The Lesser Bohemians

Last updated

The Lesser Bohemians
Lesser Bohemians.jpg
Author Eimear McBride
CountryIreland
LanguageEnglish
Published
Media typePrint
Pages320
Awards2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
ISBN 978-0571327850

The Lesser Bohemians is the second novel by Eimear McBride. It was published on 1 September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017. [1]

Contents

Synopsis

The novel is set in 1990s Camden Town, where Eilis, an 18-year-old Irish student, arrives to take up a place at a drama school. She becomes passionately involved with Stephen, a 39-year-old professional actor. Their troubled pasts result in a turbulent relationship.

Style

Fintan O'Toole described The Lesser Bohemians as having a simpler narrative voice than its predecessor, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , and that sentences "while still sometimes fragmented and discontinuous, come much closer to conventional structures and in consequence give themselves up much more easily." [2]

Johanna Thomas-Corr of London Evening Standard reported on the style of the novel:

"McBride has said that the techniques of method acting have informed the way she writes, breaking down a character’s experiences of the body and the mind and then finding a language that expresses them simultaneously. You might call it stream of preconsciousness. She coins new words […] It can take a while to puzzle out some choices[…]. And McBride’s fractured syntax is well tuned to the body’s complex desires" [3]

Reviewer Hannah Rosefield of New Statesman wrote of the style that "McBride’s unformatted language is full of compressions and inversions, nouns made into verbs and well-worn phrases torn apart." [4]

Critical reception

Writer Jeanette Winterson reviewed the novel for The New York Times , praising the novel for its experimental style whilst also distancing it from that of another well-known Irish author:

The reader’s mind runs alongside hers, and our sentences can, if we want them to, run past hers. In that sense, she really isn’t a control freak, unlike James Joyce, whose prose is a be-saved or be-damned baptism by total immersion. McBride isn’t an old-fashioned despot writer. The take-it-or-leave-it arrogance is absent. The confidence and the capacity are as good as anyone’s, male or female, but (and I’m not going to attribute it to gender, though it’s something that might be discussed sometime) there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading her such a pleasure. [5]

Fintan O'Toole, writing for The Irish Times considered that The Lesser Bohemians was a "more hopeful" work than A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , and that "the central character seems, unlike her predecessor, fully capable of making her own life. “Life”, indeed, is the novel’s last word – literally and emotionally." He drew comparisons between the novel and the works of Edna O'Brien. [2]

Writing in the London Evening Standard , Thomas-Corr concluded that the novel "broke my heart several times over and on each occasion I had to stop to cry. McBride has made something strange and beautiful — well worth its difficulties". [3]

In The Independent , Max Liu wrote: "McBride writes in a stream of consciousness style that's as accessible as it is startling. It can make the world new at the same time as evoking its timeless fundamentals". He did not appreciate a "60-odd page monologue of abuse, addiction and betrayal", which he found had a "capsizing effect". [6] Reviewing the book in the Financial Times Jonathan Lee wrote that, "This may not be Eimear McBride’s strongest book, but such moments of highly specific, deeply felt experience remind us what she can do". [7]

The Lesser Bohemians was reviewed on BBC Radio 4's programme Saturday Review on 17 September 2016. [8]

Awards

On 28 September 2016, it was announced that the book was on the shortlist of the Goldsmiths Prize. [9] [10] Subsequently, it was also shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards and the RSL Encore Awards. [11] [12]

In 2017, the novel was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. [13] It also featured in Florence Welch's Between Two Books Bookclub in 2017. [14]

Related Research Articles

Jeanette Winterson English writer, born 1959

Jeanette Winterson is an English writer. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She holds an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, United Kingdom, the prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd. Prizes are awarded in three categories: Fiction, Biography and Drama.

Fintan O'Toole is a polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988. O'Toole was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001 and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator.

Ali Smith Scottish author and journalist

Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".

Robert Fitzroy 'Roy' Foster, publishing as R. F. Foster, is an Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford.

Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.

Maggie OFarrell Irish-British novelist, born 1972

Maggie O'Farrell RSL is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award: for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Aminatta Forna Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award is an annual award for Irish authors of fiction, established in 1995. It was previously known as the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award (1995–2000) and the Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Award (2001–2002).

<i>The White Review</i> British literary magazine

The White Review is a London-based magazine on literature and the visual arts. It is published in print and online.

Stuart Evers

Stuart Evers is a British novelist, short story writer and critic, born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1976. He was brought up in Congleton, Cheshire.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2013.

The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000. Tim Parnell of the Goldsmiths English department conceived and runs the prize, inspired by his research into Laurence Sterne and other eighteenth-century writers, like Denis Diderot, who experimented with the novel form. The prize "casts its net wider than most other prizes" and intends to celebrate "creative daring," but resists the phrase "experimental fiction," because it implies "an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms." To date, Rachel Cusk is the author best represented on the prize's shortlists, having been shortlisted for each book of her Outline trilogy.

Anakana Schofield Irish-Canadian writer

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian author, who won the 2012 Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel Malarky. Born in England to an Irish mother, she lived in London and in Dublin, Ireland until moving to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1999. The novel was also a shortlisted nominee for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Eimear McBride Irish novelist

Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Donal Ryan is an Irish writer. He has published five novels and one short story collection. In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian newspaper as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers." All of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2014.

<i>A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing</i> 2013 novel by Eimear McBride

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride published in 2013.

Belinda McKeon is an Irish writer. She is the author of two novels, Solace, which won the 2011 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Tender (2015).

Kevin Davey is a British author of experimental fiction.

References

  1. McBride, Eimear (1 September 2016). The Lesser Bohemians. Faber and Faber. ISBN   978-0571327850.
  2. 1 2 O'Toole, Fintan (2 September 2016). "Eimear McBride's follow-up to 'A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing' is a more hopeful thing". The Irish Times . Retrieved 26 January 2018.
  3. 1 2 Thomas-Corr, Johanna (8 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride - review". London Evening Standard . London. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  4. Rosefield, Hannah (31 August 2016). "Rush and you'll trip: reading The Lesser Bohemians". New Statesman . Retrieved 26 January 2018.
  5. Winterson, Jeanette (21 October 2016). "A New Irish Novel Features Few Commas and Lots of Sex". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 26 January 2018.
  6. Liu, Max (1 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride, review: 'as accessible as it is startling'" . The Independent . London. Archived from the original on 18 June 2022. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
  7. Lee, Jonathan (9 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride review — mind the gap". Financial Times . London. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
  8. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe, Producer: Oliver Jones (17 September 2016). "BBC-TV Presents: ... Hunt for The Wilderpeople, Eimear McBride, Bedlam, National Treasure, Dr Faustus". Saturday Review . 12:10 minutes in. BBC. BBC Radio 4.
  9. Morgan, Tom (28 September 2016). "Goldsmiths Prize 2016 shortlist - six works of fiction at its most novel". Goldsmiths, University of London . Retrieved 29 September 2016.
  10. Flood, Alison (28 September 2016). "Goldsmiths prize shortlists novels 'that break the mould'". The Guardian . London. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
  11. "Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards » Fiction Awards 2017". www.irishbookawards.irish. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  12. "Royal Society of Literature » RSL Encore Award". rsliterature.org. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  13. "Literary awards for tales of love and loss". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  14. "Florence Welch 'Between Two Books' - Festival of Writing & Ideas". Festival of Writing & Ideas. Retrieved 23 January 2018.