On trying again – Damon Galgut in TLS:

‘McBride’s use of fractured syntax recalls at least one of her fellow Irish authors. “Language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart”, Samuel Beckett wrote in a letter in 1937, “in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it … Language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.” As with Beckett, McBride’s sutured, jagged, subjective narratives don’t leave the precinct of a single skull. Unlike with Beckett, though, her protagonists long to connect in some meaningful way with other people, and they expend a lot of energy in the attempt.’

(…)

‘It is, then, somewhat surprising when the novel ends on an upbeat note. Just when all seems lost, Eilis and Stephen decide to try again, and she moves in with him. “I … go naked to him, open to him, full of life.” Really? It seems hard to believe their love is anything but doomed: the urge to try again was always part of the problem. Perhaps McBride intended that ending to be read sardonically.
Now we can find out, because her new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a sequel. It is December 1996, and Eilis has been living for the past year and a half with Stephen in Camden. “How much that room had shifted us”, she muses. “Down from arm’s breadth. To hand’s length. To fingertip’s touch. Then no distance at all.” Eilis is twenty, Stephen is forty, and it turns out their love was doomed after all. Or maybe not, because, through a long, sleepless night – mirroring the long, sleepless night of Stephen’s original unburdening – they talk through their relationship in a bid to save it. Again.
The crisis that has occasioned this conversation is a new lack of intimacy between them. This really matters, because sex is one of the central forces in their connection and the way that every severance is healed. McBride is very good at sex, precisely because her broken syntax evokes the experience better than any coherent description can. Without sex, Eilis and Stephen might be condemned to speaking in whole sentences.’ (…)

‘All of this territory has already been covered, albeit in scanter detail, in The Lesser Bohemians. But repetition is part of the point. The problem with couples “talking through” relationships is that they tend to create structure and shape where none exists. A relationship is not a story – or at least not the story the participants wish it to be. From the outside it is obvious that the story of Stephen and Eilis is circular: rupture, repent, repeat. The city doesn’t change its face. “And there we were”, Eilis says. “Snake tail devouring back again. Standstill.” Therein lies their trouble, and the risk to Eimear McBride as a novelist. How much repetition can a reader bear? One book’s worth, perhaps, but did we need a sequel? The answer to that question might depend on how patient you are. Read in sequence, these two books are essentially like one book, in which there is much to astonish and amaze. But it can also start to feel too fraught and too much, just as it must often feel to Eilis and Stephen, who may be out there, somewhere, as you read this, much older but no wiser, talking about trying again.’

Read the article here.
‘Language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.’ Efficiently.

This is also a good sentence: ‘A relationship is not a story – or at least not the story the participants wish it to be.’

And this: ‘Without sex, Eilis and Stephen might be condemned to speaking in whole sentences.’

Sex as a substitute for language, as an attempt, the umpteenth of course, to escape language.

We talk because we cannot fuck. Or: we talk in order to have sex. In the more expensive restaurants, the explanations of the waiter are as important as what’s on your plate.

Tell me what I’m eating otherwise I don’t taste anything.