“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“‘I have always wanted to know something about you poets […] What do you do all day??“
Belfast and the 1990s. Two friends and a lot of bombs. Sarcasm and sweetness; so much anger; so much love. And a cat. We’re rereading this book after ten years: we didn’t remember it being so long, so full, and we did remember—yes, that—laughing a lot. What makes this novel so great? Because there’s grandeur in the story of these small Irish lives immersed in the infamous Troubles, a full-fledged civil war that only they could ironically call “the riots.”
Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, Northern Ireland exploded in political and ideological conflicts pitting the pro-independence Catholic republicans against the loyalist Protestants of Ulster; Belfast was massacred. Belfast is the main character, undoubtedly Wilson’s most beloved, clothed by the rain, the nights, moody, beautiful; she embraces her executioners, smiles at the weak and the reckless. The other characters are all, without exception, anti-heroes, ordinary people who experience guerrilla warfare in a tangential, stubbornly indifferent way, avoiding it in conversation and listening, dissociating themselves from it as long as they’re allowed to. And when that’s no longer possible, they effortlessly highlight the senselessness of certain clashes, downplay them, and confront them with the flow of everyday life, made up of subterfuge, boredom, and salvations large and small.
Above all, the friendship between two particularly funny guys: Chukie, a fat Protestant and insanely lucky (if we call luck the way he manages to fool a system designed to be fooled) and Jake, a handsome, somewhat inconclusive, almost always inappropriate Catholic who wanders through the pages constantly falling in love and conversing with a rather mischievous cat. The intertwined threads of their lives, their families, their friends, and their loves create a dense plot in which, at a certain, powerful point, war erupts violently despite their stubborn indifference.
It’s one of those novels you don’t want to leave, where the intertwining of the ordinary and the extraordinary makes us feel at ease and at the same time surprises us, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with a lump in the throat. History and stories go hand in hand through a city you’ll learn to love, even when certain things go a little as you’d expected (let’s not forget that sometimes realism requires a dose of banality, the same banality that life stubbornly serves us). And so, even the ending isn’t as grand as we’d perhaps hoped, but you’ll still be sad to leave these pages, which will seem to continue even without you.
Written by Delis
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Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street, Fazi, Roma, 2001
Original edition: Eureka Street, Harvill Secker, London, 1996