Barcelona
2024In Barcelona, we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son's true nature. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage. The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity.
Praise
Barcelona is full of devastating lines . . . Costello is working in the tradition of her literary heroes — Kafka, Musil, Coetzee — delivering insights which are painful but also energising because of the beauty with which they're captured . . . The most impressive collection I've read in some time.
Clear-eyed and provocative, bruised and bruising: these are the stories of a writer at the very top of her game.
It is rare that a writer of fiction can evoke such depth of feeling and visceral/moral revulsion as Mary Costello . . . in stories dealing with cruelty to animals, especially the slaughter of farm animals; rare that marital intimacy is so powerfully rendered.
The characters in these stories yearn for connection, to be understood. Mary Costello shows how a fleeting insight or incident can transform a life completely and how the secret self determines our actions for better or worse. Gorgeously written, provocative and brave.
Costello's writing is insistent, precise and unsparing. Everyday acts and ordinary lives are infused with a sense of the skull beneath the skin and of a catastrophe held tautly at bay.
Beautiful, quietly shattering . . . haunting, powerful stories . . . Costello explores the violence behind painful silences in domestic life . . . Amid complex chains of cruelty, Costello offers transcendent moments of completeness.
There are memorable stories . . . [Costello] reflects on the world around her, examining its shortcomings with a forensic eye . . . A strong contender as the finest practitioner of the Joycean short story.
Spare, unflinching . . . These elegant, emotionally complex stories are not comfortable or comforting to read, but they are beautifully, bruisingly honest.