Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney / Twisted fables from a new talent

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

 

Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney – twisted fables from a new talent

The debut Irish author delivers taut, surreal tales that take your breath away

Tara McEvoy
Mon 20 Jul 2020 09.00 BST

A

s the first lines of short story collections go, it’s pretty hard to beat the one that opens Modern Times, the debut of Irish writer Cathy Sweeney: “There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.” This, and the darkly funny page-and-a-half (A Love Story) it kicks off, are representative of Sweeney’s off-kilter sensibility. Her writing is direct, no-holds-barred; her sentences are as taut as bow strings.

Author Cathy Sweeney in Ballsbridge, Dublin: ‘The way I want to talk
about the world is to just say what I say without evasion. I think there’s more dignity in that.’
Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

Each story seems a twisted fable: we meet a woman with too many mouths; a woman whose child is in fact a very old man; a man who goes “striding all over a provincial town, making films without a camera”; a woman who saves for years to buy her husband a sex doll for his birthday.

Sweeney’s stories are typically very short. One of the longer pieces (her spin on Little Red Riding Hood) is divided into 17 chapters, but the shortest of these chapters is just three words long. The shortest story in the collection, a tale about an ageing cheerleader, clocks in at half a page. This is a breathtakingly weird book, jammed full of peculiar characters and strange scenarios.

But Sweeney brings a genuine depth to her writing too, and so the collection is peppered with aphorisms (“No one ever really hears a story until they need to”, “There was a subplot, but isn’t there always”) and probing questions: “How do you overlay words on experience and get anywhere near the feeling of the thing?”

There are shades here of Angela Carter, Lydia Davis and Miranda July, but Sweeney’s style is all her own. Reading this book in a single sitting feels a bit like getting giddy from eating too many Easter eggs, so moreish is each one of these stories. Modern Times announces the arrival of an unforgettable new voice in Irish fiction.

• Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (£14.99).

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