A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Spring.”) it is nonetheless written live. Spring.Īlthough time seems collapsed here (“Summer. See fat drops plop and run like a river down for flies. The effect can be, at times, less that of literature than of the video feed:

The prose, while seeming literarily anarchic, is actually quite focused, stripping sentences to their bare bones not as part of some stylistic exercise, but to convey immediate experience as lived. You’ll feel Joyce’s influence, certainly, as well as that of Samuel Beckett (and what Irish writer could really avoid these two?), and yet McBride’s novel feels weirdly outside of literature, despite having been hustled to the forefront of it, racking up a number of prizes in Europe. In Girl, her debut novel, she’s invented a new way of telling: one that, while it resuscitates several key tropes of modernism (not least the resistance to easy pleasure), is something all its own, wisely trading James Joyce’s linguistic blarney for an ambitious vision a great deal slimmer. It’s said that the Irish novelist Eimear McBride wrote A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing with a quote from one of Joyce’s letters taped up above her desk: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.” McBride, more completely than any recent novelist I’m aware of, has translated this crucial truth into style.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride