Destiny of Dreams by Michael Bowler (RB475)

Published 1990: First Edition / Softcover / Very Good Condition

Pictorial stiff card covers. 181 clean and bright pages, mild speckled foxing on the endpapers and edges. Slight shelf wear on covers and slightly rubbed with time. Scarce! (RB475)

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The richness of daily life in rural County Kerry in the 1950s is evoked in exquisite detail. Bowler captures well the acute sensitivities of his narrator, an adolescent whose failed attempt, at age ten, to run away with tinkers in a horse-drawn caravan does little to staunch his melancholy and his sense of longing for life beyond the emigration-bled village of Cahirciveen. Mr. Bowler is a dab hand when it comes to the turn of a phrase, rendering with precision what has been said, just so, while at the same time evoking all that goes without saying."" - NY Times. ""With a lyrical voice recreates adult memories of a magical childhood."" - Publishers Weekly.

From Publishers Weekly
This fine debut novel details boyhood and coming-of-agestet hyphens per webster/rl in County Kerry, Ireland. With a lyrical voice, the narrator at first recreates adult memories of a magical childhood--such scenes as a Christmas dinner convey an almost physical sense of pleasure in being with family. As Michael matures, however, he is beset by religious doubts, awakening sexuality and the raging loneliness of adolescence. Bowler, while clearly out to settle a few old scores dating back to his own childhood, has crafted this novel with restraint. His indictments of the Catholic educational establishment, for example, are handed down in a few swift, telling incidents of brutality and institutionalized pedophilia, which are all the more resonant for their lack of embellishment. The book ends as the narrator seeks in his first sexual experience expiation for his role in a childhood incident that led to a friend's death. In a searing denunciation of his Catholic upbringing, Michael's attempt at self-redemption fails as his sexual initiation--with the sister of his late friend--takes on the moral equivalence of murder.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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