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    Bullfighting
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    Bullfighting
    Unavailable
    Bullfighting
    Ebook208 pages3 hours

    Bullfighting

    By Roddy Doyle

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Bullfighting is Roddy Doyle's eagerly anticipated second collection; a series of bittersweet tales about men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today.

    The men in Bullfighting are each concerned with loss in different ways--of their place in their world, of power, virility, love--of the boom days in Ireland's recent history and the Celtic Tiger. "The stories, his memories, were wearing out," the narrator of the title story thinks, "and there was nothing new replacing them."

    The stories move from classrooms to crematoriums, local pubs to bullrings; featuring an array of men at their working day and at rest, taking stock and reliving past glories. In the first, "Recuperation," a man sets off for a prescribed walk around his neighbourhood, the sights triggering memories and recollections of his wife, his children, his younger days. In "Animals," George remembers caring for his children's many pets, his efforts to spare them grief when they die or disappear, looking, in the eyes of his wife, like a hero, like "your man from ER."

    But now his kids are reared and he's unemployed, and he's slowly getting used to that. "Suffer. Your man Krugman said, when he asked how Ireland should deal with the next ten years. Well, this is George, suffering." Brilliantly observed, funny and moving, the stories in Bullfighting present a new vision of contemporary Ireland, of its woes and triumphs, and of the Irish middle-aged male confronting its new realities. It is a masterful new collection from one of the country's greatest writers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 5, 2011
    ISBN9780307401151
    Unavailable
    Bullfighting
    Author

    Roddy Doyle

    Roddy Doyle is a bestselling author acclaimed across the world. He was born in Dublin in 1958 and still lives there today. He has won many awards for his writing, including the Booker Prize and a BAFTA for Best Screenplay. He has also won the Irish Children's Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal. His novel The Commitments was turned into a blockbuster film directed by Alan Parker and opened as a musical to rave reviews. Rover and the Big Fat Baby is his eighth novel for children and the fourth book in the series which began with The Giggler Treatment.

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    Reviews for Bullfighting

    3.5/5

    49 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Love the Roddy! This is where he is best - short and (seemingly) simple stories about your average Irish Joe. Some of them made me squirm, others laugh out loud, but they all made me think. My favorites were Bullfighting (but haven't i read that one before?), The Dog, and Funerals. But I liked all the descriptions of the men in pubs...can't help picturing The Constitution in Westminster. (my local!)
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, universally relevant set of stories about getting older. Reflects and ruminates upon relationships, marriage, parenthood, and aging. These stories, all told from the point of view of middle aged (and older) men, are all coming to grips with the passage of time in ones life. Whether its the realities of long-term relationships, the first friends dying off, or discovering Do yourself a favor if you're not Irish--listen to the audio. Read by Lorcan Cranitch, it really brings the whole thing alive and only enhanced my enjoyment of the work of one of my all-time favorite Irish authors.
    • 3/5
      Doyle has written a funny and moving collection of contemporary short stories about the pleasures and woes of middle aged men.
    • 3/5
      Uneven. Consistent and interesting focus on struggles with old age. Lost interest of some of the stories.
    • 3/5
      I listened to this as read by Lorcan Cranitch and there's a man who could read the phone book and still have me entranced. I'm not sure I can speak quite so highly of the collection of stories, it felt somewhat uneven. At one point I almost stopped, listening to middle aged, middle class men moaning is not by favourite occupation. And the story about blood was vile and really disgusting. Turned my stomach. Those gripes apart, this does have something to say about the facade behind which the middle aged, middle class man hides. IN each story the man concerned is losing something or has realised that he has lost something and can't see how, when or where it slipped away. The man who takes his elderly parents to a funeral and leaves them at the chip shop was poignant, aware of the potential loss of them or their faculties at any time and fearing they are already leaving. There's the man remembering the children's pets while dealing with being unemployed and yet not wanting to appear needy (the trick with the zebra finch called Pete was epic). There are several marriages on the rocks, men dealing with an empty or nearly empty nest and facing a different future that the past they had been used to living in. I'm not sure that the highs in here make this worth the entire collection, the dodgy ones weigh it down just a bit too much. I also felt that the voice was very similar and became somewhat repetitive.
    • 4/5
      Not a lot happens in the stories in Bullfighting, but there’s a lot going on. The characters are all fighting. Fighting health, fighting age, regret, loneliness, deteriorating marriages. Parents are losing children to adulthood and their own parents to childhood. They fight back with love. Love of life, children and family; and plain inner strength.A man trying to regain his health walks an unwavering daily route through his neighborhood. Memories are triggered by the sites he passes. Memories of better days in his now loveless marriage. A man copes with a friend’s death while he deals with his own health problems. Another feels so distant from his wife of 26 years that he agonizes over whether to tell her a joke and if she’ll see it as a sign of his desperation to reconnect. A man develops a taste for blood in his middle age; another for funerals.In Bullfighting, Roddy Doyle portrays family as a weakness, and also a source of great strength and resolve to live.