My Stinging Fly review of The Grind is online May 2024.
I love Karl Parkinson’s fiction and poetry, but it took me a year to finally read his new short story collection The Grind. I was reluctant to buy it online, and Books Upstairs were temporarily sold out, and then the dog ate my homework and anyway, I live on a timescale where recent means since the year 2000.
The experience of reading the stories is like reading a translation of some cult South American writer writing about life in the favela of a city at the edge of the world. That’s how distant and remote these stories feel. With most writers one senses an appeal. That is to say, the type of audience can be deduced, and the impact the writer hopes for can be intuited. The writer may wish to elicit sympathy for the oppressed, may wish to rub shit in the noses of the complacent, or may want to show that people are the same wherever etc. But Parkinson’s fictions are like declamations from the standpoint of eternity. He draws on biblical and mythological imagery and there is no implied appeal to the reader.
So I looked up the reviews, curious to see if anyone shared my view of how unique this book is. And found nothing. Barely a mention. Not a single review.
This is in stark contrast to his debut novel The Blocks which was reviewed in several newspapers – I wrote the Irish Times review of The Blocks. I pitched it with low expectations, and was astonished when Martin Doyle there asked to see it. He’d heard about it from another writer and was already well-disposed to commission a review.