I first read some of Frank O’Connor’s short stories (and translated Irish poetry) when I was at school and they made an impression because when I picked up a second hand collection recently, some of the stories came back to me word for word and, I realised, they’d been pickling in my brain for decades. So, when I discovered that he’d written a book called The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Melville House Publishing, 2004), I was pestering the internet at once.
O’Connor was born in Cork in 1903, his best writing is a sharply observed insight into the world of my grandfather (who was about the same age) – rural Ireland seen through an amused, slightly cynical but generally sympathetic eye. The Lonely Voice, then, is a remarkable book to be written by a man who grew up in the poorest of circumstances and received little formal education. It is based upon a series of lectures he gave at Stanford University in the early 1960s, not long before he died, and it ranges widely across the “greats” of the short story form, with chapters on, amongst others, Maupassant, Turgenev, Flaubert and Chekhov. Continue reading
