Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession

Leonard and Hungry Paul are two quiet friends who see the world differently. Content with their circumstances, they use humour, board games, and silence to steer their way through the maelstrom that is the twenty-first century. But things are beginning to change. Theres a death in the family. Leonard is interested in a woman at work. And Hungry Paul has entered a competition with a sizeable financial prize. Should the pair choose to stick with lives of comforting predictability - or forge new paths for themselves?

4.5/5 wonderfully, beautifully, warmly mundane

What a great book. Very gentle but intriguing story arc and what an amazing character building.

This book is about invisible people around us who are quietly living their life without much of a fuss. Hungry Paul and Leonard are two such souls that could easily be overlooked as quiet introverts going with their life where most of us extroverts are busy in self obsessed goal driven life running from one milestone to the next.

This book will make you sit and ponder who you are, people that closest to you are and who those acquaintances you know only vaguely and in passing are.

The book is unapologetically authentic.

I have been wanting to read Leonard and Hungry Paul ever since I first heard about it at a Book Expo panel, and it did not disappoint.

Let me revise that. I checked out this book from the library a year ago, read twenty pages, and gave up. It felt like the characters were...ordinary and the plot was...nonexistent. It was during the scary upsurge of the pandemic, and I couldn't focus, and I didn't want to read it. This time I checked it out from the library, read twenty pages, and was hooked. It felt like the characters were...ordinary and the plot was...nonexistent. It is exactly what I wanted to read.

The charm of the story is the ordinariness of the characters and the nonexistence of the plot. These are people just like you and me, but they look on the details of their ordinary lives and they delight in them. These folks don't have any real plot to their lives, but they deeply enjoy the daily tiny dramas and comedies.

And the story is humorous and it's never snarky humor, but subtle and gentle. Here are a couple of examples.

“Helen and Peter (Hungry Paul's parents) had played Scrabble for years, going back to when they first bought a house together and had no money to go out. They used to play high stakes games of Scrabble, with the loser providing carnal favours to the victor, a system which allowed them to explore both their vocabulary and their marriage at the same time.”

(After little prewedding argument between the engaged couple, Grace and Andrew...)
“‘Sorry for dumping on you...Don't mind me. I feel a bit better just saying all this instead of thinking it.' (Grace)
‘It's fine,' said Andrew. ‘It's good training for when I'm your husband and I'm legally required to listen to you.'“

The other thing I took away from this story is a sense that ordinary people can work through the troubles we face in life. Life isn't all breakups and divorces and nasty scenes. One can go to the edge of these and step back and face the trouble with resolve and, maybe, a bit of humor, and press on.

Gosh, that's something I think we need to see and take in and try and do in this world, don't you?

In “Leonard and Hungry Paul,” Ronan Hession crafts a world that breathes in the quiet spaces. Leonard and Hungry Paul are two men who live on the edges of life's grand narrative, content with their own modest rhythms. Leonard, a writer of children's encyclopedias, is adrift in the quiet aftermath of his mother's death, while Hungry Paul drifts through his days with the unhurried grace of one who has made peace with the world. Their story is one of friendship, simplicity, and the understated beauty of a life lived quietly.

The novel is a study in contrasts, exploring themes of contentment, the delicate balance of human relationships, and the profoundness of the mundane. In a world often dominated by noise and chaos, Leonard and Hungry Paul stand as symbols of quiet resistance, reminding us that true meaning is often found not in loud proclamations or grand gestures, but in the gentle, almost imperceptible shifts of daily life. Against the backdrop of a noisy world, the stillness of their lives highlights the fragility of human connection, especially in Leonard's nervous romance—a budding relationship that mirrors the awkward dance of two souls finding their way to each other. Steeped in the anxieties of new love, this romance is achingly real, marked by overanalyzed conversations, constant self-doubt, and wondering. Hession allows it to unfold naturally, letting it breathe, stumble, and grow in its own time.

Published in 2019, on the cusp of a world that would soon be plunged into a collective introspection, “Leonard and Hungry Paul” resonates with a kind of timelessness, an antidote to the frantic pace of contemporary existence. In a time when the world was on the brink of unprecedented global change, this novel serves as a quiet reflection on the value of stillness and the overlooked beauty in the everyday.

4 out of 5 stars: “A quiet exploration of friendship and the beauty of the mundane, though though occasionally disrupted by its own introspections.”