With "This is Happiness" , Niall, for me, is back to the great storytelling of "Four Letters of Love" and "As It Was in Heaven" Especially in a novel about an ordinary Irish village called Faha. But at just the right point in his life, when his spirit is raw for affection, this little village offers Noe the sanctuary he needs to emerge gently from the chrysalis of his own fear and timidity. ★ This Is Happiness Niall Williams Review by Arlene McKanic. Haunted by the slow death of his mother, Noe has recently withdrawn from seminary, "not exactly in disgrace," he says, but terrified he might never "discover what it meant to live a fully human life." Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. For all Noe’s wide-eyed goofiness, he’s a young man scarred early by grief, which may account for his precocious sympathy, his ability to resonate with the quiet sorrow in others. THIS IS HAPPINESS. This is a story about the beginnings of love and the persistence of affection, about the loss of faith and the recovering of belief.

To young Noe, Christy’s quest is irresistibly romantic, though he has only a theoretician’s understanding of what romance might actually mean, especially to a man and woman separated for half a century. Nominally, he’s come to Faha to work on the electrification of the village, but actually he’s returned to make amends to a woman he wronged 50 years ago. "This in miniature was the world," he writes, but that demands a kind of attention and patience that's increasingly scarce. By Niall Williams. This Is Happiness opens with such a line, reporting that it has stopped raining. Why, you wonder, does this declaration deserve its own page?

At that time, Faha was clamoring about its new electricity, and Noe befriended one of the workers, an elderly man named Christy who was lodging with Noe’s kindly grandparents.The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams’ writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. "In Faha, because the centre was distant and largely unknown, eccentric was the norm." I have bought all of Niall Williams books - but the last 2, John and History of the Rain were disappointing for me. "One of the privileges of living in a place forgotten is the preservation of individuality," Noe writes. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing. "Its destiny was to be a place passed over, and gently, wholly forgotten." “Of course, I do. “Do I exaggerate?” the narrator asks rhetorically. Back on top form . The sweetness of this novel would curdle if it weren’t preserved by a tincture of tragedy that runs through so many of these lives. The living and the dead have equal currency in the store of anecdotes, from Mrs. O'Donnell, "a spring chicken of ninety" always on the lookout for a husband, to the widow Gallagher, who died with a consecrated wafer stuck to the roof of her mouth. Escaping into the pages of Although it takes place in the late 1950s, the story feels bathed in sepia tones, and that’s not just the candlelight of Williams’ nostalgia. When the rain stops, it’s news.The narrator of the tale is Noel Crowe, called Noe.

An old man when we meet him, Noe is looking back on a stretch of surprisingly rainless days from when he was a teenager in the late 1950s or so. It tempts a young man with none of the adventure of Dublin nor the sophistication of London.

The last words Nora says to her father are “I hate you.” Moments later, she watches... Bloomsbury, 380 pp., $28 . Back on top form . Noe's narrative walks along a cow path of anecdotes about the fiercely private, yet comically nosy people in his grandparents' village. But that — and so much else — is about to change when 17-year-old Noe Crowe arrives from Dublin. The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Imagine a single sentence worthy of its own page. The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. If Faha isn't for everybody, then neither, frankly, is Williams' novel, delivered in the pensive voice of a man in his 70s recalling his youth.

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