 | |
| Author | Eimear McBride |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Theatre-fiction |
| Published |
|
| Publication place | Ireland |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 320 |
| Awards | 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize |
| ISBN | 978-0571327850 |
The Lesser Bohemians is the second novel by Eimear McBride. It was published on 1 September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017.
Synopsis
The novel is set in 1990s Camden Town, where Eilis, an 18-year-old Irish student, arrives to take up a place at a drama school. She becomes passionately involved with Stephen, a 39-year-old professional actor. Their troubled pasts result in a turbulent relationship.
Style
Fintan O'Toole described The Lesser Bohemians as having a simpler narrative voice than its predecessor, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, and that sentences "while still sometimes fragmented and discontinuous, come much closer to conventional structures and in consequence give themselves up much more easily."
Johanna Thomas-Corr of London Evening Standard reported on the style of the novel:
"McBride has said that the techniques of method acting have informed the way she writes, breaking down a character’s experiences of the body and the mind and then finding a language that expresses them simultaneously. You might call it stream of preconsciousness. She coins new words It can take a while to puzzle out some choices. And McBride’s fractured syntax is well tuned to the body’s complex desires"
Reviewer Hannah Rosefield of New Statesman wrote of the style that "McBride’s unformatted language is full of compressions and inversions, nouns made into verbs and well-worn phrases torn apart."
Critical reception
Writer Jeanette Winterson reviewed the novel for The New York Times, praising the novel for its experimental style whilst also distancing it from that of another well-known Irish author:
The reader’s mind runs alongside hers, and our sentences can, if we want them to, run past hers. In that sense, she really isn’t a control freak, unlike James Joyce, whose prose is a be-saved or be-damned baptism by total immersion. McBride isn’t an old-fashioned despot writer. The take-it-or-leave-it arrogance is absent. The confidence and the capacity are as good as anyone’s, male or female, but (and I’m not going to attribute it to gender, though it’s something that might be discussed sometime) there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading her such a pleasure.
Fintan O'Toole, writing for The Irish Times considered that The Lesser Bohemians was a "more hopeful" work than A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, and that "the central character seems, unlike her predecessor, fully capable of making her own life. “Life”, indeed, is the novel’s last word – literally and emotionally." He drew comparisons between the novel and the works of Edna O'Brien.
Writing in the London Evening Standard, Thomas-Corr concluded that the novel "broke my heart several times over and on each occasion I had to stop to cry. McBride has made something strange and beautiful — well worth its difficulties".
In The Independent, Max Liu wrote: "McBride writes in a stream of consciousness style that's as accessible as it is startling. It can make the world new at the same time as evoking its timeless fundamentals". He did not appreciate a "60-odd page monologue of abuse, addiction and betrayal", which he found had a "capsizing effect". Reviewing the book in the Financial Times Jonathan Lee wrote that, "This may not be Eimear McBride’s strongest book, but such moments of highly specific, deeply felt experience remind us what she can do".
The Lesser Bohemians was reviewed on BBC Radio 4's programme Saturday Review on 17 September 2016.
Awards
On 28 September 2016, it was announced that the book was on the shortlist of the Goldsmiths Prize. Subsequently, it was also shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards and the RSL Encore Awards.
In 2017, the novel was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It also featured in Florence Welch's Between Two Books Bookclub in 2017.
References
- McBride, Eimear (1 September 2016). The Lesser Bohemians. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0571327850.
- ^ O'Toole, Fintan (2 September 2016). "Eimear McBride's follow-up to 'A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing' is a more hopeful thing". The Irish Times. Retrieved 26 January 2018.
- ^ Thomas-Corr, Johanna (8 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride - review". London Evening Standard. London. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
- Rosefield, Hannah (31 August 2016). "Rush and you'll trip: reading The Lesser Bohemians". New Statesman. Retrieved 26 January 2018.
- Winterson, Jeanette (21 October 2016). "A New Irish Novel Features Few Commas and Lots of Sex". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 January 2018.
- Liu, Max (1 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride, review: 'as accessible as it is startling'". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 18 June 2022. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
- Lee, Jonathan (9 September 2016). "The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride review — mind the gap". Financial Times. London. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
- Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe, Producer: Oliver Jones (17 September 2016). "BBC-TV Presents: ... Hunt for The Wilderpeople, Eimear McBride, Bedlam, National Treasure, Dr Faustus". Saturday Review. 12:10 minutes in. BBC. BBC Radio 4.
- Morgan, Tom (28 September 2016). "Goldsmiths Prize 2016 shortlist - six works of fiction at its most novel". Goldsmiths, University of London. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
- Flood, Alison (28 September 2016). "Goldsmiths prize shortlists novels 'that break the mould'". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
- "Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards » Fiction Awards 2017". www.irishbookawards.irish. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
- "Royal Society of Literature » RSL Encore Award". rsliterature.org. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
- "Literary awards for tales of love and loss". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
- "Florence Welch 'Between Two Books' - Festival of Writing & Ideas". Festival of Writing & Ideas. Retrieved 23 January 2018.