Before the Wax Hardened

Biography & Memoir
Cover of the book Before the Wax Hardened by Adrian Kenny, The Lilliput Press
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Author: Adrian Kenny ISBN: 9781843517221
Publisher: The Lilliput Press Publication: May 1, 2017
Imprint: The Lilliput Press Language: English
Author: Adrian Kenny
ISBN: 9781843517221
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Publication: May 1, 2017
Imprint: The Lilliput Press
Language: English

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic.

‘He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether.’ ­­ –– The Irish Times

On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968.

‘What was it all for?’ his father asks.

‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend.

‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits.

The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic.

‘He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether.’ ­­ –– The Irish Times

On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968.

‘What was it all for?’ his father asks.

‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend.

‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits.

The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

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