History of the rain : a novel

Title:

Author:

Williams, Niall, 1958- author.

Personal Author:

Williams, Niall, 1958- author.

ISBN:

9781620406472

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Physical Description:

358 pages ; 25 cm

Abstract:

The bedridden daughter of a dead poet struggles to find her father through the stories that are central to her world, an effort that takes her through family writings, oral traditions, her father's library, and her own writing.

Subject Term:

Fathers and daughters -- Fiction.

Poets -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Clare (Ireland) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Domestic fiction.

Historical fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION WILLIAM	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father, Virgil. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces, and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her grandfather Abraham, and finally to Virgil, through wild, rain-sodden history, exploits in pole-vaulting and salmon-fishing, poetry,and the 3,958 books piled high beneath the skylights in her room. Her funny, meandering narrative sings, moves, and irrevocably inspires.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A rambling, soft-hearted Irish family saga stuffed with eccentricity, literature, anecdotes, mythology, humor and heartbreak, from the author of Four Letters of Love (1997)."There's nothing direct about us," says bedridden 19-year-old narrator Ruth Swain, speaking of the Irish, and the same is true of Williams' (John, 2008, etc.) convoluted, comically discursive latest, a shaggy dog story of a novel narrated in what Ruth calls The Meander style. (Ruth has a thing for Capital Letters.) A Smart Girl and briefly a student at Trinity College Dublin but now ill and confined to her room while rain constantly drizzles across the skylight, Ruth explains how the Swain family holds to the Philosophy of Impossible Standard: "No matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough." Tracing this belief back through generations, she enumerates the caricaturish figures of her lineage in vaguely chronological order and with Dickensian flourishes. Tributes and references to books and writers crop up constantly. Voracious reader Ruth has inherited her father Virgil's library of 3,958 books and intends to read them all. Virgil was a poet, and his father wrote books about salmon fishing, extracts from which appear in the text. In among the family history, descriptions of the local community (Faha in County Clare) and detours, there's the thread of Ruth's golden twin brother, Aeney, whose unsurprising fate is central to Virgil losing his struggle with the Impossible Standard and to the cycle of water and writing, faith and hope with which the book concludes.Williams returns to home turf with a long, sentimental, affectionate poem to Irishness generally"the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world's worst bankers"and one quirky family in particular that insists on being read at its own erratic pace. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.