∎ [PDF] Free Nights Beneath the Nation Denis Kehoe 9781846686689 Books

Nights Beneath the Nation Denis Kehoe 9781846686689 Books

Download As PDF : Nights Beneath the Nation Denis Kehoe 9781846686689 Books

Nights Beneath the Nation Denis Kehoe 9781846686689 Books

I've never been to Ireland, let alone Dublin in the early 1950's, and this book took me there. The first-person voice is so perfectly calibrated that Daniel is pretty much a living, breathing person. And I'm glad it's told in the first person, with a character looking back at his youth. It just wouldn't have worked otherwise. Seen objectively the follies of youth are just too embarrassing. Sometimes I go back and read my diaries from my early 20's and just have to shake my head over things. This is a novel that beautifully captures the fleeting moment when (as Daniel says) you truly are experiencing new things for the very first time.


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Nights Beneath the Nation Denis Kehoe 9781846686689 Books Reviews

Decades ago in the early 1950s Daniel Ryan was a teen from a poor family when he moved to Dublin. However, he was taken aback when he realized he preferred sleeping with men. He hd grown grown up in a small town that proclaimed homosexuality is an asylum disease for the mentally insane perverts or a devil's sin. He fell in love, but his relationship ended poorly and he fled Ireland for New York.

In 1998, wealthy septuagenarian Daniel returns to Dublin for the first time since he fled in shame in 1951. Nothing seems the same to him and he feels no one his age has anything in common with the cosmoplitan man he has become after five decades in Manhattan. In his birth land, Daniel feels like a stranger in a strange land.

This is a complex, perhaps too complicated comparative look at a man in two stages of his life; as the story line rotates between young Daniel learning with energy and elan his sexual proclivity vs. the eldery acrimonious Daniel having lived a life alone in exile. Nights Beneath the Nation is a fascinating protrait of a young and old gay male struggling to accept his sexual preference.

Harriet Klausner
I've never been to Ireland, let alone Dublin in the early 1950's, and this book took me there. The first-person voice is so perfectly calibrated that Daniel is pretty much a living, breathing person. And I'm glad it's told in the first person, with a character looking back at his youth. It just wouldn't have worked otherwise. Seen objectively the follies of youth are just too embarrassing. Sometimes I go back and read my diaries from my early 20's and just have to shake my head over things. This is a novel that beautifully captures the fleeting moment when (as Daniel says) you truly are experiencing new things for the very first time.