My 3 star review of
We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O'Toole :-
Spoiler:
I identified with the author immediately, even if I did not know substantially about him. This book, despite being a nonfiction one, has a beginning, a climax, and an end. O'Toole uses the English language with calm and restraint. He does not even think of showing off. His story seems to have existed and been compiled for years without any release of any kind. It is safe to say that O'Toole is not a prolific author. Should we apply the 'death of the author' philosophy to someone so alive?
The Ireland from the author's childhood made the poor pay dearly for their lack of money. The poverty of Ireland is vaster than its shores. It bears kinship with the poorest of India and some parts of Africa. But the slums of Ireland are residences proper. They cannot be called slums. There is a sluggishness about Crumlin, where the writer began living. Though there are few toilets in the developing towns at that time, there was too much concreteness about these poor houses to call them squalid. Urban Ireland was grey, depressing, claustrophobic, and too uniform to call them hellholes. All this back in the 60s.
The impression I got from reading the beginning of the book was that the latter could have been longer. O'Toole gives us a lot, yet the length of his historical, fireside-like chat could have revealed more. This is what I take away from the book. It does not censure itself. It simply makes us understand that it is revealing everything but not going through even a fifth of what was worthy of hearing.
Fintan O'Toole made us side with him easily, even if most of his personal focus was on his childhood. Here too, he does not tell everything worth telling. The swirling traumas of child molesting was all around him. The Catholics' world famous hypocrisy at work. John F. Kennedy visited the country and must have looked on the populace with fantastically concealed pity. The author did not meet the president. That would be too theatrical. But he gave us a glimpse into Ireland's position in the world through that visit.
There is a perversity about the desire to enjoy the plight of a terrorism infested place like Ireland. The IRA was an insane landmark in the pockmarked face of the country. Just as many people seem to follow the war on Ukraine and find excitement in it... so too did I find excitement in this book. On one hand I shouldn't really do so. I ought not to find joy in this violent narration. But if I hadn't enjoyed the book, I could not have finished it. It was a guilty pleasure. Here was I, safe in my humble abode, in a different island where there exists no army, let alone a draft. I could not live in a war torn country. It would have finished me off, regardless of any circumstances.
But I did draw pleasure of a more karmic kind that is the dominion of the endless fight between good and evil. Here at last we have a contextual bookkeeping of Haughey, the Taoiseach of Ireland. The rapacity of the latter person was a foil to the author's telling of the corruption and frozen ability to think of the population at large. We get to see the disadvantages of living in a country where religion is meant to be the natural way of organising society. All of this was very fascinating.
It began to dawn on me that the book has a happy ending, with a look to the future too. The fall of the political troupe and the defeat of the hold of Catholicity on the laws of the land was a rewarding aspect. This was one of the reasons why I think many people still now in the US can read the book with a touch of familiarity about them. If they had not been there they sure will be.
As the chronology of the book went on almost linearly, we see the icy façade of orthodoxy and the reality of the society undergo changes. Changes in office, and in law. I give this book 3 stars because simply I reserve 4 or 5 stars for outstanding reads. This book is very revelatory about my own self and the place I live in. For that alone I would reread the book. But I don't think I will. A reread will bring to fore the nasty bits that I have half forgotten in it. Since I cannot reread it, I cannot give it more than 3 stars. I recommend it though. And I wouldn't be surprised if many people like it more than I.