In the latest of our books series, PAUL LYNCH tells SOPHIE GRENHAM about escaping to Paris with NOTHING BUT BOOKS PACKED, the move from film critic to novelist, and his love of YEATS
Paul Lynch was born in Limerick and grew up in County Donegal. Prior to turning his hand to fiction, Paul was the chief film critic for the now defunct Sunday Tribune. Since then, he has become the prize-winning author of Red Sky in Morning (2013) and The Black Snow (2014). His work has achieved great international recognition, with an especially appreciative audience in France where he has earned such accolades as the French booksellers’ Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and the Prix des Lecteurs Privat.
Red Sky in Morning was a book of the year in The Irish Times, The Toronto Star, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post. The Black Snow was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered where Alan Cheuse said that Lynch’s writing was found “somewhere between that of Nobel poet Seamus Heaney and Cormac McCarthy”. Ron Rash has called Lynch “one of his generation’s very finest novelists”.
Paul lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter.
On home
I live in Drimnagh with my family. The area is long settled and one can imagine in the 30s and 40s when Dublin Corporation relocated so many from the tenements of the inner city, how Drimnagh must have felt like a new world — the children clamouring the new streets and their parents gathering by the gate to chatter. Now the gossip is gone as everybody goes to work. By day, I feel I have the street to myself. What Drimnagh has in quietude it lacks in lifestyle amenities. It was an enormous blindside on the part of developers. I regularly take my daughter for a stroll in Brickfields Park. And many of us are grateful for the opening of Union 8 restaurant in nearby Kilmainham. Finally, great food has come to this side of town.
On creating
I write first thing in the morning so it is easier to work from home. When my daughter was born I had to move my office upstairs. I recently put up a wall of shelves for all my favourite authors and then top shelf collapsed during the night. We thought an earthquake struck the house. It was the poor poets that took the fall. (They always do). I’ve had to get my father involved — soon as I’m done typing this, we are going to fix it.
My desk is a mountain of notes, books, postcards, and rechargeable batteries for my headphones (it is useful to write with a noise-quieting headset). I keep a line from Heaney’s North in sight — “Compose in darkness. / Expect aurora borealis / in the long foray / but no cascade of light”. Leonardo da Vinci goads me from a sticky: “Ostinato Rigore!” he says, which means stubborn rigour.
On bookshops
I love the sprawl that is Chapters on Parnell Street. It is cavernous and yet intimate and I have stumbled upon many a book that became much-loved. Their second-hand store upstairs is a boon for the city — there have been times in my life when buying new books was not an option.
On literature
What we read as teenagers can fill the well for the rest of your life. At school, I fell in love with the works of Thomas Hardy, WB Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot. Their work went in deep and I can feel them still in my own writing.
On escapes
I have been known in the past to jump on a plane to Paris on my own for a few days with nothing but books. I also found the voice of my first novel Red Sky in Morning while writing there. When Haussmann flattened the mediaeval slums of Paris in the 19th century and built those wide, tree-lined boulevards, he gave the world a city where you could walk and think and yet be a part of the bustle. This is why I think writers find Paris so creative. There is so much space and sky.
On his previous career
I do miss the weekly beat. The hunt for gold amidst the endless dross. The feeling of discovering a masterpiece for the first time and writing about it. That was always what it was about for me — seizing upon the great works. But reviewing is difficult, treadmill work, and there are so many rotten, lazy films that do not meet the standard of entertainment, let alone art. It is the bad stuff that beats you down. It is the bad stuff that turns the critic into a snide and a grouch. I did it for five years and I had become a curmudgeon. Now I watch only the good stuff. You are what you watch.
On moving from critic to author
The discipline of thinking critically about film or fiction helps with your own work. There is a little voice that whispers, what you are writing is not good enough. Being a critic for so long reinforces the idea that there is a standard for what we think of as the good and that one should attempt to meet it. It is refreshing too to see it from the other side. The world is incredibly hard on artists. It takes an effort of heroism to get a film or a novel out to an indifferent public.
Image by Anthony Woods
Red Sky in Morning (€10.50) and The Black Snow (€11.75) are both published by Quercus and available from bookshops nationwide.
Sophie Grenham
Love THEGLOSS.ie? Sign up to our MAILING LIST now for a roundup of the latest fashion, beauty, interiors and entertaining news from THE GLOSS MAGAZINE’s daily dispatches.