This Is Happiness
Niall Williams
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
This Is Happiness
Niall Williams
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Charming is one word for Williams’ prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers (which he might not care about), but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view.
This is a charming, often moving book, enriched by beautifully drawn characters and brilliantly depicted scenes from country life. The narrative unfurls at a languid pace: We drift from Easter services to games of Gaelic football, from pub sessions to house dances. And yet we happily surrender to the gentle rhythms of the drama and the lilting cadences of the prose. Again and again Williams ensures there is musicality in standard descriptions and poetry gilding commonplace truths.
Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland.
The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn’t stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined.
The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams’ writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing. Readers will never forget the scene in which Christy and Noe get drunk in a pub and try to ride home on their bikes, nor Noe’s first kiss in the balcony of a movie house, an experience he endures from the fast-living sister of the girl he has a crush on. The book is hilarious among its many other virtues.
not only an understated coming-of-age story and a reckoning with the failures of the past but an entire community, and a whole, now-vanished world. The book is characterized by genuine sentiment, sharp emotional acuity and a boisterous humour keeping it from slipping into arch sentimentality. Williams writes with a musical sensibility, playing individual words as notes in melodic sentences that dip and dance, that are almost impossible not to read aloud.
In the pre-modern idyll fashioned by Mr. Williams, beauty stands out a little more sharply, and feelings are experienced with more directness and intensity.
It takes time for Niall Williams to convince you that tourist fodder isn’t what he’s producing in This Is Happiness.
... Williams describes the rain with such rhythm and grace as to render the whole chapter a poem.
... Williams balances carefully between nostalgia and clear-eyed realism.
... [a] long, affectionate, meandering story.
... glorious and lyrical prose.