Guest Blog – Sue Recommends
Guest Blog – Sue Recommends:
Today our guest contributor is Sue Rainsford, author of the darkly stunning novel Follow Me to Ground.
At a moment when many of us would like to be spending more time outside, Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig, from The Lilliput Press, is a rich meditation on the spaces and structures that enclose and transport us.
Michael is a widowed bridge engineer who has retired to Bilbao, and his inner life is emphatically spatial and almost inadvertently poetic. In the novel’s prologue, we read
One morning, lying next to Catherine, I recalled a connection I designed many decades before to the underside of an enormous bridge that arced across the mouth of a tidal river in an isolated place in northern India, and, as she squeezed my forearm and her foot rubbed against my shin I realized I’d miscalculated the moments and stresses that my connection was required to transmit.
As Michael mourns his wife, listens simultaneously to two versions of Schubert’s Trout Quintet and visits the sculptures of Richard Serra, the intimacy of embodied encounter and the impersonal—and oddly lyrical—laws of physics continue to entwine.
Moving as it does between the variant registers of solitude and seclusion, there’s an undeniable melancholy to Duncan’s second novel. It is also, however, an exuberant, replenishing testament to the pleasures of reflection and domestic space. Furthermore, Michael’s inner life is so bracingly lucid that each image conjured—‘a yellow outline of a sea vessel riding across the waves of a broad bay’, ‘timber legs…carved into sculptural figures of female deities’—slips behind the eyes of the reader, so that for a moment you feel you’ve seen them firsthand.
Here’s a link to Adrian reading from the book;
Sue Rainsford is an Irish fiction and arts writer based in Dublin.
Website: https://www.suerainsford.com/
Twitter: @humbird_fuil
Image by: Ali Rainsford