title: Milkman by: Burns, Anna published: 2019 read: 2023-03 preview

if you check the reviews of this book, you find extremes.  Many people being upset and irritated by Burns’ way of describing her heroes, of which “Milkman” is one.  No one in this book has a name (except for Milkman, one discovers somewhere in the middle), but are called, “oldest sister”, or “maybe-boyfriend”, etc.  Well, here I am, often fighting with remembering who’s-who, and this approach works for me. I don’t need to remember five or 10 different names of different characters who, when I first encounter them, have no face and are hence hard to remember.  That “maybe-boyfriend” is later called “ex-maybe-boyfriend” also works for me.

Maybe that was what made me sit straight throughout the whole book.  Figuratively speaking, then.  I had such an easy time concentrating on the text rather than skipping the boring parts.  I dug in, sentence by sentence, following the 18-year-old hero in her struggle in Ireland during The Troubles (a name befitting this book, bychance).

It’s sentences like this:

Any time the fingers were there – between my neck and my skull – I’d forget everything – not just things that happened moments before the fingers, but everything – who I was, what I was doing, all my memories, everything about anything, except being there, in that moment, with him.

Highly erotic if you want.  

Then, what Burns does: it tells a story from beginning to the end, but on each and every turn, the main character gets lost in pages-long associations, making a whole story about smallest things, until she then comes back to what she was actually telling.  Most entertaining!

Then, when they moved to the harsh consonants, those number names, the alpha-numerical names – the NYX, the KGB, the ZPH-Zero-9V5-AG – which names maybe-boyfriend himself was partial to, I couldn’t take the overload and had to get myself and ‘The Overcoat’ out of the room.

And then, it’s full of magic realism.  Or perhaps, the way that an 18-year-old may describe the world:

‘Hey, you two’ – this was to the younger brothers – ‘Is something maybe missing?’ ‘It’s the parents,’ said second youngest. ‘They’ve gone away.’ Second youngest then resumed his dinner and watching of the TV, as did youngest, who seven years later was to become my ‘almost one year so far maybe-boyfriend’.

Don’t you love it?  I do.  I really adored this book.  Devoured the pages.  Was sad when it was over.  Or not.  Because, there is a story in it: she’s being put on the spot because of supposedly having an uncouth relationship – she does not – and the issue is resolved, in the end, by her courtesan dying.  About which one is clearly informed in the very first sentence of the book; no surprises.

Of course, the entourage, as mentioned The Troubles, lasting from the late 1960s to 1998 and costing the lives of some 2000 civilians, is powerful and, if you did not live through the period, alienating.  In that case, I strongly advise you to watch Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2022), a powerful movie on the same period and perhaps realistically depicting that troubling time.