Billy Roche, "Tales from Rainwater Pond"
A series of short stories set in Ireland - but with a vaguely American narrative style - linked by invisible threads that connect them to form a choral novel, the fresco of a small town, Wexford, among country inns, stations, hotels, petrol pumps, haberdashery shops, bars. The stories take place all around the Rainwater pond, a sort of lagoon close to the sea, invaded by semi-salty rainwater in a disused, dark and apparently bottomless quarry, a symbol of everything that cannot be seen but exists, hidden and as abysmal as certain torments without remedy. The lives of the inhabitants of Wexford unfold around this pool: workers, craftsmen, musicians, hurling players, people who work during the day and have a beer in the pub in the evening. Trivial people who, however, cultivate, hidden in their hearts, lifelong loves, eternal, stormy and romantic ones, overwhelming with immortal passions. The characters of these bitter and poignant stories are almost always women, seen through the deforming lens of those who have always been in love with them, but also tired, unmotivated men who seek the redemption of a life and sometimes find it in a small insignificant countercurrent gesture, as in the story The free day, which reminded me of Pirandello's “Wheelbarrow”. It seems that the inhabitants of Wexford spend their lives loving each other without reciprocation. These women, beautiful and apparently destined for something big, do not understand the happiness they give up by not reciprocating the obsessive love of sensitive and generous men, rather by trading it with the indifference of coarse, leathery, disillusioned, faithless husbands. And so they fade, without losing, in the eyes of those who have loved them all their lives, the beauty, the mysterious and unfathomable charm. Unhappy characters, who have left their dreams aside, who have become wives, mothers and then grandmothers, with a heart of pain and nostalgia to tear their hearts while in silence someone from a distance broodedover them, spied on them, with the desire to console them or to take revenge on them. Poignant and poetic tales, as beautiful as ancient ballads, built around unfinished loves, where there is always someone who comes from outside to take away who you have loved all your life to no avail. A breath of good literature, one-off.
