This book doesn’t live up to its title, but what a title that is. In the title story of this collection, the narrator, himself a writer, steals it from Yakup, a waiter in a Turkish bar who passes quiet spells by scrawling into his notebook. ‘I look… I listen, I make notes,’ Yakup says simply, and that epitomises the attitude of O Ceallaigh.
His short stories give us windows into lives, as if a camera has been turned on at an arbitrary moment and we observe what is done, and what is said; and then just as randomly the camera is turned off. All the stories end abruptly. In ‘A Performance’, a man on stage ips out his own beating heart; the four pages that contain this tale are gruesome, and there is a suggestion that the audience find the brutal act cathartic, but that is all.
The first story, ‘In the Neighbourhood’ is structurally ambitious. Set in a poor apartment block, it tells the lives of the unconnected occupants from different perspectives. Occasionally one character may see another through the window or have a chance encounter in a lift,but the event that really draws them together is a plumbing leak. Like much else in this collection, it works – just – but it reads like a raw idea rather than a finished product.
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