Cover Design: Fergal Condon
Cover Image: Commuter Blueprint
by Kelvin Mann
Life In The Universe
Stories by Michael J. Farrell
Publication Date: 18th May 2009
Published simultaneously in a clothbound edition and in paperback.
Life In The Universe wias launched on May 21st in
Waterstone's, Dawson Street, Dublin 2.
This is a great collection. The stories surprise, and are full of surprises. They are funny, provocative, clever, charming, and quite brilliantly written.
- Roddy Doyle
A journalist sees an otherwise average house rise into the air. Two old codgers speculate about a utopian life created by writing that need never be read. An elderly priest and an even more elderly widow scan deep space in search of the meaning that eludes them at home. A woman invites a friend from the distant past to attend her suicide.
The late great Earth is going through a phase and is desperate for new answers. Its creatures, crawling about seemingly having a good time, are strangled by their stale imaginations. A world that now has nearly everything is still pathetically short of the long haul.
Look around you. A failed farmer becomes writer-in-residence in a town you know. A beautiful artist roars into your village on a motorcycle and neither art nor the village will ever be the same again. A painter paints a picture of himself that then talks back to him.
Written with great compassion and humour, Michael J. Farrell's stories are crammed full of life; and they quietly celebrate all the mystery and potential of our frail existence. Just live as long as you can, they urge us, and expect the unexpected.
Cover image is by Kelvin Mann. Originally from New Zealand, he has been living in Dublin for over ten years. Whole galleries of his work, including variants of the cover image, can be viewed on his website.
| Paperback €12.99 ISBN 978-1-906539-08-5 |
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| Clothbound €30.00 Exclusively available here (100 signed and numbered copies) ISBN 978-1-906539-07-8 |
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Reviews & Reactions
Impressive reviews are coming in. Watch this space.
The Weird and the Wonderful
It's always bracing to being a book with no expectations -- no advance praise, no foreknowledge of the author - and then to find oneself irresistibly ensnared by its originality and wit. Life in the Universe is such a book.
I learn from the dustjacket that the author of these 11 stories is in his seventies and was a priest for some years, two facts I'd never have guessed from the spritely and mischievous prose he writes, or from his droll and sardonic view of human beings in all their fumblings and foolish optimism.
"The only thing worse than night is day," Self-Portrait begins. "Night is when people usually die, and the only thing worse is to wake up in the morning." This story features Fogarty, a man whose painting of himself speaks back to him. This isn't the only odd situation in these wry tales. In Gravity, the protagonist wonders who to confide in when he sees a house ascending into the air. In By the Book, librarian Winnie, who begins by resenting the readers who are her customers, feels moved by a strange library visitor to go to the houses in her rural area and deliver unsolicited books to them.
Farrell's tone is so assured and his linguistic touch so deft he makes such improbabilities seem not just likely, but in the natural order of things. And he can be very funny, too. The young narrator's mother in Catharina wanted her pub to be a haven for lost souls because "she herself had not fared well in the domestic bliss department."
In Gravity, Kyle reflects that "it was great to be able to say one didn't know. Human ignorance was one of the few certainties left." Writers-in-residence, in the story of that name, were "unusual people invited someplace they don't belong to accept money to write about the locals or the zeitgeist or about nothing at all."
Spirituality, though, can be hard to come by. In Dandelion, the priest "Knelt for a minute in front of the altar hoping God would come out of hiding and make a difference." And confronted by adulteries in the confession box he "went easy on the penance because God had created sex and no one wanted to offend God by belittling one of his brighter ideas."
Still, his calling left him "wandering the earth in a post-Christian miasma and waiting for Christ to come back with a better public relations formula suitable for sceptical times." Farrell himself is sceptical about his characters, though he gives them all their due in stories that celebrate the urges and eccentricities of fallible human beings in an often bewildering world.
It's always bracing to being a book with no expectations -- no advance praise, no foreknowledge of the author - and then to find oneself irresistibly ensnared by its originality and wit. Life in the Universe is such a book.
I learn from the dustjacket that the author of these 11 stories is in his seventies and was a priest for some years, two facts I'd never have guessed from the spritely and mischievous prose he writes, or from his droll and sardonic view of human beings in all their fumblings and foolish optimism.
"The only thing worse than night is day," Self-Portrait begins. "Night is when people usually die, and the only thing worse is to wake up in the morning." This story features Fogarty, a man whose painting of himself speaks back to him. This isn't the only odd situation in these wry tales. In Gravity, the protagonist wonders who to confide in when he sees a house ascending into the air. In By the Book, librarian Winnie, who begins by resenting the readers who are her customers, feels moved by a strange library visitor to go to the houses in her rural area and deliver unsolicited books to them.
Farrell's tone is so assured and his linguistic touch so deft he makes such improbabilities seem not just likely, but in the natural order of things. And he can be very funny, too. The young narrator's mother in Catharina wanted her pub to be a haven for lost souls because "she herself had not fared well in the domestic bliss department."
In Gravity, Kyle reflects that "it was great to be able to say one didn't know. Human ignorance was one of the few certainties left." Writers-in-residence, in the story of that name, were "unusual people invited someplace they don't belong to accept money to write about the locals or the zeitgeist or about nothing at all."
Spirituality, though, can be hard to come by. In Dandelion, the priest "Knelt for a minute in front of the altar hoping God would come out of hiding and make a difference." And confronted by adulteries in the confession box he "went easy on the penance because God had created sex and no one wanted to offend God by belittling one of his brighter ideas."
Still, his calling left him "wandering the earth in a post-Christian miasma and waiting for Christ to come back with a better public relations formula suitable for sceptical times." Farrell himself is sceptical about his characters, though he gives them all their due in stories that celebrate the urges and eccentricities of fallible human beings in an often bewildering world.
- John Boland in Irish Independent Weekend Review
Throughout Michael J Farrell's first collection of stories, there radiates a serene, bemused wisdom in tales told by an omniscient narrator. Farrell's eccentric characters fret endlessly, but usually instructively, about such matters as galaxies, virtual worlds, entropy and the space-time continuum. There are possible 'headcases' at large ('The Written Word') but it's never quite as simple as that; idiot savants, more like. In 'By the Book,' a frustrated librarian personally pushes books on families around the town, rapidly depleting her stock and heading for a P45. Strangers create a bit of a stir. A visiting artist causes confusion with her art installations in 'Catharina'; in 'Writer in Residence' a guest writer is popular with the locals, despite writing very little, at their expense. 'Gravity' enters decidedly surreal territory as a man begins to see a house, a woman, various things, rise skywards.
A refreshing and provocative debut from this former priest, now in his mid-70s.
Given a **** rating.
A refreshing and provocative debut from this former priest, now in his mid-70s.
Given a **** rating.
- Paddy Kehoe in The RTE Guide
Creatures of inner and outer space
Michael J Farrell embarks in Life in the Universe on a kind of probing trip to find out if there is life yet in the light up above, and light in the life here below. Such a title in other hands might be facilely grandiose, but in Farrell's hands it is a glory.
... these stories keep you looking up in a philosophical sense, looking beyond the immediate material world to speculative dimensions that are partly religious, and partly scientific.
Michael J Farrell embarks in Life in the Universe on a kind of probing trip to find out if there is life yet in the light up above, and light in the life here below. Such a title in other hands might be facilely grandiose, but in Farrell's hands it is a glory.
... these stories keep you looking up in a philosophical sense, looking beyond the immediate material world to speculative dimensions that are partly religious, and partly scientific.
- John Kenny in The Irish Times. Read the original full review.
METRO made it their book of the week, with 5 stars
In this debut short story collection, Longford-born septuagenarian Michael J. Farrell proves himself a master of the opening line - how's this for a cracking intro: 'Packy Bannon's silhouette rode the silhouette of his bicycle along the horizon,' (The Rift Valley) or what about: 'My name is Olaf, a quiet man to whom not much happens' (The Friendship Portfolio)? Thankfully, Farrell manages to sustain the momentum from beginning to end in these fine, funny and frequently absurd tales set in a rural Ireland which is somehow both recognisably contemportary yet tempered by age-old parochialism. In the aforementioned Rift Valley, an amateur philosopher takes a hiding when he defends the honour of a Kenyan woman seeking employment in his hometown; here Farrell avoids all the hoary cliches regarding immigration and instead comes up with a surprisingly touching and idiosyncratic tale devoid of stereotypes. In Catharina, a conceptual artist arrives in an Irish backwater in the 1960s and proceeds to win over the locals with her curious creations. When she later vanishes, we're unsure whether the disappearance is her masterwork or the result of foul play.
Elsewhere, buildings appear to come unstuck and float in mid-air (Gravity); a librarian takes extreme measures to promote reading (By The Book); and a widow explores the firmament through Nasa's astronomy website (Dandelion). Farrell wears his learning lightly in a collection that explores such diverse subjects as race, the role of art in society and life in the information age, doffing his cap to Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien along the way. Proof, if it were needed, that wisdom really does come with age.
- Daragh Reddin in METRO
