The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely:
Kiely, Benedict & Lakeland, Paul
MEMORIES, LEGENDS & LIES The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely Benedict Kiely L) 'id R. GUdine, c24.95, ?34 pp. Paul Lakeland enedict Kiely is a great Irish writer, though not one as well...
...Paul Lakeland is the Aloysius P. Kelley, SJ, Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University...
...The forty-eight stories represent four previously published Irish volumes, and the publisher has included the novella, "Proxopera...
...The Shortest Way Home" gives us the delightful story of a young boy who falls out with the nuns in his elementary school, and, insisting on going to the big school with the older boys, finds himself in the "Wee Brother's" classroom, allowed to while away the day drawing and painting, and taking his daily nap in a cabinet where one drawer has been set up for him as a cot...
...Bulletin inserts . . . special prayers for the day...
...Kiely is a treasure, and we will all be better people for reading him...
...Until the fateful day when the whole piece of furniture collapses...
...Closed for business I have just finished reading Maurice Timothy Reidy's article "Closing Catholic Parishes" (September 10...
...Some of the tales are exercises in a purely magical nostalgia, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as the writer recalls the past as it cannot ever quite have been, while persuading us of the reality of it all...
...In the process we are losing essential communal and Catholic values of intimacy, community building, and close-knit relations between a people and its pastor...
...There's also the church, as in "A Great God's Angel Standing," which tells of the unlikely friendship between Fr...
...He was born in Dromore, County Tyrone, and raised in nearby Omagh, in the north of Ireland, though he has lived and worked most of his adult life in and around Dublin, aside from a few brief stays in the United States...
...Paul and Pascal Stakelum, the "notorious rural rake...
...Friend-ship, it seems, can also trump harsh political realities, and the hatreds inspired by old events and new foolishness are carried out among neighbors...
...This year marks the 30th anniversary of Bread for the World as a Christian citizens' movement...
...Later, he will become more obviously autobiographical, as in "The Fairy Women of Lisbellaw...
...Above all else, Kiely begs to be heard, to be read aloud...
...They are first about ministry and service, not about buildings, and certainly not about efficiency...
...I have visited a number of Episcopalian parishes that continue to survive and thrive with one hundred or fewer families...
...ROBERT P. IMBELLI Newton Centre, Mass...
...It is also not difficult to see some experimentation with style, as in the very occasional and slightly peculiar efforts at a kind of rhyming prose poetry...
...Here is a world, and here is an imagination bigger than that world, that fashions and recreates it into more than it was and is...
...Ending Hunger...
...Even as Kiely recalls this lost past of some imaginary childhood, Paddy carries us back a further step into the dream world, remembering that it was beneath this very tree, they said, that Johnny Patterson, the famous clown, had once pitched his tent and joked and danced and sang...
...In addition to his short stories he is the author of nine novels, and also of travel books, memoirs, works on politics and literature, and even a story for children...
...Our evangelical brothers continue to "plant" and develop new churches by the dozens in every community in order to serve existing and prospective congregants...
...Stories and stories about stories, characters and the stories they tell, memories, legends, and lies, all are woven together into a fantastic quilt of the past that is brighter and more alive than the past could ever have been...
...Certainly, there is development, particularly in the ways in which the stories become less purely comic, gaining a darker side as their author grows older and wiser...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) Adeodatus...
...Nowhere is this clearer than in "Proxopera," the story that ends the collection, where an old man is sent off to blow up a peaceful Irish town by thugs with hoods on their heads, whom he easily recognizes as his neighbors...
...To request FREE resources: 1-800-82-BREAD (I-800-822-7323) or visit www.bread.org ^ YES, please send me a sample of the free worship bulletin inserts and information about Bread for the World Sunday...
...Paul Lakeland enedict Kiely is a great Irish writer, though not one as well known in this country as he ought to be...
...The current trend toward closing parishes is depressing and disrespectful of our Catholic heritage and values...
...But the reader will be hard pressed to find evidence of maturation in the capacity to tell a story...
...Child-hood, romance, nostalgia, death, the cruelty of politics, and the goodness of VALERRYordinary people, all mingle in his mind and memory, to be given back to the world through the power of a remark-able tragic-comic imagination, in words that warm the heart and with a voice so sure and insistent that you almost hear the stories read to you, or wish you could...
...God's original creation is thus renewed and transformed, but not annihilated, in the heavenly City of God...
...Who can resist reading on...
...NAME PLEASE PRINT ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP 04XA-CW...
...There's humor here, as when Pas-cal accompanies the good priest on his regular visit to shrive the residents of the local mental hospital, and finds him-self hearing one of the confessions, al-most but not quite by accident...
...Imagine instead a multitude of small, close-knit parishes where the primary activity is not administrative matters but the pastoral and spiritual growth of a people who have a sense of neighborhood and history...
...J Bread for the World Seeking Justice...
...The Old Master goes up and down, and the mad major chases butterflies in his garden...
...and a preaching resource by Dr...
...These efforts often begin like the communities in Acts, meeting in homes and rented facilities...
...Kiely must have been born with that gift...
...In the earlier stories that make up the original first two volumes, Kiely recreates memory through desire...
...In a publication whose contents were written over a period of about thirty-five years, it is hard not to talk about the youthful and the more mature work...
...In many cases it is being done by co-opting both the clergy and the Free worship resources — to help end hunger housands of churches across the T country celebrate Bread for the World Sunday as an opportunity to renew their commitment to ending hunger in God's world...
...While childhood and small-town life are prominent, the world inB ~itth /e///// Commonweal 28 October 8, 2004 trudes a little, mostly in the form of American soldiers passing through the Northern Ireland town where he sets his tales, and with the Americans comes romance, fleeting in most cases...
...The voice of the storyteller invites us into his world, as in the opening sentence of "The Jeweller's Boy": "The first day the boys from Gal-lows Hill paid any attention to Robbie, the barefooted son of Jamie the Jeweller, was the day Short Morgan's watch got broken in a wrestling match...
...Or the sublime first line of one of his best-known fables, "There was something different and a little disconcerting about Harry the Barber, possibly because he drank and had a red face and his hand shook and he kept a cow in the house...
...A journalist and well-known broadcaster, he is obviously a quintessential man of letters, in a culture in which—distinctly opposite to our own—the gift of storytelling lends weight and dignity to a voice in public affairs...
...50 F Street NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20001 Commonweal 29 October 8, 2004...
...How can a parish of four or five thousand families remotely hope to have a shepherd who knows the people...
...Rather than Ratzinger's claim being "astounding," I believe it to be in close continuity with the great theological tradition that here resisted the allure of Platonism and stressed the goodness of the material creation...
...REV...
...Life in this most verbal of cultures is a fabric of stories upon stories...
...More telling is the way in which the friend-ship survives the deep differences between the priest and the public sinner, itself an avenue into the later stories where the complex politics of Northern Ireland come more to the fore...
...So, in "A View from the Treetop," Paddy escapes to the top of a tree in the middle of the village, and watches the world go by for a whole day...
...And yet, of course, this is the way we all recall our childhoods, as vivid as the young imaginations we all once possessed...
...Though many of his stories were first published in the New Yorker and a selection from them appeared in 1980 under the title The State of Ireland, some of them are published for the first time in America in this present volume...
...Kathy Grieb of Virginia Theological Seminary are all available free of charge to help churches and worshipping communities observe Bread for the World Sunday on October 24—or another suitable Sunday in October or November...
...By consolidating parishes, it appears church leaders are pursuing a "cathedral" model of church where the bottom line is efficiency and the goal is to build huge Mass attendance...
Vol. 131 • October 2004 • No. 17
