Kurt Vonnegut said, “One plausible mission of the artist is to make people feel glad to be alive, at least a little bit.” Remarkable that, in the glum and downbeat voice of her narrator, Baume pulls this off.Īmong her many gifts is an exquisite sense of place. These parts of the book are wrenchingly moving. Other aspects of the natural surroundings – plants, insects, birds, the sea – are conjured with the measured tenderness of a man who doesn’t realise he’s in love with the world.

No writer since JM Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity. The mutilated dog becomes a projection of the narrator’s desires, losses and thwarted longings, a transcendence of the self into a realm of radical identification.

All this has the makings of a firework display of sentimentality, but Baume creates from such risky materials a tour de force. His only meaningful relationship, if that's not putting things too strongly, is with the ugly, one-eyed dog he rescues from the pound to which it was consigned after being attacked by a badger. Something similar happens to Baume's protagonist. Fans of 19th-century fiction will recall that Marner, a misanthropic recluse, regains his moral self when he fosters an abandoned child. Baume's choice of her narrator's reading material is surely significant. A novel he mentions fleetingly is George Eliot's Silas Marner. He is often unlikable and always pessimistic, but there are the weird moments when you find yourself cheering him on, agreeing with him or, most strangely, loving him.Īlone by choice, he kills time walking or reading. “I am not the kind of person who is able to do things,” he tells us, rioting in ironic understatement. Colin Barrett, Donal Ryan, Eimear McBride, Paul Lynch, Audrey Magee and others have deserved their remarkable successes and significantly raised the bar.īaume’s narrator is 57, an outsider without friends, ties or fealties. Published by Tramp Press, the new independent Irish publishing house, Spill Simmer Falter Wither arrives at a time when Irish fiction is in good health. Sara Baume won the 2014 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award for her brilliant piece Solesearcher1, so hopes for her debut novel have been high.

Simmer falter wither