... a story brimming with both the desire for and the fear of strong feeling, handled with a loose, supple comedy ... Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns ... Fate, doom and disaster are lightly invoked, and swiftly brought down ... Barry’s rich comic and lexical gifts have shone particularly in his short fiction...The stories collected here are more relaxed, whimsical, even impressionistic ... Barry in mellower mood is more subtle and surprising ... However brokenhearted, Barry’s stories always sing.
There's not a bad story in the bunch, and it's as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written ... Barry does an excellent job probing the psyche of his diffident protagonist, and ends the story with an unexpected moment of sweetness that's anything but cloying — realism doesn't need to be miserablism, he seems to hint; sometimes things actually do work out ... Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws; in just 13 pages, he manages to make Hannah and Setanta come to life through sharp dialogue and keen observations ... Barry proves to be a master of writing about both love and cruelty ... Barry brilliantly evokes both the good and bad sides of love, and does so with stunningly gorgeous writing ... There's not an aspect of writing that Barry doesn't excel at. His dialogue rings true, and he's amazingly gifted at scene-setting — he evokes both the landscape of western Ireland and the landscape of the human heart beautifully. His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is his understanding of the ways our collective psyche works; he seems to have an innate sense of why people behave the way we do, and exactly what we're capable of, both good and bad.
Barry is particularly impressive as a writer of men’s voices and stories, which means that he has the rare art of being able to convey in sentences what is not said, not even fully thought, by his characters ... We know what Séamus is thinking, and we can guess about Katherine. It’s not, exactly, that we need the happily-ever-after which appears to be receding, only that Barry’s writing of silence, of the ways we read silence, is uncomfortably excellent ... The 'heroic path' is taken by the stories, by the whole collection, as well as by the characters within. Though they all begin more or less in literary realism, there is another tendency pulling towards capital-R Romanticism, towards the suggestion that we are all in the end creatures of landscape, buildings and weather, what we imagine to be our actions directed by dimly seen powers beyond our control ... But these playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do.
These are romantic stories, and Barry is a romantic writer. I mean romantic in the old-fashioned literary sense: mood-haunted, place-haunted, devoted to the themes of love and loss and self-creation ... Romanticism has its risks, of course. Romantic characters risk igniting themselves in the fires of a foolish passion. And the romantic writer risks collapsing into sentimentality, or into the mere performance of emotion. Barry is well aware of this. He knows that if you get romanticism wrong, your story ends up defaulting into histrionics, or banality. But he also knows that when you get romanticism right, it sets off a great depth-charge of emotion in the reader. What makes Barry such an extraordinary writer is how often, and how superbly, he gets romanticism right ... He gets it right particularly in his short stories ... it’s in his short stories that Barry seems most fully and brilliantly himself ... his third collection, is made up of 11 stories, and by my count, six of them are unimprovable masterpieces. Four of the others are merely (merely!) very, very good — better than the average run of short stories by some considerable distance ... a collection otherwise so good — so rich and so flawlessly crafted — that its best stories feel instantly canonical, as if we’ve already been reading them for years ... The densely woven prose summons up Roethke’s own spiky rhythms; it also echoes one of Barry’s great inspirers, Saul Bellow ... The other stories, with their casts of ghost-struck lonely men and not-quite-innocent young women, and with their gorgeous evocations of landscapes and interiors, are comparably gripping and rich. Following his courageous path, Kevin Barry remains the great romantic of contemporary Irish fiction. Like all of the most interesting artists, he gets better with every risk he takes. The courage may be his. But the rewards are all ours.
... the animating force behind these tortuous yearnings and consummations is mortality — or the fear of it ... they feature Barry’s distinctive prose stylings: coarse and lyrical, arresting and often hilarious. There are verbal titillations and delights on nearly every page, but also an undertow of sorrow ... Barry’s old country music cuts deep into the reader’s heart.
... lyrical ... Barry skillfully blends humor and pathos ... Barry works in dual emotional registers throughout the book ... full of elegant sentences ... Burrowing into the poet's psyche [in 'Roethke in the Bughouse'], Barry vividly conjures his pain and pride. It's an aptly poetic coda to an inspired, evocative book.
Easygoing in their elegance and capacious in their emotional range, these stories draw naturally from Ireland’s literary tradition without becoming distorted by nostalgia or homage ... in these stories the environment is uncannily responsive to the mood of the scene, a mysterious intelligence of its own ... In these splendid stories, Mr. Barry portrays the two opposing faces of passion.
Passion proves hazardous for the loners and oddballs who drift through Barry’s forceful landscape ... Written over the course of eight years, these stories aren’t quite of equal strength, but throughout, their language is exhilarating, its verve evoking the very best of Barry’s compatriots while further carving out a territory that’s all his own.
Like Ireland, the island on which Kevin Barry’s fiction is set, the characters that populate his works are remote yet tantalizingly close to others who may offer promise or enrichment ... The hallmarks of Mr. Barry’s writing are in evidence here, from the earthy dialogue to his many poetic descriptions ... Mr. Barry is always compassionate toward his characters, from cancer patients who refuse treatment because the medicine makes them impotent to abusive mothers who summon inordinate empathy at the most felicitous times. In the world of Kevin Barry, a working-class antihero sure is something to be.
Barry’s characters are painted in their smaller moments of yearning, hope and resignation, no one particularly announcing themselves ... Barry is an Irish writer, featuring mostly the country he lives in—and delightfully so—with even his written words carrying the lilt in the English language gifted to it by the Irish ... The most successful story in the collection is the title story because it marries Barry’s ability to created moods in the countryside to the moods of the characters ... Two of the 11 stories in the collection are something of off-notes ... This collection of stories is recommended for readers who prize beautiful prose and story moments that linger.
... more traditionally contained. What connects the novels and the stories is Barry’s style, a nervy mix of high poetry and low comedy that he applies with unceasing vigor ... If you’re fond of sentences like 'The sun was setting,' you’re free to leave now. Barry won’t watch evening fall with so little effort ... This is a short book, and even still there are two or three stories that don’t quite swing. And there are inevitably moments when Barry is too lyrical by half, though it’s easy enough to write off such moments as the cost of his gift.
As great as Barry’s novels are, the short story – and That Old Country Music offers pretty strong supporting evidence, as did his previous collections There Are Little Kingdoms, and Dark Lies The Island – might be his more natural home ... You can almost imagine Barry as some sort of Keith Richards figure, removing extraneous notes, until he has it all pared back into the perfect riff. The two main characters are so expertly drawn that you feel you’ve known - and been avoiding - them for years ... This is the kind of book you want to start into again as soon as you’ve finished ... It is—and you’d expect nothing less from Barry—exceptionally good.
You should read this collection at least twice. The first time, horse it into you—then study the technique ... You’ll notice a rhythm forming: a main character wants a story, then the next doesn’t, though over the collection they get better at realising that the tale will come or not of its own volition ... Often Barry gives away the plot up front so we can focus on characters, sunsets, what’s said and what’s not. As in earlier collections, he curtails lyricism with barbs, but it feels closer to the characters’ voices now, rather than an author absolving themselves of schmaltz ... Much of the comedy is gentle, familial, and the characters have a dignifying privacy that lets them surprise us and even themselves ... That’s the lesson of the collection: give in to the place, give in to the process.
Shafts of high comedy have always distinguished Barry’s work, the swerve from grief into blessed laughter, devastating throwaway lines summing up a life or a failure. His knockout way to turn a sentence remains, but there are fewer laughs here; urban larks and verbals replaced by an undercurrent of sadness ... The lovely irony is that Barry himself is known very much for his glittering style — curlicued even. So is he sending himself up here? Or acknowledging a change of direction?
... the prose throughout is fresh and sometimes startling, and the details have a poetic beauty ... Sometimes, as with Old Stock, Barry chooses a more comic tone which lightens proceedings but doesn’t bring the same heft. Elsewhere the humour works a treat, as with the grotesquely funny mother-and-son alcoholics in Toronto and The State of Grace ... Some stories don’t quite land ... Fans of the Limerick author might also be disappointed that a number of these stories have already been published elsewhere. But these criticisms are only to judge Barry against the incredibly high bar he has set for himself. That Old Country Music is still one of the best collections you’ll read this year.
Barry’s beautiful tone poem of a novel, these 11 lyrical short stories, set mainly in the west of Ireland, are imbued with the melancholy of an Irish folk ballad, but that bone-deep sadness exists alongside pulsing, deeply felt life ... It’s no surprise that music, especially Irish ballads, would be central to stories populated with so many characters left shell-shocked by love. The searing melodies sometimes take center stage.
Few imaginative writers signal their process or intent as blatantly as Kevin Barry in his third collection of short fiction ... Barry’s writing has never tended toward the rococo: the influence of his iconic literary forebear, James Joyce, is felt more often than not in the inclusion of low jokes and gleeful vulgarities. By contrast, Barry’s prose tends more toward the Protestant parsimony of Samuel Beckett, with a strong strain of Flann O’Brien’s insouciant wordplay thrown in for good measure ... all attest to an author made positively giddy by the potential of language embedded in the specificity of a particular, locatable place ... Only the Cormac McCarthy-inflected Ox Mountain Death Song and the closer, Rothke in the Bughouse, feel somewhat out of place in this new collection.
With this new collection, the author seems especially keen on bridging the gap between lyrical and narrative concerns—in other words, creating something beautiful while also making sure the reader cares ... True, Barry’s tales are often romantic from a male heterosexual point of view, and most of them eventually break from the familiar tropes associated with the form [of romance] ... Barry’s knack for evocative prose is his best tool for carving out romance where little ostensibly exists ... If what Barry writes in That Old Country Music is romance, it’s romance of the most fraught and resonant kind. A blade going in has never felt sweeter.
In his third collection of short stories, Kevin Barry reveals himself to be quite the romantic ... In all its manifestations, however, Barry keeps his take on the romantic tethered to humour and to his remarkable rendering, without crass mimicry, of the dialect of the west of Ireland, where most of these stories are set. Where there is a romantic impulse there will be excess of feeling, and Barry exploits the comedic opportunity exquisitely ... The Ireland in which Barry sets these stories is both the old and the new, and the latter could be anywhere: flat whites, refugee detention centres, russet fake tans. The old, though, is more revered—notwithstanding the occasional friendly gibe[.]
As magical as it is beautiful, this country is vividly depicted in stories that share the timeless themes of love, loss, tragedy and fate ... Most characters here are barely getting by. They either live off the land or struggle to make ends meet. That is the beauty of this book.
[A] catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate these eleven stories are bedeviled by phantoms: memories and possibilities, places they can’t forget, and people they really should. The resultant confrontations are chronicled by the Irish author with equal parts earthy relatability and offhand poeticism ... no matter where we roam, our travels terminate the same way, a fact Barry examines in a pair of striking tales that grapple with the inevitability of death.
Sewn together in an assorted, agrestic patchwork, Kevin Barry's third collection of shorts stories has a thorough line of romanticism, seclusion and whitethorns that fasten this 174-page collection into an assured, cohesive and witty read ... there is a tangible bygone soul that persists throughout, evoking a sense of magic in a land that is in a constant state of flux ... Certainly, there is a case to be made that a handful of the stories could have been expanded upon. Others conclude on a note that is a bit too abrupt ... a brief, pleasurable read that will leave you pining for more of Barry’s lively and lyrical prose and is sure-fire recommendation to those who are already familiar with his work. and are seeking more ... 4/5 stars.
Tales of love, lust, and country life by the gifted Irish writer ... Barry has the right stuff for short stories. He brings characters to life quickly and then blesses them with his uncanny ear for dialogue and prose rhythms, his compassion and wry wit ... Exceptional writing and a thoroughly entertaining collection.
Irish writer Barry follows Night Boat to Tangier with a rather mixed story collection ... As always, Barry can’t write a bad sentence ('A light rain began to fall and it spoke more than anything else of the place through which she moved'), but the too-tepid stories don’t do justice to the author’s considerable talents. This won’t go down as one of Barry’s finer works.
