As much as I would love to appreciate Irish authors, I always end up not understanding the full picture, many references and perhaps sentiments lost to me as I was born and raised in Turkey. That Old Country Music broke that curse for me. Lyrical but witty, and with dark humour - four stars!

Some fantastic short stories from one of the masters of the form. Barry perfectly captures voice and atmosphere making each of this a story that you would be happy to read much more of.

When you ask someone to name a 21st Century Irish writer, people these days will invariably namecheck someone like Sally Rooney or Rob Doyle. Indeed, in Irish writing currently there seems to be a laconic almost horizontal approach to irony; one which recognises the ultimate absurdity of the world, yes, but one too which lacks wit or guile.
This is why Kevin Barry is still renowned as a national treasure in Ireland. For years now he has been writing exactly the sort of stories which the new wave can only dream of writing. Managing somehow to balance between compassion and absurdity, between humour and sincerity, with a dexterity and lightness of touch which always leaves the reader baffled as to how.
His catalogue is a marvel and this addition to it is no different. 'That Old Country Music' sees Barry, once again, at the peak of his powers and long may it continue.

The inimitable Kevin Barry returns with a veritable feast of short stories, of rural Ireland in the classic mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today. This is an eclectic short story collection featuring Barry’s trademark rich prose, perceptive skill and mordant characters who come alive on the pages. As always, his writing probes the dark sides of life — and this includes exploration of loneliness, loss, grief and quiet rumbling despair. A lot of his characters’ could be said to merely exist as opposed to living. The propensity for life to guide you in one miserable direction and then another. The tedium of quotidian life. A pregnant 17-year-old waits for her fiancé to return from robbing a petrol station; a loner falls for a Polish girl working in the local café; a policeman stalks his foe through the brooding Ox Mountains. At each turn, Barry makes his fiction a matter of life and death.

Never less than thought-provoking in nature and vast in scope, Barry delivers us some superb characterisation and plotting all tied together by the Emerald Isle in which they are set whilst gently but firmly reminding us of his exquisite storytelling gift in the process. Those who have loved and enjoyed his work to date will find much to adore amongst this collection of poignant gems. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humour and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today. Full of the damaged characters, menacing rural scenery and darkly comic, slantwise prose that have become his trademark, this is a melancholy masterpiece. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.

In “That Old Country Music”, Kevin Barry delivers a perfectly formed batch of new short stories to amuse and entertain and along with a cast of characters (some of whom you may feel you already know) to become new friends.

The gift that Kevin Barry has is undoubtedly in easily creating characters that are full of life, sometimes roguish, sometimes pitiful but always life-like. The opening story “The Coast of Leitrim” is a charming and tragic encounter between Seamus Ferris and Katherine Zielinski that takes an unexpected twist; I loved Con, the guy most people try to avoid as he only ever wants to discuss the most recent passing of another local in “Who’s Dead McCarthy”; I felt the discomfort and awkwardness of Alan the barman in “Toronto and the State of Grace”; and shared the devastation that Hannah felt in “That Old Country Music”. Every story centres on a vivid often helpless character. The mountains and the scenery play a significant role in each story too; the whitethorn blossom appearing in 6 of the stories (!!)

“There’s a sickness around the place,” says the hero of The Coast of Leitrim, and there’s no better doctor of letters than Kevin Barry to provide a dazzling diagnosis, brimming with thorny humor, insights and originality of expression.

In That Old Country Music, his third collection, he seems to venture far into a particular form of Irish soul but think again, The first story, The Coast of Leitrim, co-stars the Polish object of the affections of a Leitrim man and the final story, drawing on the coast of Galway, co-stars American poet Roethke with Inishbofin and a doctor in Ballinasloe.

For me, the masterpiece is the title story.

A great collection.

This collection of short stories is published in the UK in October 2020. I thought this was a brilliant read. I'm a bit of a tough sell on short stories, I don't always stick with them, so I think it's a testament to the writer that I found the stories here so engrossing. Characters are diverse, from a Roma child on the run to an American poet in a psychiatric hospital (a fictionalisation of Theodore Roethke's experience). ("When you say you're going into work, as a writer, what you mean is you're about to crawl into your fucking nerves.") A story about a musicologist translating a lost ballad about a doomed Irish couple working in Lancashire, who loved to sing, beautifully evokes the poetry of 'traditional' music ("The merest, glancing line gave somehow the sombre bricks and industrial smoke of England's Victorian north, and those brassy old pubs loomed above the verse, like lanterns in the dark of the long-lost singing nights.") Some were surprisingly romantic and sweet, others needled the idea of writing and writers. One I will be buying for myself when it comes out in paperback.

Kevin Barry's collection of short stories bear all the trademarks of his vital, vibrant, poetic and lyrical prose, his beautiful rich textured descriptions are to be savoured, then there is his compassion and humanity in the offbeat, occasionally cunning, criminal, feckless, sexually confident, fastidious, sensitive, addled and flawed characters he creates. There is dark humour to be found in these stories, with their focus on broken hearts, the sorrow, torments, cruelty and sadness of love, the well worn shapes of desire, erotica, lust, loss, heartbreak which can hold the seeds of madness and insanity. His depiction of the ancient Emerald Isle overflows with the psychic, a magic, a spiritualism, the tangible soul and atmosphere of the land, its bogs, its beauty, mountains, and hissing seas, emanating a timelessness, brimming with moodiness and feelings, brooding, singing its beguiling music for those that can hear.

The people, families and communities are deeply connected, an earthy connection that often lives beyond death such as can be found in Old Stock, the death of Uncle Aldo and an old inheritance. Love can be a tricky affair, as it is for 35 year old Seamus Ferry, bedevilled by the fear of committing his heart to his, the Polish Katherine Zielinski, driven by an inner compulsion to destroy all that he loves. Collecting old folk songs that have yet to be recorded leads to the discovery of a troubling song, of matters of the heart, all its destructive powers, the deranged souls, its ephemeral nature, incorporating erotic wickedness and greed. Con McCarthy is the connoisseur of death, an expert, elaborating on it in depth, with a particular relish of the slapstick death as he rearranges his face for each death that he relates. A grim but necessary and vital messenger of death for his city.

As always with short story collections, some are more substantial than others, but with Barry, every single one is a revelation, a tribute to the transformative and artful power of his storytelling, even within the short story format, in which he is entirely at home. My favourite stories were Ox Mountain Death Song, Toronto and the State of Grace, and Roethke in the Bughouse, which tells of the American poet Theodore Roethke, married to Beatrice, on the island of Inishbofin, having a breakdown, to be committed to a mainland psychiatric hospital. It's always a sheer joy to read virtually anything Barry writes, as indeed these short stories are, but I did on occasion hanker for greater length, and I was shocked at how quickly I reached the end of the book, it all seemed too brief an experience. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.

That Old Country Music is an eclectic collection of snapshots of everyday life set in the West of Ireland. Covering the whole spectrum of human emotion and experience from a desperate virgin to a Romany migrant, Barry brings you alongside his characters as they endure what life is offering them at key moments in their lives. Some of the stories are more engaging then others, but as a whole the book is a joy to read with an easy style of writing, that will last in the memory.

In the stories of That Old Country Music, there’s often an air of loneliness and dissatisfaction. For every character there’s a feeling of heartbreak coming or just gone, which is appropriate, as Barry manages to encompass entire life tales in the straightforward telling of a few events. No matter whether the tale stretches from train ride to full life (‘Roma Kid’) or takes place in a few short hours (‘This Old Country Music’, ‘Toronto and the State of Grace’) there is the feeling that one has gone on an immense journey from A to B, with C continuing well beyond the last word. And, crucially, enjoyed it. Barry keeps a light and humorous touch in the bleakest situations, with a kind pragmatism to the summing up of each character’s quirks. His descriptions of people, landscape, items, even, are succinct but cinematic – the hills fair roll out in front of your eyes.

Throughout there’s also the sense of inevitability. The characters in these stories make their choices - of course they do - but often with the sense that their fate has been decided no matter what they do: the world has a role that must be filled, by someone – whether that is the death-caller of ‘Who’s-Dead McCarthy’; the cottage Don Juans of ‘Old Stock’; the watcher of the Canavans in ‘Ox Mountain Death Song’; the fooled lovers of ‘St Catherine in the Fields’ and title story ‘That Old Country Music’ – and they must be the ones to fill it, even as much of the story forewarns them of the shoes they are stepping into. In the context of this reading, the narrator of ‘Extramedura’ seems to be what remains of one of these other characters, doomed to watch the tale they once were in play out again and again, fulfilling the promise of heartbreak coming and going with closing lines to so simple and sad that they’ll make you want to put the book down and sigh for a while.

All of this is the mark, as you’d expect from Barry, of a writer with absolute control over his stories. I wanted to wallow in the world he’s created here, one that’s old and new, peopled with the bleak and beautiful. What struck me most, though, is the kindness of the collection – the events that take place are not always kind, but there seems to me to be a sweetness and warmth of feeling throughout, a belief in the basic goodness of the world, even when it’s bad. Loved it.

Another wonderful short story collection from Kevin Barry! This time, the stories have slightly happier endings... very unlike his previous stories! But they are clever and witty as always and I love how he writes about sadness and melancholy, with dark humour and care. This is a wonderful collection and feels very short. An easy and enjoyable read.

This is a beautifully realised collection. The prose is so measured, so considered. The voices in Kevin Barry’s short stories are deftly linked by time and place. The stories are interwoven with tropes and a vernacular that pull them together with tenderness and a mordant wit. Barry has a light, elegiac idiom that rings true for anyone from this part of the world; Donegal, Sligo. He imbues the landscape with a mysticism that touches on a psychogeographical intensity. This felt like a homecoming.

Some heartfelt stories of longing and loneliness here, emotionally charged in that understated way we have come to expect from Irish writers these days and at which Kevin Barry is a master.

I particularly enjoyed the first one ‘The Coast of Leitrim’ where a young man falls in love but is afraid of committing his heart. ‘Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome.’ ‘To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it.’

My other favourite, which shares some of the same angst, is the title story ‘That Old Country Music’ in which a young girl is disappointed in her dreams of a different life, yet resigned to its inevitability. ‘The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that old burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the old tune’s circle and turn - it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.’

Looming over many of the lives here are the mountains of west Ireland, the wilderness just beyond, and Kevin Barry conjures this atmosphere so well.
‘The day was up and about itself.
The fields trembled.
Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.’

A collection of stories to be savoured, beautiful writing. Highly recommended.

‘Did you not hear who's dead?’ asks Con McCarthy of Limerick in the story, “Who's-dead McCarthy” in this sparkling new collection of Barry's stories.
Much of the psychogeography of rural Ireland is concentrated here as sad and serious themes rub along inside a comic, even jaunty, voicing.
Emotional territory is staked out in journeys, places, misunderstandings, love, death and song. The Ox and Bluestack mountain ranges, the Southern Polish city of Stalowa Wola and Moose Jaw, Canada all make cameo appearances, thickening the texture of what living in Ireland might mean.
My favourite story, ‘The Coast of Leitrim' contains the line, “in fact the shortest length of coast belonging to any county in Ireland'. Seamus then corrects himself: ‘I mean barring the landlocked counties'.
This whimsical pedantry tells us much about Seamus Ferris; his shy but passionate courtship of ‘Katherine' turns by the end of the story into a headlong gallop to Southern Poland.
A strong imaginative empathy pulses through this varied collection. The rural hinterland, immigrant and emigrant stories and a deeply sensitive ear for the cadences and lilt of Irish speech patterns are major elements of this writer's work.

This is another fine collection of stories from Kevin Barry whose prolificness doesn't seem to undermine the quality of his writing. The 11 stories cover love, death, vagrancy, relationship-breakdown and artistic breakdown, siding mainly with outsiders, and they share a sad comic intensity that might be regarded as typically Irish if that wasn't a cliche. The recurring phrase, "much of a muchness", sums up the stories in a positive way in that they are consistent depictions of a world like our own but more entertaining. The first two stories, "The Coast of Leitrim" and "Deer Season" I liked best but they are all worth reading and savouring.

In an interview with The TLS, Kevin Barry was asked, "Which author (living or dead) do you think is most overrated?" and his reply was "I shall courteously refrain from naming names but any of the acclaimed authors (and there are many) whose work is essentially humourless. High seriousness on the page is always the giveaway mark of mediocrity. The very best work is always funny."

This is interesting because this collection of 11 short stories contains a lot of sad people in sad situations. It is one of Barry’s gifts as a writer to write about sad situations in a way that makes you smile or even laugh out loud. There is humour in the darkness and a lot of it comes from the wonderful turn of phrase that Barry seems to be able to summon up whatever the circumstance he is writing about. Some of the smiles are smiles of recognition that he has captured something with his words.

The other remarkable thing Barry can do when writing is write a short story that feels complete but leaves you wishing it was longer. I have read all of Barry’s novels but this is my first experience with his shorter work. I have read other short story collections where the stories felt that they needed to be longer because they were incomplete or where the stories felt like they had actually run their course about halfway through. Telling a good short story is an art. And Kevin Barry is very good at it.

Take the opening story here where a young man meets a young girl but is totally unprepared for the way love will open him up.

"Tears welled up in his eyes and he had to make out it was the breeze off the river was the cause of them.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t realise I was so on my own,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to be brutally f**ken honest about things.’"
(asterisks mine to try to avoid offending anyone!).

And a few pages later, we read:

"He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome."

The course of true love ne’er runs straight, but you will have to read the story to find out whether there is a happy outcome and whether our protagonist can actually handle it.

I think my favourite story in the collection is “Extremadura (Until Night Falls)” in which a vagrant crouches by a dog at the edge of town in Spain and watches the people whilst remembering why he has left Ireland and found himself wandering in a foreign country. I actually read this one twice before moving on to the next.

This is only a short book (I am really not sure I believe the Goodreads information that has it at 240 pages, but my NetGalley ARC has no page numbers), but it is full of Barry’s trademark beautiful sentences and turns of phrase. It tells us darkly humorous and moving stories of people, as the blurb says "on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope". It is a pleasure to read.

4.5 stars and highly recommended.