This six-page story from Donal Ryan’s collection A Slanting of the Sun centres on the search for a lost wedding ring. ‘Losers Weepers’ is a monologue, like much of Ryan’s work, a tidal stream-of-consciousness, dipping into someone’s soul.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us how his neighbour lost her wedding ring while walking with her child. “Its worth seven grand. I know because she told me in a desperate whisper as I helped her search for it earlier.”
The search for the ring creates a common purpose for the local community. “We sifted through patches of gravel and pebbles with our fingers. We braced the sting of kerbside thistles. We were forensic about it.” Threaded through the story of the lost wedding ring are insights into the narrator’s life and family. The different strands whirl together, back and forth in time – it’s a rambling story, a kind of scavenger hunt.
What I love most about Ryan’s work is the sensibility of the prose, the way that it ebbs and flows, swelling up with secrets. Several years ago, I went to one of Ryan’s readings, where he discussed his first book, The Spinning Heart, a polyphonic novel made up of monologues. He described The Spinning Heart as “a book of silences”, the pages filled with things the characters couldn’t say. There’s something of this quality to ‘Losers Weepers’ – it’s unclear who the narrator is speaking to, if anyone. And yet there is an urgency to his monologue, a need to tell the truth, if only to himself.
Collected in A Slanting of the Sun, Transworld, 2015
A Personal Anthology 