Hopdance

In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deanes Reading in the Dark, Parkers poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonists life before, during and after this ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to the heaviness at the novels heart, as its characters strive to rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parkers alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin cankers of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones. This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous lost treasure of literature now presented to its reading public. See more