After thirteen years with a white-knuckle death grip on the steering wheel of their career, Bono finally learned how to take a breath. He embraced long lunches and late nights. Quality time with his wife and kids. And some partying too. “House parties, dance parties, our mates,” as he recalls of the early days’ scene. Bono flourished, finding lightness in himself for the first time in a long time. Maybe even ever.
Looking back, he might’ve gone too big. “I was going through the pure joy of having adolescence the wrong way around—having it in my thirties instead of my teens,” he recalls. “There was a moment where I had to ask myself, ‘Where is this self-love and where’s this self-indulgence?’ ” But he’s grateful all the same.
Time is layered in Northern Irish writer David Park’s latest novel. The past ever present, it underpins but also threatens to undermine the two protagonists.
“I was just about to turn seventeen,” writes Jay, the retrospective narrator of The South, celebrated Malaysian writer Tash Aw’s carefully sculpted new novel, “and at that age, what did I really know about time?” And over a series of taut chapters told from multiple perspectives during an extended stay at the failing farm that Jay’s family has recently inherited in the country’s southern region, the idea of time emerges as the novel’s true subject, its passing interminable one day and impossibly fleeting the next. The South also explores time’s inevitable effects on narrative and memory, and how each can shape and transform the other.
As “The Dark Maestro” recounts the activities of the crime syndicate, some of the passages are difficult to read. But they are not gratuitous. Slocumb is building the scaffolding for the real story, about a father who seems to have every strike against him, yet wants to learn to be a good person. It is about coming together as a family out of sheer love and appreciation for one another despite the chaos all around.