What Does Deborah Levy Read When in Paris?
We’ll Never Have Paris, bien sûr!
Erik Martiny’s The Pleasures of Queueing
The author, like the narrator, was born in Cork, Ireland and grew up speaking French at home. This dual heritage inscribes itself on every page of this Bildungsroman. It may be that Martiny’s bilingualism in both language and culture allows him a more than ordinary awareness of the potential playfulness and variety of English as spoken in Ireland – the novel abounds in verbal play with choice renderings of the speech patterns and pronunciations of Corkonian school kids, interspersed with diction that ranges high and astonishingly low.
Peter Harris reviews Erik Martiny‘s The Pleasures of Queuing.