["A Cow in the House"] contains the stories of a man talking easily, of a man whose memories crowd in on him, some merry, some melancholy, but all demanding attention, so that their appearance on the page seems at times to follow an order dictated by the random operations of change, and inconsequentiality seems the ruling principle of life. Memories of lost days of youth in rural Ireland, the Ireland of small towns and small farms where "Edwardian days lasted until 1939", and life moved slowly; rules of logic only falsify such memories and the stories drift along, remembered experiences and people conniving with their invented counterparts to create a fiction which makes the reader say, not "Life could never have been like that", but "That is just how life would be remembered"; and if the emphasis is on tolerance and neighbourliness, it is not because memory is up to its tricks, but because, as the author, ever so gently, reminds us, "there are burned-out buildings in the main streets—and barricades and checkpoints at the ends of the town".
Mr. Kiely's head is well stocked with songs and poems and stories and conversations and people, and he hardly ever starts a hare that he does not follow, but not for long, for every page has several hares, and though one suspects he could talk on for a whole book, mingling fact and fancy down the boreens of memory…. Mr. Kiely does have his ten stories to tell and his leisurely explorations have their goals. The little boy with the broken watch knows that time will never be the same again, a student pays more attention to his girlfriend than to his exams; youthful love fails to cross a religious division; a cow in the house is no less a wonder than a box of chocolates in a nun's habit; bigotry can sometimes be dissolved by humour; for some men women are the most terrifying as well as the most desirable of beings; the world of the imagination can crowd out the world of everyday; such are the ostensible subjects of the stories, but it is the transitoriness of life, of habits, of traditions, of places and of people, that informs these stories and makes the humor turn into sadness….
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