Tag: Donal Ryan

‘Losers Weepers’ by Donal Ryan

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

‘Sky’ by Donal Ryan

William has lived in the same house all his life, which he sees as normal and others see as suspicious: “Did you never want to have a look at the world? No, faith, I did not,” he says. “This road is as good as any, or as bad.”

(I think I might have picked this story for that punctuating “faith” alone, for the rural life it conjures.) 

William tries to reach out, phoning a helpline, taking computer lessons, but his efforts fail at the last – while he can look with wonder at the vastness of the world, he cannot engage in cutting it down to fit himself. For William, the world is real and tangible – the road, the crows, the sky. Everything else is, he says, “a world of knowledge and nonsense”. The beauty of the story is that William might be absolutely right or he might just be bound by fear. His invisibility is at its most heartbreaking when his sister moves away, taking his beloved nephew Billy with her. “I’m only a ghost to him now, and he to me,” William says. 

Ryan is at his best among the broken and the wistful, and here he writes with just enough sentimentality to tighten the cord between your brain and your heart, but without leaving you feeling cheap afterwards.

First published in A Slanting of the Sun, Doubleday Ireland, 2015. Also published in Irish American and available to read online here