Bernard MacLaverty Midwinter Break
Bernard MacLaverty is an author who refuses to reserve the glories of his prose only for dramatic subjects or events. A trip to the toilet, a sip of whisky, airport departure lounges: everything is noticed, respected, attended to. The local result is a transformation of the ordinary; the cumulative one, a literary career of uncommon grace and insight. His first novel in just over a decade-and-a-half, Midwinter
Break is a portrait of marriage and late-life coupledom as it unfolds during a holiday in Amsterdam.
Gerry is a retired architect and a furtive alcoholic; Stella is a tightwad of religious bent. They’re both (like the author) Northern Irish but long resident in Scotland. They’ve been together for decades and fit like comfortable shoes. And yet. The shift out of the domestic round reveals something of what each has hidden from the other. After all these years, the possibility of rift remains. MacLaverty’s achievement is to find, in the ongoing sense of mysteriousness that exists between husband and wife, father and mother to a son, both the sadness of human isolation and the potential for renewal such isolation retains. A beautiful, melancholy summation of major concerns – politics, history, intimacy, women and men – that plays out in a resolutely minor key.
The American editor, critic and author John Freeman recently visited the doyenne of United States nature writers, Annie Dillard. In the interview that resulted, one line caught my eye. Freeman and his travelling companion are attempting to gauge her interest in a bigname author of the moment,