The Heart in Winter
Ratings8
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings8
Average rating4.1
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: THE LA TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, AND MORE! • Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.
“A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.”— The Guardian
October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.
Reviews with the most likes.
Four stars, on account of the beautiful language and the decency of keeping an otherwise unremarkable story short.
Now go read “Blood Meridian”, which sits on another level, entirely.
Raw and unflinchingly bleak. This is my first Kevin Barry book and it took me a while to get used to his style of writing. After a couple of chapters in, at one point I even considered quitting it. But I'm glad I stuck around for the sake of the story and the fate of its characters.
It's a tragic tale of love and death. Filled with a narration that feels surreal and fascinating.
I didn't like how this book ended but I'd surely recommend it to people who are looking for an old time short and tragic love story.
Kevin Barry. Kevin Barry! Wherefore art thou Kevin Barry? If you were not Kevin Barry – if you were of a name more memorable, more singular – perhaps I and the rest of the reading world would not so easily look past you. If your name had a barb on its hook, maybe it would not so easily slide out of the mind. If your name was not beige; if it had the color and sound and shape of your writing, perhaps your books would populate a hundred thousand more shelves. Why I'm just now reading Kevin Barry, or why his name is not surrounded by grander accolades, I can't really say. I can only say it's not on account of any defect in his writing, because there isn't any.
The Heart in Winter is Kevin Barry's novel featuring a turn of the nineteenth century Butte, Montana as its central setting and its Irish immigrants as the central cast. Most of the Irish populate Butte as laborers for the mining boom, but Tom Rourke isn't much for physical work and scrapes by as a man of letters and songs (and opium, too). Before long, Tom meets Polly, and the two ignite a love affair that is as ill-advised as it is inevitable.
The novel follows the journey of our fated lovers, with Barry as the orchestrator of words and sentences and chapters that never miss a note. Like a jazz ensemble, The Heart in Winter takes exciting small turns, twisting tempo and tone but never losing the beating heart of the story. The prose is masterful, always razor sharp while remaining loose, fluid, and elastic.
“She lay in the darkness and sermonized against herself. If you are of the kind that throws yourself to the fates of the earth then you better watch out. If you are of the kind that takes notions in a life then you just got to accept all of that life's capricious outcomes. If you are of the kind that throws all cares to the wind don't go complainin when suddenly you are off your goddamn feet and spinnin out forever in the crazy fucking wind.”
Goodbye now, if you need me, I'll be in Kevin Barry's backlist to find who else he has beautifully thrown to the fates of the world, to life's capricious outcomes, and I look forward to basking in their tales of spinning forever in the wind.
