One of my all time favourites. Gut-wrenching, laugh-out-loud, crazy, true, wonderful book.

Charming, familiar/unfamilar, thought-provoking.

I can't say enough about this book. There's a great review by Allan posted last week. Allan grew up in Northern Ireland and lives in Belfast. I come to this book as an outsider, but someone who has visited Northern Ireland half a dozen times, starting back during the height of The Troubles.
MacLiam Wilson, the author, loves this city and it comes through constantly in the book. And he loves the people of Belfast. This is from the last page of the book : "The mountain looks flat and grand in the greyness, it is stupidly green. It looks like all cities this morning, Belfast. It's a tender frail thing, composite of houses, roads and car parks. Where are the people? They are waking or failing to wake. Tender is a small word for what I feel for this town. I think of my city's conglomerate of bodies. A Belfastful of spines, kidneys, livers and lungs. Sometimes, this frail cityful of organs makes me seethe and boil with tenderness. They seem so unmurderable and, because I think of them, they belong to me.
Belfast - only a jumble of streets and a few big bumps in the ground, only a whisper of God."

The book tells a story, and at times it is hilarious, and crude. An interesting insight is made by a French journalist to the city who asks someone to explain why the Irish kill other Irish. MacLiam Wilson makes fun of those politicians and paramilitary groups who take themselves very seriously. There are some who would be insulted by the writer's irreverence. But his irreverence is the point. He is saying "get over yourselves". This , I have learned, from Irish friends, is a fundamental value in Irish society. Be humble, don't put yourself above others, and if you do, we'll knock you down a peg or two. McLiam Williams is a master.

I joined Goodreads after a bad experience with a collection of loosely tied short stories that shall remain nameless. That book hit me over the head with a bat, kicked me in the gut, drove over me and dropped what was left in a frozen river from a tall bridge. It was a formative experience, but at the moment I hated it so much -so much- fiercely, with passion. And on top of that I thought it was pretty shitty; the proportion quality/effect it had on me was completely off. So I told myself never again: never again to pick up a book based on titles, covers and blurbs. Viva goodreads and previous opinions. The problem of that being, I would have missed this book too.

Curiously, my love for Eureka Street didn't bloom overnight. In fact, after finishing it, I thought it was good enough, but the plot is not exactly believable and I was expecting it to look cheap in hindsight. What happened, instead, is that it became insidiously part of the books that I read just because. And the BBC Northern Ireland mini-series was great too. It's available on youtube, if anyone is interested. So I picked up a soft cover edition whose paper had seen more than a little rain for 2 euros in a half open-air second hand bookstore on the corner of my hostal in Berlin and I powered through the german feeling I was missing perhaps 30% percent of the book (as I probably did). This was not meant to be a life companion, by any means. So why? And how can I have it again?

I'm going to tell you what this is about, thought: it's about men and women hitting their thirties, looking around, realising that they have somehow lost their footing after leaving college, and building a life they can go on with. It's about coming out of the holes we find ourselves into. It's a feel good book; read only the first chapter and the last, and it'll be more than obvious. It deals with anger, poverty, difference, missed chances and risks taken that impossibly payed off. Look at the relationships: all of them are about difference, being happy with it, accepting it, reconciliation, hope; they mimic Ireland's political situation, they are based on forgiveness, and they have this bright tomorrow ahead of them and I'm rooting for them all, because life is not about being right or being wrong; it's not even about agreeing: it's about doing your best and letting others do theirs.