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History of the Rain

Niall Williams (Goodreads Author)

3.93 · Rating details · 4,831 ratings · 820 reviews

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That’s how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories—and throug ...more

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Kindle Edition, 369 pages

Published May 6th 2014 by Bloomsbury USA (first published April 10th 2014)

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Apr 16, 2017 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"As It Is in Heaven", was so enjoyable, I wanted to return to another Niall Williams novel - sooner - rather than later.
"History of the Rain", is extraordinary-phenomenal-brilliant!!! WOW!! - just WOW!!!

A young girl name Ruth Swain, an Irish girl, lies in bed sick....( we never know what she has), but is surrounded by books - around 3,000 books - which she inherited by her father. Throughout the story, books are dropped like rain. I was marking books I haven't read and looking up books to famil ...more

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Jul 22, 2020 Candi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, contemporary-literary, european-literature, kindle

“I will know somehow we can come through, and our story is of enduring and aspiring and that it is enough to keep hoping and to keep telling stories, for each other and about each other…”

Ruth Swain has taught me a lesson here and for that I am forever indebted to her. I have a tendency to be harder on myself than I am on anyone else. The shadow that has fallen over the country and the world in recent times has caused me to examine myself and my goals more sharply than ever before. Furthermore, n ...more

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Apr 28, 2017 Cheri rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017, ireland, family-relationships, literary-fiction, literature-irish-literature, favourites, library-book, irish-author

“We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.”

In prose that sings the songs of falling rain, of ancestors, of family hovering in that place “in between” this life and the next, of the beauty of the land that is Ireland, of the salmon that swim the Shannon, and of poetry, surrounded by her father’s thousands of books inside, the beauty of words on every page.

”We are our stories. We tell ...more

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Apr 25, 2020 Angela M rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-favorites

I was in this small town Faha, in Ireland, in this attic room filled with so many books, in the mind and heart of Ruth Swain, an unforgettable character who made me laugh, cry, think and want to read all of those classics I never read. Nineteen and bedridden in her attic room, with an illness that is never fully divulged, Ruth Swain reads and writes and tells us stories, her story and the story of her family. In an utterly stunning way, we the readers are addressed by Ruth and we become part of ...more

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Aug 01, 2020 Cecily rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Cecily by: Laysee

Shelves: lit-crit, death-grief-bereavement, bildungsroman, read-only-cos-of-gr-friends, ireland, landscape-location-protagonist, solitary-protagonist, unreliable-narrators

.
Hide and seek - and salve

This is a novel for those who love to lose themselves and find others between pages whose scent whispers as much as the words. Who want to understand those they’ve loved and lost - through their stories and the ones they tell about them. Who want the company of a bibliophile with a poetic turn of phrase and dash of sharp wit.

“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.”
This is akin to the recurring theme of word ...more

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Jul 21, 2020 Laysee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-star-books

‘We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.’ – Niall Williams, History of The Rain

History of The Rain is an elegiac story set in Faha, rural Ireland, where it rains and rains and rains. Not surprisingly, the characters are rained upon and their fate swallowed up by the perpetual deluge. The story is told by nineteen-year-old Ruth Swain, who is bed-bound on account of a life-threatening ...more

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Apr 30, 2014 Julie Christine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ireland-theme-setting, read-2014, contemporary-fiction, best-of-2014

A novel of beauty and grace, showing again that Niall Williams is more than a writer, he is a composer who elicits music from the magical combination of letters we know as words.

Young Ruth Swain has returned home from university to convalesce in her attic bedroom, where the rain of Co. Clare pours ceaselessly on the two windows above her head, and three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight volumes of classic prose and poetry surround her in teetering stacks. Her father is gone and Ruth seeks A novel of beauty and grace, showing again that Niall Williams is more than a writer, he is a composer who elicits music from the magical combination of letters we know as words.

Young Ruth Swain has returned home from university to convalesce in her attic bedroom, where the rain of Co. Clare pours ceaselessly on the two windows above her head, and three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight volumes of classic prose and poetry surround her in teetering stacks. Her father is gone and Ruth seeks him, his history, and his truth, in the vast library he left behind. Her clear, funny, and poignant voice guides us through misty decades of Swain and MacCarroll family lore to illuminate how her father, Virgil, and her mother, Mary, came to farm the worst fourteen acres of land in Ireland.

The reminders of present-day Ireland—references to the Crash, the internet, Marty in the Morning on RTE's Lyric FM—jolted me out of the dreamlike meanderings in a timeless world, casting a surreal glow over this rain-sodden ode to Ireland, literature, and love. But the anachronisms make the story more bewitching; Williams shows us that even in this hyper-connected world, it is possible to escape. And the greatest escape is found in the pages of a book.

This is a book to savor, slowly and delicately. It pokes gentle, meta, self-mocking fun at the conventions of novel structure. If you are a reader who expects tidy packages of chronological storytelling, plot points, and story arcs, give this a try. You might be surprised what beauty can be woven outside the confines of the Fiction 101 blogosphere. And read with a notebook by your side, because you'll want to make note of each volume Ruth references in her vast library—it's a primer on Western literature's greatest works of poetry and prose. Tissues would be good, too. I reckon you won't make it through this with dry eyes.

Tied up in my delight with History of the Rain is my love for Ireland, particularly the west. Williams, as he always does, captures this incomparable spirit, the particular state of longing that I feel when I am in Ireland, or just thinking about being there:

We're a race of elsewhere people. That's what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world's worst bankers. ...It's in the eyes. The idea of a better home. Some of us have it worse than others. My father had it running in the rivers of him.

Let this river of words take you away. But be forewarned: you won't want to return. ...more

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Oct 27, 2014 B the BookAddict rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to B the BookAddict by: Terri Jacobson

Shelves: best-of-the-best, bury-me-with-this-book

I picked up History of the Rain after reading the review by my good GR friend Terri. I am indebted to her for bringing the novel to my attention.

Plain Ruth Swain is one of the most appealing characters I have met in a long time. There is nothing plain about Ruth, in my opinion, as she writes in her “still, small, strong, hopeful voice.” Confined to her bed and with her golden twin already slipped away from her, she is a reader. Like many of the infirm, she views the world from a different viewp I picked up History of the Rain after reading the review by my good GR friend Terri. I am indebted to her for bringing the novel to my attention.

Plain Ruth Swain is one of the most appealing characters I have met in a long time. There is nothing plain about Ruth, in my opinion, as she writes in her “still, small, strong, hopeful voice.” Confined to her bed and with her golden twin already slipped away from her, she is a reader. Like many of the infirm, she views the world from a different viewpoint than the rest of us and her voice is unsubtle, insightful and delightfully extraordinary. From her bed, Ruth is searching for her father, Virgil Swain and, as she puts it, “she’s writing a river”. Her story simply flows.

Beginning with the incredibly obstinate Swains, her great grandfather the Reverend, grandfather Abraham, she also tells you snippets of her mother’s family history. There’s the Shannon River, rain, fishing, pole-vaulting, poetry, Ireland and there’s Ruth. Woven with her own tale and references to her 3958 books, she imparts her father’s story: “This is my father’s story. I am writing it to find him. But to get where you’re going, you have to first go backwards. That’s directions in Ireland, it’s also T.S. Eliot.”

“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or to keep alive those who only live now in the telling”

“He had the kind of brain where strange is just normal in a bit of a storm.”

“All time was the same to Nan, she had that most remarkable of skills, the habit of living, and has it so perfected that death has given up and gone away.”

If you don’t fall for Plain Ruth Swain, there just may be something amiss with your humanity. The Times’ summation of History of the Rain is perfect: “Williams’ prose is bathed in poetry and moonlight.” Ruth Swain is a narrator who tells a story unlike any other storyteller. Her voice and her story are indelible and captivating. Mr Williams, I applaud you!

This is one of the best reads I have had this year. The blurb says this novel is exquisite – believe me, it is. Most Highly Recommended. 5★ ...more

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Jun 18, 2020 Dem rated it it was ok · review of another edition

A rambling, eccentric contemporary fiction novel that made my head spin for all the wrong reasons. A long list Booker Prize nominee, a guide book to Ireland and a list of “ you need to read books thrown in for good measure.

I actually purchased a hard copy and an audible edition of this one as I had such high hopes for it.
This was a case of Irish information overload with this story and the drowning of the shamrock comes to mind. I started out listening to this novel and the narration sounded ...more

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May 12, 2020 JimZ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This to me is a 5-star book. I think I knew it about 100 pages into the 358-page novel. The writing was extremely clever…in the acknowledgments Niall Williams said it took 5 years to write and at one point thought of abandoning it. Good God! Thank God he did not do that, but persisted on. I read his last work, This is Happiness, about 3 months ago and gave that 5 stars (my first introduction to Niall Williams) and I marveled at his writing style and was writing down passages in the book that wer This to me is a 5-star book. I think I knew it about 100 pages into the 358-page novel. The writing was extremely clever…in the acknowledgments Niall Williams said it took 5 years to write and at one point thought of abandoning it. Good God! Thank God he did not do that, but persisted on. I read his last work, This is Happiness, about 3 months ago and gave that 5 stars (my first introduction to Niall Williams) and I marveled at his writing style and was writing down passages in the book that were just stunning. I had a number of bookmarks in this novel so that I could go back to the passages later on that just really hit me as stunning (oops, I’m repeating myself). There were times I was caught unawares by Ruthie’s sardonic wit and laughed out loud.

The story is told from Ruthie’s perspective. At the time of the writing she is 19, has for a large part of the book some disease that has her bedridden in her upstairs bedroom (in the attic) for the last 3 years or so, surrounded by 3,958 books. How those books came to be there…well I shan’t tell you. 😊 She has a twin brother Aeney and her Mam, Mary (nee MacCarroll) and her father, and her grandmother Nan. And someone mooning after her since she was a little girl, Vincent Cunningham. And interesting characters in the town she lives in, Faha. Ruthie tells us some about her father’s grandfather (the Reverend Swain) and a little bit more about his father (Abraham Swain) and a lot about her father (Virgil Swain) and mother. I don’t think I’ll say anything more about the plot.

Niall Williams did a clever thing in the book. Ruthie throughout was alluding to books to prove a point and she would include the edition of the book, who the publisher was, and the number of the book her father gave it. It was a joy to come upon Ruthie recalling William Trevor (The Collected Stories, Penguin, London), Elizabeth Bowen (The Last September & The Death of the Heart, Anchor, New York) and Anne Enright (The Gathering). Charles Dickens was frequently recalled as was Keats and Shakespeare.

In the last book I read by Niall Williams, ‘Four Letters of Love’, he had a final sentence in the book which was stunning and relayed a lot of information to the reader (3rd time I have used that…me bad) and was 13 lines in length. In this novel he had a final sentence that was stunning and was 25 lines in length, and once again tied up some important loose ends in the novel….that if he had not tied up I would have had some lingering concerns (well what happened to So-and-So?). I would still have probably given this novel 5 stars…but given the 25-line sentence to close the book, I definitively give this novel 5 stars (me giving 5 stars is getting to be a rare things nowadays 😊).

There were 10 blurbs on the first page of the novel praising it chiefly from literary periodicals and newspapers, and more such blurbs on the front and back cover. The book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014.

At least in the Bloomsbury issue of the novel, you could tilt the book in a certain way and make out a whole page of small print on the front cover, apparently from one or more pages from the novel…that was really cool. In the Bloomsbury edition there was a jumping salmon on the front cover which reminded me of another novel I had read, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by another fave UK author of mine, Paul Torday (1946-2013).

I have not read the reviews of this book yet (I don’t want reviews to affect the review that I give) but have a suspicion this was well received judging by the number of blurbs, the uniformity in what they say in the blurbs — sad and funny and uplifting and engrossing, all at the same time (Sydney Morning Herald) — and that I was reading a Bloomsbury edition that was in its 8th printing.

One of my notes I made while reading when I got to the bottom of p. 223: “Man, this dude knows how to write.” He wrote: “She had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling. She had that falling-off-the-world feeling she often got around him, a feeling that came swift and light and was so unlike the weight of the responsible that had come into the house after her father had died that it felt like wings inside her.” I think what enthralled me about this sentence and what set it apart from others was his using the word “responsible” rather than the more grammatically correct “responsibility”...It caught my attention and my brain realized that this was a markedly beautiful sentence.

Reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...
a review from a blog site, The Book Lover’s Sanctuary: https://bookloverssanctuary.com/2014/... ...more

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Jun 19, 2015 Phrynne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I would give that six stars if I could. It was perfect. I loved the watery theme, the rain , the rivers, the salmon, even the mud and the floods. The descriptions of Ireland were spot on and some of the observations of the people were laugh aloud funny. I found Ruth to be an endearing heroine and loved all the other main characters as well. At times it was a sad book, at other times it was hopeful and uplifting. It was full to the brim with literary references as well as current day politics and ...more

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Aug 01, 2014 Katherine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: the-booker-prize, contemporary

"There's a book inside you. There's a library inside me."

I woke up thinking about this novel, and I almost regret dedicating my morning to finishing it. But sometimes a story begs to be devoured.

Sometimes, you can tell an author is a devout reader through their writing. Niall Williams clearly is one of these types, based on History of the Rain. So, of course, I love him the more for it. This is a story of family, history, love, tragedy, Ireland, and books. And it's probably my favorite Man B ...more

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Aug 11, 2014 Krista rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014, man-booker-nod, favourites, irishfic

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

History of the Rain (Book 3959, Bloomsbury, New York) is a quirky kind of book with lyrical Irishness, circular storytelling, poetic narrative, a wise-cracking protagonist, and my God, the rain. It had me rereading sentences and paragraphs to savour the words (sometimes to decipher the meaning), and in two diff ...more

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Mar 30, 2019 Betsy Robinson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

From her sickbed under a water-pelted skylight in the attic of a tilted house crammed with newspapers and books, in the unmarked parish of Faha, “down in a hole beside the river” in County Clare, Ireland, where it never stops raining, nineteen-year-old Ruth Swain says she is writing a “river.” I would characterize the output as a torrent: a literary reference-packed history of her family. Reading it is like being awash in flood rapids. Sentences cascade, sweeping and twirling you along so fast y ...more

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Dec 20, 2016 Kelly rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ireland, its-the-quiet-ones, examined-lives, 21st-century, grand-opera, fiction

Oh my god, this book makes me so angry because if you just cut out the repetitive, far too long, cloying middle 80 pages or so where he shows his hand over and over so insistently that I can't help but look at it, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous talented thing full of pain and life and love and erudition and things put just so. I'm really pissed off that this author over indulged and threw me out of the narrative by telling me how clever he was again and again and getting maudlin about how Irish peopl ...more

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Mar 26, 2014 Chrissie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014-read, fiction, audible, relationships, ireland, returned

This book is d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g! Must it be SO depressing? It doesn't help that the end tries to close with a hopeful note.

The book is about death and illness and how some people demand so much of themselves that they are doomed to fail. It is also about the importance of stories, our stories. There lies the wisp of hope embedded in the book.

There are some beautiful lines, lines that perceptively reveal human relationships and some of descriptive beauty. I did feel the drumming of the rain on This book is d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g! Must it be SO depressing? It doesn't help that the end tries to close with a hopeful note.

The book is about death and illness and how some people demand so much of themselves that they are doomed to fail. It is also about the importance of stories, our stories. There lies the wisp of hope embedded in the book.

There are some beautiful lines, lines that perceptively reveal human relationships and some of descriptive beauty. I did feel the drumming of the rain on the skylight above Ruth's bed.

The book is written for bibliophiles....maybe. I love books, and I have read a large number of the many referred to, but still this book was not for me. The central character, Ruth, is a bedridden girl of 19. She has decided to read all her father's books, the point being to discover who her father really was. A person's books do say who you are, don't they? She refers to these books by their number in her father's library. Yep, they are all numbered, and they are in the thousands. Poetry and classics. Mythology and history. Dickens and Edith Wharton and Faulkner. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy too, of course. I objected to how she refers to characters/events in theses famous books as quick explanations for events and characters in her story. (The book we are reading is Ruth's story.) But you can't do that. The situations are not the same; the details are not the same, and it is the details that make a story. It all becomes superficial and cursory. For me this was a disservice to the original literature. In addition, the numerous references to the books' titles, date and city of publication made the writing disjointed.

I didn't feel engaged in the lives of her father, her mother, her grandparents or great grandparents. All are quickly covered. There is too much in too few pages. Her relationship with her twin brother, yes, there the story came alive. Only here did I feel the love that bound these two.

There is humor. Maybe half of it made me laugh.

The setting is Clare, Ireland, after the bust, but the stories of her ancestors go back to the First World War.

The narration of the audiobook by Jennifer McGrath was lovely. Her Irish dialect is beautiful, lilting.

...more

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Aug 23, 2014 Carolyn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: literary, relationships, contemporary

"This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander."

Ruth Swain, 19 years old is lying ill in her attic bedroom in her big boat bed, hand built by her father, surrounded by the almost 4000 books belonging to her father, Virgil. She is watching the interminable Irish rain through her window and writing a history of her family.

This is a wonderful, lyrical history of a family and their relationship with the river Shannon and the land beside it, 'the worst fourteen acres in Irel
"This, Dear Reader, is a river narrative. My chosen style is The Meander."

Ruth Swain, 19 years old is lying ill in her attic bedroom in her big boat bed, hand built by her father, surrounded by the almost 4000 books belonging to her father, Virgil. She is watching the interminable Irish rain through her window and writing a history of her family.

This is a wonderful, lyrical history of a family and their relationship with the river Shannon and the land beside it, 'the worst fourteen acres in Ireland', that her impractical poet father tries to farm in the samll community of Faha, County Clare. The river runs through the novel as a powerful metaphor, telling the past, the present and the future of Ireland itself and the Swains. In summer the river is benign and golden sunny days are spent swimming and fishing the leaping salmon and in winter the incessant rain can cause it to flood destroying the farm and threatening the people living nearby. It is the centre of their lives but is never to be taken for granted and can snatch a life in an instant.

"Here in Faha, of rain we have known All kinds, the rain that pretends it's not rain, the rain that crosses the Atlantic and comes for its holidays, rain that laughs at the word summer, sniggers at the dry day in Ennis twenty kilometres away, hoots at what pours, streams, teems, lashes, pelts, and buckets down. But this was different. It had intent. That's what Mam thought. And the intention was Flood.

As much as she is becoming a writer, Ruth is also a reader and her writing is coloured with what she has absorbed from her fathers great collection of books. She recalls her grandfather, Abraham who wrote and published a book on Salmon fishing in Ireland, and writes of her twin, Aeney a blue eyed, blonde haired golden boy who was taken from them. From her sickbed she is able to view her family history from a distance and seek and find her father and his love for them.

"And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metamorphic leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book did not and does not perish, and you will know my books exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I have found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned , in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows." ...more

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Aug 01, 2014 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read2014, booker-winners-and-listed, location-ireland, books-on-books

I contemplated leaving this book unfinished, but decided to stick it out. I can't say I'm glad I did, as the whole experience left me feeling a bit ambivalent.

That surprises me because on paper I should like this book quite a bit - the story of a sick/dying girl reconnecting with her dead father through his library. But the story meanders quite a bit, and the author (or we can say narrator) Really Likes To Emphasize Ideas With Extra Capital Letters. This is something that is one of my top pet pe ...more

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Apr 22, 2019 Leila rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: my-challenge-books, so-many-books-so-little-time

Beautiful writing but just not for me. I struggled with it.

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Jun 30, 2020 Sharon Metcalf rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020

4.5 Stars
Who amongst us here on Goodreads doesn’t have a soft spot for books about books? I know I do, and I love it when authors sneak literary references into their own works. If you can relate to this I'm sure you'll get a lot of enjoyment from History of the Rain by Niall Williams. This novel was jam packed with literary references and I thoroughly enjoyed the way Ruthie, his narrator, described people using characters from other books as her terms of reference. In some ways Williams relied ...more

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Aug 06, 2014 Antonomasia rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Antonomasia by: Booker longlist 2014

Shelves: booker, ebooks-kobo, ireland, decade-2010s, 2014

Just as I was one of the 'right' readers for its fellow Booker longlister The Wake, I'm a wrong 'un for The History of the Rain - a book which is, so far, effusively well-loved on here.

It's very, very Oirish: whimsy and tragedy and tragical whimsy, eccentric villagers and stone-filled fields and potato blight and poets who won't publish. Ireland is pretty enough but these things - or in some cases the manner in which they're written - just don't do it for me. (As with not liking any sort of bes Just as I was one of the 'right' readers for its fellow Booker longlister The Wake, I'm a wrong 'un for The History of the Rain - a book which is, so far, effusively well-loved on here.

It's very, very Oirish: whimsy and tragedy and tragical whimsy, eccentric villagers and stone-filled fields and potato blight and poets who won't publish. Ireland is pretty enough but these things - or in some cases the manner in which they're written - just don't do it for me. (As with not liking any sort of bestseller or hit, I don't feel too bad about not being fond of Oirishness: there are squillions of fans and it will be just fine without me.) Though what stock-Ireland does very well IMO is jokes about Catholicism: e.g. "a miniature Virgin Mary who, First Miracle of Faha, transformed herself into a plastic bottle with blue cap-crown". (It may be the absence of that sort of cynicism about anything else that explains the failure to connect.)

I'm not heartless and can see why one may be moved by this, young narrator Ruth's potentially terminal illness faced mostly off-screen as she devotes most of her attention to family history, or the magic surrounding her lost poet father and his family's "Impossible Standard". There are a couple of pages about grief and loss in Part 3, Chapter 1, which are absolutely perfect. Perhaps it implicitly indicates, especially near the end, that the romanticisation of failure - whilst an impediment to some - can be helpful when there's truly not much choice, it can be a comfort when you're long term sick and lend the possibility of being interesting rather than merely a degraded mess. (Though I may be reading in this idea which I consider important and too-little stated - merely because Ruth is still naively starry eyed about said romanticisation.) However, ultimately the book still adheres to the idea of publicity / publication as success. But aside from those few bits, my feeling is that it's all been said before and I wasn't keen enough to hear it again. The book seems unnecessary. Though to all those who adore it, it clearly is.

I've heard a similar story, from a similar narrator, very recently. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, also on the 2014 Booker longlist, has likewise a provincial nuclear-family setting with now-absent siblings and father, a chatty, meandering daughter-narrator who, although she's a student at least some of the time during the book pays practically no attention to her contemporary culture, making it claustrophobic - and yes, depressingly provincial, gotta get out of here - for those of us who thrive on references. The authors are in both cases old enough to be the narrators' parents. (And this, like the three other Booker longlisters I've read so far, contains discussion of religious doubt; perhaps it is universal in litfic and I hadn't quite noticed, but it's easy to imagine panel chair and noted atheist A.C. Grayling nodding approvingly towards these paragraphs and books.)

Ruth sounds like she was "born middle-aged" to quote some other book I can't remember, with an air of gossipy, bustling capability although she spends most of the present-day parts of the book in bed or in hospital. She may sound mature and wise-beyond-her-years, but cynically I'd argue that it might just be easier for an author in his later fifties to create that, than to write a nineteen year old who sounds more like one. I am not entirely convinced by her. Although, yes, I have met women who seemed middle aged in their teens - straight into work after school or students living at home... It's odd, actually, that Ruth never mentions her experience of the university she's had to leave or take years out from. And I don't always find Ruth that wise - one hopes she will come to detach more from her family's unrelenting standards and history through having understood them so young, and you want to give her a copy of Pink Brain, Blue Brain to get her to her examine all her gender generalisations. Though countless novelists in their thirties and forties, whom you'd think both old and young enough to know better, still make similar ones.

As the genres list tells you, this is one of those Books About Books. Inevitably beloved on sites like this one, but I am almost always a refusenik. Twee, embarrassingly insular, I tend to think - but then, for all I've read, books aren't really my 'home' form. All the precious stuff that sounds like guff when I hear it said about novels or films makes utter perfect sense when it's said of music. (Which is more ancient, requires greater, more esoteric skill to produce yet demands nothing more than possession of a sense to absorb, and is physical as well as mental. And, for the last century or so, can even be appreciated whilst doing other things.) And I might just buy it re. poetry. Ruth is trying to get to know her lost father more deeply by reading his library. Goodness knows I understand the idea of using someone's favourite things to relate to them and absorb them when they're not there (and I wish I'd been more forgiving towards a couple of people who'd done the same to me when I was younger). But - perhaps because Ruth's young, or perhaps because it's too poetic a book to introduce such doubts - it never acknowledges that without the person there to talk to, you might be ascribing the wrong meanings or picking out the wrong bits, so you have to accept you're doing it as a comfort and daydream for yourself, and you're only going to get your own responses out of them. Nor would it be the sort of novel to say that 3000 mostly water-damaged old books, almost certainly mouldy, are not good companions for someone with what sounds like leukaemia. Many others say they've been inspired to read more via the references in The History of the Rain; like Ruth, I was a "reader of so many nineteenth-century novels before the age of fifteen that I became exactly too clever by half". I'm still pretty content with my intake of English classics, and the only book mentioned in here that I want to read and haven't is Anna Karenina.

Some generally favourable reviews find the references to modern life - the Boom, the Crash, Latvians and Lidl, the internet - jarring. True, a lot of the book does feel like it could have been an Irish village at almost any time in the twentieth century, but I think it blends things quite well. In smaller places, where you don't see adverts everywhere and streets full of people walking around with iPhones, a lot of life honestly doesn't look terribly different even if it is affected by wider economic change, and a lot of the work is of a type that means you couldn't be on the internet all day anyway. Their village doesn't have broadband, they still have a lot of VHS videos in the house, she's never become "an e-Person, an iPerson". The sense of continuity and change rings true even if the voice and cast are a tad cliched. ...more

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Dec 10, 2014 Ravi Gangwani rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: best-book-of-life, emotional, favorites, booker-nominated, ireland

These words are from writer 'Niall Williams' of the book 'History of the Rain'. Almost two years ago.
Dear Ravi,

Greetings from a deep dark and starry night in County Clare. Thank you for your email about my novel 'History of the Rain.' It is a wonderful thing that a book written here in the wind and rain of the Atlantic coast of Ireland can reach a reader in India. I am greatly touched by your taking the time to let me know that you enjoyed the novel.

Best wishes from Ireland

Niall

Yes without ...more

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Jan 07, 2014 Dawn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads-won

I received a copy of this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Three quarters of the way through this book, I thought I knew what my review would say. I was going to tell you how "History of the Rain" by Niall Williams is one of the best books I've read; how I've never laughed so much during a book; how the characters pop up out of the page and add so much charm to the story; how reading just a few pages in the morning changed my day.

Having now finished, most of the above is still true. ...more

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Dec 16, 2015 Paul Secor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-that-make-me-laugh, favorite-fiction, keepers-at-least-for-now, favorite-books-about-books, favorite-2015-reading

Niall Williams writes like an angel - if angels were writers - and he has created a narrator, Ruth Swain, who narrates like an angel - if angels were narrators.
History of the Rain is an ode to the imagination, and to storytelling, and to books, and to reading, and to Ireland, and to what it means to live. That's a lot of to's, but they're all in there. ...more

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Aug 04, 2014 Jenny's rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, favorites, books-i-own

Brilliant! Exquisite! Delightful! Pure Poetry! The best thing I've read so far this year!!!!

"He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure. " -Niall Williams

I don't often covet the gift of writing either. Mostly I'm content just to be a reader of books as well, though reading this one made me wish I was a ...more

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Aug 06, 2014 Bonnie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is the most achingly beautiful book I have ever read. There is not one flaw and exceptional beauty. Niall Williams has created poetry out of words and created characters so real they will live on forever. The setting is Faha, Ireland where rain is the only constant. The main character is Ruth Swain, a girl who loves to read and vows to read her father's collection of 3,958 books in order to understand him. Ruth is sickly with a "blood disease" and spends her days in an attic room with skyli This is the most achingly beautiful book I have ever read. There is not one flaw and exceptional beauty. Niall Williams has created poetry out of words and created characters so real they will live on forever. The setting is Faha, Ireland where rain is the only constant. The main character is Ruth Swain, a girl who loves to read and vows to read her father's collection of 3,958 books in order to understand him. Ruth is sickly with a "blood disease" and spends her days in an attic room with skylights over which rain falls. She is as a unique character as someone from Faulkner and soon has you under her spell.

Her father back from sailing the seas marries a local girl and they, after years of trying, have twins, a boy and a girl. Aeney is vital and outgoing in contrast to his immobile sister. They live on the wild, rain-sodden history of fourteen acres of the worst farming land in Ireland, and her father battles the stone littered, brackish watered river to make a living for the family. He plants potatoes and watches as they flourish only to die from blight, he relentlessly shovels the soggy ground bordering the River Shannon from encroaching on his land and, finally, begins writing poetry.

This book is so unique dealing with the love of reading books that passes from father to daughter. The mood is quirky(Chapter Twelve is four words: Your blood is a river) and inundated with witty sayings. After every mention of a book, the author, publication date and city is given, "Read Middlemarch(Book 989, George Eliot, Penguin Classics, London).

The novel relates the first meeting of Virgil and Mary and their loving but meager existence where Virgil vows God is not going to beat him and took every setback as a trial, doubled the lies of wire, re-staked the fence, then made a double perimeter alone the river when he came out one morning to see a whole portion of it, posts and wire both, had been pressed forward into the water. The river always wins so Virgil spends more time reading than working and Mary works twice as hard. Ruth writes about their cows that kept going toward the river where three drowned and she comments, "One drowned is bad luck, two is the devil himself, three is God". A neighbor has to point out that maybe they were thirsty.

At one point, Virgil gives up and starts writing poetry at a desk under the eaves. He is know as "the Poet" and turns his love of reading into action.

This is the best and most unusual book I have read and I cannot heap enough praise on Williams for this remarkable story of the Swain family. As Ruth says, "It is enough to keep hoping and to keep telling stories, for each other and about each other, collaborating in the elaborate history of ourselves so that in stories we exist".

...more

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Dec 15, 2014 Robert Blumenthal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I sometimes go back and forth while reading a book, changing my star ratings as I proceed. This stellar novel was easy--it was a 5-star journey all the way. If I was forced to use only one word to describe this novel, it would definitely be "Irish." It is so Irish that I could hear fiddle music and Irish brogue, taste the whiskey, and feel the warmth and charm of the characters as I read. It is narrated by a wonderful narrator, a sickly Irish woman in her 20s. It is mostly about the life of her ...more

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Jul 23, 2014 Elaine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014

A very beautiful if imperfect book. Is it a cliche to call an Irish book lyrical? Well, this one is. It's a wistful, tender family saga rooted in a dreamily rain-soaked Irish riverside landscape. It's also sometimes quite funny, as Williams' linguistic creativity bounces off the walls and into various phenomena of contemporary culture (particularly those associated with the Great Recession - the Bust, as he calls it).

I found it quite absorbing and was prepared to be blown away at the beginning. ...more

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Aug 07, 2014 Tom Lee rated it it was ok · review of another edition

It's a little depressing to see so many Goodreads reviews lauding the grace of this book's writing. It's kind of bad writing! In truth, it uses a pretty formulaic trick to evoke resonance and meaning: overwrought run-on sentences interspersed with smirking, percussive declarations. Pleading, plaintive, frankly embarrassing jumbles of words followed up with overconfident Joss Whedonisms. Read the damn thing again and you'll see. The offense is not absolved by our narrator repeatedly acknowledging It's a little depressing to see so many Goodreads reviews lauding the grace of this book's writing. It's kind of bad writing! In truth, it uses a pretty formulaic trick to evoke resonance and meaning: overwrought run-on sentences interspersed with smirking, percussive declarations. Pleading, plaintive, frankly embarrassing jumbles of words followed up with overconfident Joss Whedonisms. Read the damn thing again and you'll see. The offense is not absolved by our narrator repeatedly acknowledging her tendency toward purple prose early in the novel.

The book describes several generations of the Swain family, culminating in the narrator, who is chronicling her history while facing a long-brewing medical crisis. Poignant events occur during this history, but there is no particular plot or tension. Everyone is either a stalwart, a moony dreamer, or an impossibly quirky Irish small-town personality.

And the fucking Irish! So many words are spent noting the idiosyncrasies of the Irish character. I have begun to suspect that the Irish character is best characterized by its refusal to shut up about itself. Honestly, it felt a bit like a preview of one of those romantic comedies set in some small town hours from Dublin that I never care to watch.

So, look: the writing is less sophisticated than it pretends, but it's not graceless, per se. The plot is less interesting than it imagines, but it's not boring, per se. It's difficult to call this a bad book. It's just that there's so much artifice present, so many words designed to convince us it's a certain type of book, with a certain associated value. It's flatly not that book, and it doesn't deserve the associations that it helps itself to.

It also suffers considerably from its insistence on name-checking other books. This is both pretentious and self-indulgent. Please, no more literary books that bend over backward to pat their audiences on the back for the act of reading by elevating it to some quasi-mystical nonsense. (A partial pardon is extended to Carlos Ruis Zafon because he usually manages to kill a bunch of characters gruesomely in between rhapsodizing about typefaces or whatever.)

Anyway! I expect this novel to be optioned into a mildly successful film starring whoever the contemporary equivalent of Andie MacDowell is. But I really wish the Booker judges would stop falling for this stuff. ...more

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May 21, 2014 Deborah Meyler rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I've not finished this book yet, but I am tempted to a mid-read review, partly because I don't want it to end. It reminds me slightly of Ulysses except I am enjoying it; perhaps it reminds me of Dubliners. It also reminds me of John McGahern, but it might be that my sampling of Irish literature is too limited to come up with better comparisons. It's very funny, but the humour is soaked through and deepened with tragedy and lost opportunity and resignation, a mood here as perpetual as the rain th ...more

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About Niall Williams

Niall Williams

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Niall Williams studied English and French Literature at University College Dublin and graduated with a MA in Modern American Literature. He moved to New York in 1980 where he married Christine Breen. His first job in New York was opening boxes of books in Fox and Sutherland's Bookshop in Mount Kisco. He later worked as a copywriter for Avon Books in New York City before leaving America with Chris ...more

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“We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.” — 34 likes

“He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.” — 25 likes

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