Paul Murray, the Irish disenchantment portrait: “We are trapped in millionaire prisons and we don’t have the tools to go out” | Culture | EUROtoday

Paul Murray (Dublin, 50 years outdated), essentially the most twistedly sensible Irish author of the second, which is to say rather a lot considering the second of grace that crosses his nation’s literature, he loves bees. “It could be said that I am a fan of bees,” he says, smiling paradoxically. Because it’s not that he’s within the insect in query, however what he has in widespread with the drift of the modern human being. And what can a bee share with any of us? They will ask. Very easy, Murray replies: like us, the bees “technology is atrophying the brain. They had a fabulous memory, but the pesticides are erasing it. They are preventing them from returning to the hive and remembering the flowers that must polline,” he says.

It is a Friday in March within the afternoon. Murray is at house, in Dublin. When the video calls, he asks for forgiveness as a result of possibly, he says, he’s a bit thick. “It’s Friday afternoon,” he says beneath. The concept is to speak about The bee stingthe novel for which he was the finalist of the distinguished Booker in 2023, newly printed in Spanish by Anagrama. It is the story “of a family that has forgotten how to be a family”, slightly within the method of Jonathan Franzen however the European. “Bees are an evolution of wasps, which have always seemed to me a very sinister, disorganized insects, without a clear objective. The objective in bees is very clear. In addition, they have a communal way of life, individuals as such do not exist for them. That is why it is so horrible what is happening to them. That deletion of brain himself? ”, Asks the author. Meanwhile disconnected people, bees are misplaced. As is the one that’s entangled within the veil of the bride on the best way to the church within the novel, in addition to its 4 protagonists.

The protagonists are the members of the Barnes household. Dickie, the daddy, proprietor of a chapter concessionaire for his personal worry of the long run; Imelda, the mom, a frivolous and chilly compulsive purchaser obsessed together with her look and standing; Cass, the teenage daughter dominated by a poisonous friendship; and PJ, the just about teenage Benjamin who has stopped feeling understood by all those that are out of his cellphone. “What united them as a family no longer exists. They feel nothing for each other. And only PJ affects him, because he misses the time spent with his child’s sister. He is the only one who remembers that things were different at some time,” says Murray. “They are a clear example of what happened after 2008, when the economy sank, and the false idea of ​​society – and even family – that had been created during Celtic Tiger sank with it.”

The Celtic Tiger is how the bonanza interval that started in Ireland in 1995 is thought and led to 2008, abrupt and terribly, with the world disaster. It is a component that is sensible to the complete work of Murray, together with the important Skippy dies (Ed. Pale fireplace). That is, the impact that the years of the financial bum had in Irish society.

Murray grew up in a home filled with books. “My father was a theater teacher and not only bought books, but we were going to the library every week,” he says. From the start he thought of writing as “a natural extension of reading” and, nonetheless, he’s nonetheless shocking to dedicate himself to it. “I am lucky,” he admits. Reading Thomas Pynchon “the second year of university” modified him fully. “Growing in Ireland, the land of James Joyce, and being the son of a teacher can make you believe that literature is a system tool. But when I read The rainbow of gravity It seemed dangerous, punk, colorful, angry, completely antiestablishmentand my attitude regarding literature changed. It could also be all that! ”He remembers. And his is. In truth, maybe the e-book that appears most to Skippy dies sea The system broomby David Foster Wallace, as an artifact that battle in opposition to the absurd of the world.

Skippy is an effective boy. Take good grades. It all the time behaves nicely. And but, nothing goes nicely. Murray states that it’s as a result of Skippy is what occurred throughout The Celtic Tiger, that’s, the reverse of what occurs to the barnes of The bee sting. “When I was a child and teenager, Ireland was a place that you left, but then it began to grow in an unasumable way – until 229% – as in a fairy tale in which the poor boy becomes a millionaire. And it went from a miserable theocracy to globalized and rich country, a postmodernity that we could not understand. It was a great drunkenness. People bought cars and versaces, And it was said that it had to be rich without knowing how. At the same time we wanted to remain ourselves, but it was impossible. In 2008 it all exploded through the air and all those people, such as the Barnes, who had used money to flee from the past, returned to the past, ”explains the author.

Murray is satisfied that the system “always lies” and that it’s not true “that if you hold the norms” you’ll have “a good life.” “Skippy is the perfect example of this. We are trapped in millionaire prisons and we don’t have the tools to get out of them,” he says concerning the world in the midst of Trump period. “The tragedy of being an individual within the twenty first century is that you just suppose you may reside pretending that you do not want anybody, however it’s not true. Think of a visitors jam. It doesn’t work that there are eight billion individuals being people who aren’t heard. We are alone inside our cellphone. The extra time you spend with it, the extra you suppose to be connecting, however additional you’re to see the world wherein you reside. The actual world begins to be an anachronism The non -real, the digital one, the place all of your neurosis are reaffirmed. And so misplaced, he provides. Like bees.