In the time of madness
En anglais – In the last years of the twentieth century, foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious, and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years, it had been paralyzed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto, but now the age of Suharto was coming to an end. Would freedom prevail, or was the “time of madness” predicted centuries before now at hand? A book of hair-raising immediacy and a riveting account of a voyage into the abyss, In the Time of Madness is an accomplishment in the great tradition of Conrad, Orwell, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
The Guts
En Anglais – The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids … and bowel cancer. He isn’t dying, he thinks, but he might be. Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle – his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments – Outspan, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever. He is reunited with his long-lost brother and learns to play the trumpet… This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. It climaxes in one of the great passages in Roddy Doyle’s fiction: four middle-aged men at Ireland’s hottest rock festival watching Jimmy’s son Marvin’s band Moanin’ At Midnight pretending to be Bulgarian and playing a song called ‘I’m Going to Hell’ that apparently hasn’t been heard since 1932…
The deportees and other stories
En Anglais – For the past few years Roddy Doyle has written stories for Metro Eireann, a magazine by and for immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories takes a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in Ireland today. The Deportees now brings those stories together for all of Roddy’s devoted readers, ranging from a terrifying ghost story, “The Pram,” in which a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge’s older sisters and decides–using a phrase she has just learnt–to “scare them shitless,” to the glorious title story itself, where Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed the beloved Commitments, decides it’s time to find a new band, and this time no white Irish need apply. Multicultural to a fault, the Deportees specialize not in soul music, but in the songs of Woody Guthrie.
The dead republic
En Anglais – The triumphant conclusion to the trilogy that began with « A Star Called Henry » Roddy Doyle’s irrepressible Irish rebel Henry Smart is back-and he is not mellowing with age. Saved from death in California’s Monument Valley by none other than Henry Fonda, he ends up in Hollywood collaborating with legendary director John Ford on a script based on his life. Returning to Ireland in 1951 to film « The Quiet Man »- which to Henry’s consternation has been completely sentimentalized-he severs his relationship with Ford … His career in film over, Henry settles into a quiet life in a village north of Dublin, where he finds work as a caretaker for a boys’ school and takes up with a woman named Missus O’Kelly, whom he suspects- but is not quite sure-may be his long-lost wife, the legendary Miss O’Shea. After being injured in a political bombing in Dublin in 1974, Henry is profiled in the newspaper and suddenly the secret of his rebel past is out. Henry is a national hero. Or are his troubles just beginning? Raucous, colorful, epic, and full of intrigue and incident, « The Dead Republic » is also a moving love story-the magnificent final act in the life of one of Roddy Doyle’s most unforgettable characters.