![]() ![]() His father is frustratingly mute on the subject of the boy’s mother, but finding the truth of her becomes his, and the book’s, quest and narrative force. All he has of her is a mysterious photo from a partly burnt newspaper article. She knew the weight of them words she took them serious.Ĭummins explains in an Author’s Note that she has not been entirely true to the traveller’s voice a truly authentic pavee voice “would have rendered the book almost impenetrable to the American reader.” Her close writing and vocabulary choices are fundamentally apt and effective, although I think an unschooled gypsy boy in 1959 Ireland would not know the words ‘precarious’ or ‘choreography’, but this is a small point.Ĭhristy is motherless. ![]() They rippled out til I could see them on Missus Hanley’s face. ![]() “She’s my mother,” I said, and even though I was whispering, my words fell into the quiet room likes stones into a pond. ![]() The mashed grammar, misplaced syntax, and sometimes literal spelling all add up to the acceptable sound of a traveller’s boy, a gypsy youth who sees the world without any city notions of blame, cause & effect, and obligation. It is a coming-of-age story of a 12 year old boy, Christy Hurley, a tinker’s son, a traveller, a pavee, told through his eyes, his words. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |