Aiden O Reilly
  • Notes on Books
  • News
    • News
    • For the record
      • Kudos to The Missouri Review
  • Debut Book
    • Events, readings, etc.
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Awards
    • About me

Website of Aiden O'Reilly

RSS FeedTwitterFacebook

Soul

Andrey Platonov

A young engineering student in Moscow in the 1930’s is given the mission of helping to modernise the impoverished Dzhan people of a remote desert area. He is of those people himself, but his mother had sent him away when he was only ten or eleven, knowing she could never provide for him.

The desert area is a Nowhere-Land close to the borders with Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. The people there are a motley assemblage of “runaway slaves, criminals, people who didn’t know God”, — with no proud traditions, no sense of history, no awareness of itself as a people. They live in reed houses and live off the pounded roots of the same reeds. They have lost all sense of being alive.

It’s a powerful story – part fable, part realism, part epic tale, part nihilism. I have just too many thoughts to write down anything here.

I am reminded of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who couldn’t bear to think that so many human lives pass by with so little significance. He advocated a universal project for mankind of using scientific methods to resurrect all those who have ever lived.

Selected Posts

  • Backstory of a book
    2019-02-22
  • Stinging Fly Wheldon essay
    2017-07-24
  • The Blocks by Karl Parkinson
    2016-10-02
  • London Trip
    2023-03-05
  • Honest Ulsterman interview
    2016-02-29
  • Greetings, Hero launch Hodges Figgis
    2014-11-21

Selected pages

  • Debut Book
  • Publications
  • Writers' Workbench at Block T

Crucial

  • . .
  • Asylum books
  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Daniel Seery
  • David Mohan
  • Djelloul Marbrook
  • Gorse magazine
  • Slava Nesterov Artist
  • The Penny Dreadful
  • The road to publication
  • The Short Review
  • The Short Review
  • Unthology

Other links

  • . .
  • Karl Parkinson's The Blocks
  • Unthology 4 review
  • Wandering minstrel Larry Beau

What I'm up to

  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Examiner review
  • Irish Times / Ashley Stokes
  • Irish Times Q+A Irish Times Q+A
  • The road to publication

Recent posts

  • Writing Course at Crumlin College 2024
  • Interpolated Stories, by David Rose
  • Renaud Contini’s The Infinite Castle
  • Hangdog Souls by Marc Joan
  • London Trip London Trip
  • Writers’ Workbench, Block T Dublin 8

Quotation

The Tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction