Call Me the Breeze (52 page)
Read Call Me the Breeze Online
Authors: Patrick McCabe
“A weepingly explosive take on that most distressful border between two unstoppable political realities. … The blistering unmediated rawness owes still more to earlier Southern (American) gothic precursors: Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and—most persistently—the Flannery O’Connor of
Wise Blood
.”
—
Guardian
(London)
“Patrick McCabe’s brilliant new tragicomic picaresque
Call Me the Breeze
… is often very funny and is rich in ironies. … Whether McCabe means [it] as an allegory about Ireland’s struggle with the twenty-first century or the paradoxical nature of creativity I am not sure. Nor does it matter; it is about both things and it is close—very close—to being a masterpiece.”
—Salon.com
“McCabe’s raw prose … and flawed but likable characters make for a hilarious novel.”
—
Maxim
“A rollicking tragicomedy, brilliantly cast. Joey, with his physical girth, intellectual myopia, and injured indignation, could be the Irish cousin of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s
Confederacy of Dunces
(1980).”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“Turns the traditional epistolary novel on its head. … McCabe’s deliciously warped wit is as razor sharp as ever. … [His] trademark humor and crafty Irish colloquialisms … leaven even the darkest of scenes.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“
Call Me the Breeze
is a full-blown original. … A painfully funny, beyond-dark odyssey through the soul of a man in conflict with himself and the demented universe he inhabits. That the soul plumbed is Irish is incidental—the music of anguished perversion and twisted joy is universal. From the depths of his own heart and history, Patrick McCabe has created the novelistic equivalent of a rock ‘n’ roll anthem—a tenderly nihilistic and brutally life-affirming scream that enriches, explains, and redeems the hells we are all trying to survive.”
—Jerry Stahl, author of
Permanent Midnight,
Perv—a Love Story
, and
Plainclothes Naked
fiction
MUSIC ON CLINTON STREET
CARN
THE BUTCHER BOY
THE DEAD SCHOOL
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
MONDO DESPERADO
EMERALD GERMS OF IRELAND
plays
FRANK PIG SAYS HELLO
(based on
The Butcher Boy
)
THE DEAD SCHOOL
LOCO COUNTY LONESOME
children’s stories
THE ADVENTURES OF SHAY MOUSE
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Faber and Faber Limited.
The first U.S. edition of this book was published in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers.
CALL ME THE BREEZE
. Copyright © 2003 by Patrick McCabe.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03019-1
First Perennial edition published 2004.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
McCabe, Patrick.
Call me the breeze: a novel / Patrick McCabe. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-052388-3
1. Politicians—Fiction. 2. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 3. Northern Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C32C35 2003
823’.914—dc20 2003056564
ISBN 0-06-052389-1 (pbk.)
04 05 06 07 08 
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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