The Top 5 of 2017: #2

Here’s a funny thing. My #2 pick, The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, is essentially the same book as my #3 pick, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron. Both are epic stories of oppression (fun!). Both cover roughly the 1940s through the present. Both are very, very long (bang for my bookish buck!). Both connect the stories of the characters to larger moments in social revolutions.  The moral of both novels is that people are truly terrible to one another and create legacies of injustice. Also, things might get better (maybe?). But while The Castle Cross… is an American epic, The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a novel of Irish repression and transformation.

The main character in The Heart’s Invisible Furies is Cyril Avery, a boy whose unwed, pregnant birth mother was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and sent packing from her hometown and family. Once adopted, Cyril finds himself isolated. Some of that isolation comes from the particularities of his weird, new family, but a large part of it comes from the fact that he is gay. The reader follows Cyril as he navigates his country’s restrictions and bigotry. Boyne says that his inspiration for the novel was Ireland’s passage of marriage equality. How did a country so steeped in discrimination evolve?

This was my favorite thing about Ireland. It might have a repressive past, but OMG Pringles vending machines!

This is a sad book. I was worried that I was stumbling into another A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – a book that was so devastating that I’m still crushed by it nearly two years later. But Boyne does something interesting with humor here, taking painful moments and infusing them with crackly and silly dialogue. The humor gives the reader a break from the hopelessness that can arrive when encountering the struggle for civil and human rights. It’s as if he is saying, “The pain is real, but this story is just fiction.”

I find it compelling that I made my way to these tragic books this past year, a year where we seemed to be reinforcing the darkest elements of history. One of the interesting things about making an end-of-year reading summary is looking at the themes that emerge. What do the books I read say about me? What am I looking for?

You can read an interview with Boyne here and here.