too long of a break, a day or two spent in another book andthe rhythm is thrown completely off, you have to get back into the book relearn the rhythm that is the voice of Marcus Conway, spiritif you actually read all of this review, I wish I could buy you a cup of coffee but digital coffee sucks and I'm poor, but I hope you enjoyed it and if you didn't because you found the style irritating then you may not like this book because it is written in a similar manner though it truly does grow on the reader after ten pages or so butif for some reason it doesn't Solar Bones may drive youmay drive youmay drive you nuts
    • 5/5
      "...and it was part of their whole Christmas thing to leave food and drink on the kitchen table for Santa Claus and Rudolph, something to keep them fed on their big night's work, usually cake or a sandwich and a carrot, and it was my job, before going to bed to eat some of it - or at least to leave teeth marks in it - to show that Santa had indeed sampled our hospitality so that, the following morning, when they had got over the delight of their initial presents they would stand beside the table to examine the remains of the food and the whiskey glass lying sideways on the table because obviously, with a drop taken in so many houses along the way, Santa must have been well slewed by the time he got to our door and it was a wonder at all he managed to leave the right presents in the right houses and there was Agnes standing by the table in her pyjamas listening to me saying all this, weighing it up, while Darragh was already surging ahead , examining the carrot and cake but still not saying anything so that I began to wonder if I had slipped up somewhere in my story and given something away that would spoil the whole thing and I was about to open my mouth again but Mairead (his wife) was looking at me from across the table, shaking her head, wearing that expression, both fearful and dismayed, which was telling me without words tostop now, before you go too farstop nowso I stopped"This was really good. I had checked it out from the library in print, not knowing anything about it - it was calling to me from the "new fiction" section. It's written in stream of consciousness, but don't let that scare you as it is perfectly done. No capitals or periods or quotations, but it works just fine because of how they formatted it. I had started reading it and was thinking that it had such a lovely flow to it, an internal rhythm that I thought would be perfect as an audiobook, so I checked, and sure enough it was available on audio. Narrated by Tim Gerard Reynolds, it is so beautifully rendered that it was a pleasure to listen to, and I was sad when it ended. So why not five stars? Well, I though it dragged just a bit in the middle, keeping it from being a perfect read - such a small quibble, really, as the book is only 217 pages. Anyway, highly recommended, and if you do audio at all, go with that format - I listened to it at 1.25x speed, and it was sublime.
    • 5/5
      Whoof.What a book.I picked it up with both dread at the prospect of reading a gimmicky one sentence long book and hope that it would turn out every bit as the reviews and praise and awards had said it was.I don't want to overhype it, but I thought this was a beautiful book, a lovely reflection on family and a real sense of place that defines a person's life and love of all sorts. I could imagine Michael Joyce writing a book like this, it's that poetical and elegiac.I have dozens of page edges turned down for little moments that were funny, poignant, touching, or just so well written.What a book.
    • 2/5
      The one-long-sentence gimmick was not difficult to follow as it was basically stream-of-consciousness writing with the memories of a working and family life, however the plot on the most part lacked any compelling drama or suspense until the climactic events of the final few dozen pages unless you consider maintaining an ethical stance in your civil engineering career while fighting the forces of political insider machinations to be dramatic this might cause your attention to waver as it did mine requiring me a month's reading to finish this 200-page novel which did win the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize for its "fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities for the novel form" and despite various blurbs to the contrary I did not detect any signs of humour to help lighten the load on the way.