The South

I’m sorry I’ve been missing for so long. A lovely family holiday in Italy led to pure laziness in the sunshine when I got home, and then a dose of Covid turned the laziness into lethargy and an absolute phobia towards my computer which only got worse as the stack of books next to it got taller!

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been telling myself to just jump in and start writing, however short, however clumsy, make a start, so I’m going to begin with a book I hardly remember anything about. Except that I absolutely loved it, and read it in one satisfied gulp.

Katherine Proctor, an artist, has arrived in Barcelona on October 24th, 1950 having left her husband and child and their home in Ireland. She isn’t a brave women, it takes her enormous courage to sit in a cafe alone for her meals, but gradually and tentatively she starts to explore the city and meets Miguel, another artist, with whom she makes a new life and eventually moves with him to the mountains of northern Spain.

Katherine has run away from the south of Ireland, from Enniscorthy, and the war of independence and civil war that is only 30 years in her past. She runs south to Barcelona and then the mountains of Catalonia, but to a country that is also harbouring memories of violence. The village Katherine and Miguel settle in felt claustrophobic with the smouldering hatred of Spanish history; the few families still living there are constantly wary and we learn about Miguel’s own terrible past in the Spanish civil war. Memories and history are bound together in the people both Irish and Spanish but the trauma and violence that has coloured their past lives and the drama that unfolds in the present is explored with the most incredible restraint. I think this is partly because Katherine watches everything with an artists eye, she observes and records which keeps us slightly at a distance, a technique that works brilliantly.

Colm Tóibín is a new author for me, which I find surprising since I’ve loved his voice whenever I’ve heard him being interviewed but I’ve made a start now, and he’s definitely someone that I want to keep reading. One of the subjects that I didn’t really pick up on while I was reading but Roy Foster talks about in the introduction is that of women artists in Ireland in the mid 20th century. He mentions Norah McGuinness and Joan Jameson amongst others and has encouraged me to explore further. For me that’s a perfect book: a good story, well told, that leads to greater knowledge!