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Solar Bones
by
the Angelus bell
ringing out over its villages and townlands,
over the fields and hills and bogs in between,
six chimes of three across a minute and a half,
a summons struck
on the lip of the void
Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one ...more
ringing out over its villages and townlands,
over the fields and hills and bogs in between,
six chimes of three across a minute and a half,
a summons struck
on the lip of the void
Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one ...more
Paperback, 223 pages
Published
May 5th 2016
by Tramp Press
(first published May 2016)
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Start your review of Solar Bones

this
this book
this book just
won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, given for innovation in the novel form, which is what impelled me to read it in the first place, and I sort of wish I had finished it prior to its winning, because now it will look like I am just being contrary that I really didn't like it since a lot of people did, although the main reason apparently that it won is that it is purportedly one long 223 page sentence, but
the only reason that is so is because the bloody author d ...more
this book
this book just
won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, given for innovation in the novel form, which is what impelled me to read it in the first place, and I sort of wish I had finished it prior to its winning, because now it will look like I am just being contrary that I really didn't like it since a lot of people did, although the main reason apparently that it won is that it is purportedly one long 223 page sentence, but
the only reason that is so is because the bloody author d ...more

Click here to watch a video review of this book on my channel, From Beginning to Bookend.
...more


Sep 13, 2018
Paula
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Lovers of beautiful prose and experimental form
Recommended to Paula by:
Booker, Goldsmiths
Winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award, winner of the 2016 Goldsmith Prize, and the 2017 Booker nominee, Solar Bones is a stunning and beautifully written novel.
Set in a small Irish town, Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table on All Souls’ Day and reminisces about his life. Thru a stream of consciousness, he reflects on every day life ranging from his work as a civil engineer to politics and the economics of earlier and present times. He is a ordinary and moral man with a lovin ...more
Set in a small Irish town, Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table on All Souls’ Day and reminisces about his life. Thru a stream of consciousness, he reflects on every day life ranging from his work as a civil engineer to politics and the economics of earlier and present times. He is a ordinary and moral man with a lovin ...more

After you get used to the writing style of this novel—it's technically all one sentence, no full stops—it's quite a beautiful read. It's told from the perspective of one man on a single afternoon as he reflects on his life, his marriage & children, his work, politics, and a lot of other big topics. But it's a very human novel. I admired it's ability to take philosophical views and ground them in one person's experience; it became very relatable and moving. I think this novel deserves a re-read b
...more

Wonderfully and intricately structured in a way that demanded my full attention this is a portrait of a man's life told in a single contemplative hour. Mike McCormack tells his story in a single sentence without proper punctuations and in places bending the rules of grammar to the limit - and it works absolutely beautifully. This lends the prose an immediacy and a poignancy that mesmerized me. This quiet novel tells of a quiet man - an engineer thinking about his life and the things important to
...more

I had already bought a copy of this book before the Booker longlist was announced, because it won the Goldsmiths Prize and was well received by reviewers whose opinions I trust.
The whole book is a single sentence monologue, which tells quite a conventional story of a mid-life crisis but is rather more interesting than that would suggest, since the topics it covers are wide-ranging and universal. The narrator is a middle-aged engineer, who works for a local council in Mayo. I was aware that ther ...more
The whole book is a single sentence monologue, which tells quite a conventional story of a mid-life crisis but is rather more interesting than that would suggest, since the topics it covers are wide-ranging and universal. The narrator is a middle-aged engineer, who works for a local council in Mayo. I was aware that ther ...more

Nov 07, 2017
Jaidee
rated it
liked it
Recommends it for:
insightful middle aged blokes
Recommended to Jaidee by:
Lee
Shelves:
three-stars-books
3 "much to admire but only kinda liked" stars !!
First of all a big thanks to Lee M. who recommended this book to me. I know he carefully considers which books to recommend to me and I am glad he did this one (remember three stars is a good book to me !)
This book has won and been nominated for a number of awards and I can understand why. The book is written in an open stream of consciousness way with no periods but lots of commas. It carefully delves into the inner life of a middle class middle a ...more
First of all a big thanks to Lee M. who recommended this book to me. I know he carefully considers which books to recommend to me and I am glad he did this one (remember three stars is a good book to me !)
This book has won and been nominated for a number of awards and I can understand why. The book is written in an open stream of consciousness way with no periods but lots of commas. It carefully delves into the inner life of a middle class middle a ...more

Aug 14, 2018
Dianne
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
booker-2017,
best-of-2018
Exceptional, stellar writing in this little gem, but the structure makes it a bit of a chore to read.
Marcus Conway reflects on his life in the kitchen of his house in Mayo, Ireland on All Soul’s Day. His reflections are represented in a stream of consciousness, which is basically one long, lovely, and remarkable sentence. Just as we do in our own reminiscing, one thing leads to another and Marcus’ memories progress in leaps and bounds across time and space, covering his entire life and all of h ...more
Marcus Conway reflects on his life in the kitchen of his house in Mayo, Ireland on All Soul’s Day. His reflections are represented in a stream of consciousness, which is basically one long, lovely, and remarkable sentence. Just as we do in our own reminiscing, one thing leads to another and Marcus’ memories progress in leaps and bounds across time and space, covering his entire life and all of h ...more

July 2017
What a difference a year makes!!!! Since this was picked up by a UK based publishing company it became eligible for the Man Booker Prize and subsequently has made the long list for 2017. THIS IS A FANTASTIC BOOK!!!! It is a book that stays with you and haunts your soul. I'm firmly rooting for it to win.
----
24th November, 2016
Do you ever feel like a complete idiot and just want to rewrite an entire review??? That's how I'm feeling about this particular review! I got things so wrong. I w ...more
What a difference a year makes!!!! Since this was picked up by a UK based publishing company it became eligible for the Man Booker Prize and subsequently has made the long list for 2017. THIS IS A FANTASTIC BOOK!!!! It is a book that stays with you and haunts your soul. I'm firmly rooting for it to win.
----
24th November, 2016
Do you ever feel like a complete idiot and just want to rewrite an entire review??? That's how I'm feeling about this particular review! I got things so wrong. I w ...more

How appropriate that the narrator of Solar Bones is an engineer. This novel is quite the feat of engineering itself, written in a stream of consciousness with no full-stops and only the odd comma to punctuate the flow of thoughts. This might sound like a showy literary gimmick but it works brilliantly and I can see why the book has been nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize, an award which seeks to promote fiction that breaks the mould.
Set in a small Irish town on All Souls Day, Marcus Conway sits ...more
Set in a small Irish town on All Souls Day, Marcus Conway sits ...more

I wanted to read this book when I read its description; I don't think I would have pushed through to the end if it hadn't been on the Man Booker Prize Long List.
To me, it suffers from what many experimental novels do - too much experiment with no clear purpose. I have read many stream of consciousness works. Most memorable to me (and the least known) is the first chapter of Narcopolis, something I probably could have read for the entire work but the author decided to step back from it and just w ...more
To me, it suffers from what many experimental novels do - too much experiment with no clear purpose. I have read many stream of consciousness works. Most memorable to me (and the least known) is the first chapter of Narcopolis, something I probably could have read for the entire work but the author decided to step back from it and just w ...more

This is the first time since reading David Foster Wallace that I have found any work of fiction to compare for a mind-blowing literary experience of the first order.
After the first few pages you will forget there are no full stops - although there are natural pauses ... and it all works beautifully.
There is so much good stuff pouring out of Ireland lately, but this surely must become a modern classic to rival Joyce etc.
Here is my (edited for spoilers) review for www.whichbook.net :-
Set in post ...more
After the first few pages you will forget there are no full stops - although there are natural pauses ... and it all works beautifully.
There is so much good stuff pouring out of Ireland lately, but this surely must become a modern classic to rival Joyce etc.
Here is my (edited for spoilers) review for www.whichbook.net :-
Set in post ...more

Stream of…
First off, DON'T READ THE BLURB on the back cover of this book, or the description above! In its third line, it gives away something that Mike McCormack takes 200 pages to reveal, something that I see as the main point of the entire novel.** Instead, open at the first page and let McCormack's poetic language work on you:
the bell...more
the bell as
hearing the bell as
hearing the bell as standing here
the bell being heard standing here
hearing it ring out through the gre

Now Winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
It is amazing how this text turns the life of an everyman - "husband, father, citizen" - into poetry! McCormack portrays what is mostly considered too common to make it the heart of a story, and in a way, he celebrates the life of those who make up and sustain our societies: Average people.
There are already many interesting and eloquent reviews of this book, so I'd like to restrict myself to challenging one notion that has been frequentl ...more
It is amazing how this text turns the life of an everyman - "husband, father, citizen" - into poetry! McCormack portrays what is mostly considered too common to make it the heart of a story, and in a way, he celebrates the life of those who make up and sustain our societies: Average people.
There are already many interesting and eloquent reviews of this book, so I'd like to restrict myself to challenging one notion that has been frequentl ...more

This book certainly takes stream-of-consciousness to a whole new level, with not a full stop in sight! I was initially a bit wary, thinking I would find the lack of punctuation and meandering style irritating but I didn't at all and, in fact, I found it rather lovely to read. The family felt so real by the end of the book and it definitely stirred my heartstrings. I hope this makes the Man Booker shortlist, and I would be happy to see it win.
...more

" this is how you get carried away
sitting here in this kitchen
carried away on an old theme, swept up on a rush of words and associations strewn out across the length and breadth of this country, a hail of images surging through me while at the bottom of the page another story of how"
Now Winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize
Shortlisted for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Ineligible for the 2016 Booker Prize (https://www.theguardian. ...more

Now deservedly the winner of the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.
I first read this book when it was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmith Prize, an award it deservedly went on to win. My original review is at the end of this review.
At the time there were two side issues that caused some debate
A) Had it been overlooked for the Booker or was it in fact not eligible
B) Why was a major plot revelation included on the back cover blurb (see below) and not either included in the book or omitted e ...more
I first read this book when it was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmith Prize, an award it deservedly went on to win. My original review is at the end of this review.
At the time there were two side issues that caused some debate
A) Had it been overlooked for the Booker or was it in fact not eligible
B) Why was a major plot revelation included on the back cover blurb (see below) and not either included in the book or omitted e ...more

Man Booker Longlist 2017. Brilliant! It is November 2nd, All Souls’ Day when Catholics pray for the souls in purgatory and the dead return to walk the earth. The Angelus Bells ring out and we meet the narrator Marcus Conway sitting in the kitchen of the home he lived in for most of his life. He was a civil engineer in rural Ireland—in Louisburgh, near Westport, in the County Mayo—married to the schoolteacher Mairead and father of two grown children that confuse him. Agnes is a performance artist
...more

I found this to be a beautiful, rich, and rewarding book. On the surface, SOLAR BONES presents a middle-aged man's reflections on his work and family life. The meditation unfolds one early afternoon in November—the month of All Souls, when ghosts restlessly flit about—while the man is alone in the house he's lived in since he married 25 years ago.
Marcus Conway is an engineer with a metaphysical bent. In due time, the reader learns that his original intentions had been toward the priesthood. Hav ...more
Marcus Conway is an engineer with a metaphysical bent. In due time, the reader learns that his original intentions had been toward the priesthood. Hav ...more

Chaos and order at a kitchen table in Western Ireland
Of course, the Irish writer Mike McCormack (° 1965) is not the first one to write an extremely long internal monologue. His illustrious fellow countryman James Joyce and also Virginia Woolf are two well-known predecessors. But McCormack nevertheless managed to give his own twist to the process: we are constantly in the head of Marcus Conway, who - at his kitchen table at home - over 260 pages looks back on recent and less recent phases of his ...more
Of course, the Irish writer Mike McCormack (° 1965) is not the first one to write an extremely long internal monologue. His illustrious fellow countryman James Joyce and also Virginia Woolf are two well-known predecessors. But McCormack nevertheless managed to give his own twist to the process: we are constantly in the head of Marcus Conway, who - at his kitchen table at home - over 260 pages looks back on recent and less recent phases of his ...more

Nov 13, 2017
Producervan in Cornville, AZ from New Orleans & L.A.
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
favorites-of-van-s
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. Kindle Edition. Tramp Press. ©2016.
Tramp Press is a publishing company founded in Dublin in 2014 and is an independent publisher that specializes in Irish fiction.
Magnificent. This is by far the best work of adult fiction I've read this year, in fact in several. (And I have read some great ones!) A rare insightful look inside the mind of a family man from County Mayo. A stream-of-consciousness novel like James Joyce; poetic, spare, passionate. Surprising. A brilli ...more
Tramp Press is a publishing company founded in Dublin in 2014 and is an independent publisher that specializes in Irish fiction.
Magnificent. This is by far the best work of adult fiction I've read this year, in fact in several. (And I have read some great ones!) A rare insightful look inside the mind of a family man from County Mayo. A stream-of-consciousness novel like James Joyce; poetic, spare, passionate. Surprising. A brilli ...more

Now the winner of the 2018 Dublin Literary Awards
Solar Bones is notorious for two things. One is that the book is comprised of one 223 page long sentence and that there's the famous 'spoiler' if you have the Tramp Press edition (which I have, the Canongate edition omits the spoiler). Oh and it won the Goldsmiths prize First of all don't let the one sentence thing bug you. McCormack still uses paragraphs, however they are connected with words such as then, but, when etc so it's readable. Secondly ...more
Solar Bones is notorious for two things. One is that the book is comprised of one 223 page long sentence and that there's the famous 'spoiler' if you have the Tramp Press edition (which I have, the Canongate edition omits the spoiler). Oh and it won the Goldsmiths prize First of all don't let the one sentence thing bug you. McCormack still uses paragraphs, however they are connected with words such as then, but, when etc so it's readable. Secondly ...more

It's easy to scoff at literary fiction which experiments with form given our existing canon of literature which is already packed full of wildly eccentric novels. Everyone from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett to Gertrude Stein to William S Burroughs to Eimear McBride has twisted not only conventional grammar but the shape of the story on the page to say something new about the experience of life and art. So a novel that is one long continuous sentence which lasts more than two hundred pages may
...more

This is a beautiful book. You may have learned by now that this is a novel without periods. Others might have told you not to be deterred, that this does not detract from the story nor its readability. They are right. The format does not detract but conjures up the perfect atmosphere for what it contains. Solar Bones does not read so much like a relentless single sentence as it does a river-like flow broken up, via unpunctuated paragraphs, by plentiful pleasant whirlpools and eddies.
The river r ...more
The river r ...more

I'm giving this 2 stars because I've read worse. And, also, if I allowed myself to fully comprehend how much time and energy I just wasted on getting through this book, I would have to commit seppuku. Today I choose to live!
Strike One: A major plot element is portrayed erroneously.
Crytposporidium is neither coliform (a bacteria) nor a virus. It is an enteric pathogen of the parasitic class. (And, no, "viral parasite" isn't acceptable either.). McCormack's insistence on classifying "crypto" as a ...more
Strike One: A major plot element is portrayed erroneously.
Crytposporidium is neither coliform (a bacteria) nor a virus. It is an enteric pathogen of the parasitic class. (And, no, "viral parasite" isn't acceptable either.). McCormack's insistence on classifying "crypto" as a ...more

I bought this book last summer on a book buying spree in Belfast - 3 bookstores and Tesco's in one morning! I didn't get to it right away, and when it was the April read for my book club, wasn't able to attend the meeting nor finish the book. However, I was pulled in immediately by the story, and strong sense of place in the novel, which is set in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland. The title shows up early in this phrase: “rites, rhythms and rituals / upholding the world like solar bones”.
This ...more
This ...more

FURTHER UPDATE: On reflection, I think I have made a complete fool of myself with comments about the blurb. I now think that the blurb on the back is quite possibly the cleverest thing about it. The author has set the scene and the atmosphere for his book without using any of his novel to do it! He wants you to know what is explained on the back, so you do need to read it.
UPDATE: Since writing this, I have discovered that you should ignore my warnings about the blurb. The author wants you to rea ...more
UPDATE: Since writing this, I have discovered that you should ignore my warnings about the blurb. The author wants you to rea ...more

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Solar Bones follows the inner most thoughts of Marcus Conway, as he reflects on his loves and life based on his analytical mind, in a single hour. The story is told in a wonderfully unique way, without any limitations on punctuation. It flows almost like a stream of consciousness. It felt at once very intimate, and I felt an immediate pull to Marcus, the main character. However, I just couldn't really get to grips with the way this ...more
Solar Bones follows the inner most thoughts of Marcus Conway, as he reflects on his loves and life based on his analytical mind, in a single hour. The story is told in a wonderfully unique way, without any limitations on punctuation. It flows almost like a stream of consciousness. It felt at once very intimate, and I felt an immediate pull to Marcus, the main character. However, I just couldn't really get to grips with the way this ...more

This is a beautiful, immersive book. The stream of consciousness approach doesn't feel as realistic as Ducks, Newburyport, but that lets McCormack write some stunningly lyrical passages. The main character's memories unspool as an hour or so passes - each set piece is sparkling with insight and wit and the pieces gradually join together to build up a moving picture of a life well lived in rural Ireland. It's lovely stuff - I'm just going to have to read every Goldsmith's Prize winner of all time
...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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Schlafly Global B...: having trouble with this book. | 21 | 19 | Feb 27, 2020 06:27PM | |
Solar & Human | 1 | 3 | Apr 27, 2019 07:00PM | |
Play Book Tag: Solar Bones - Mike McCormack - 5 stars | 5 | 22 | Feb 01, 2018 01:24PM | |
Play Book Tag: Solar Bones - Mike McCormack 5/5 | 3 | 22 | Oct 06, 2017 10:28AM | |
The Mookse and th...: 2016 Goldsmiths Shortlist: Solar Bones, by Mick McCormack | 28 | 71 | Nov 17, 2016 12:49AM |
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“her voice suddenly gone as if it had snagged on the mist and was carried off into the failing light, leaving the phone dead in my hand, a warm sliver with the screen fading like some luminous shard from outer space which had traveled across stellar distances at great speed to arrive here in my hand where its glow was now losing its heat, gone”
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“something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass”
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