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Reflections in a Tar-Barrel (2023 edition) by Jack Harte
Set in the Mid-Seventies, this novel explores the world through the eyes of an eccentric young man, Lofty, and follows his journey of exploration from the West of Ireland to Paris and Lourdes. The relationship he strikes up with a sex worker on the streets of Paris leads back to the woman-starved West of Ireland where Lofty now combines the roles of hawker in religious goods and keeper of a mobile brothel. Events accelerate with accumulating menace and hurtle towards disaster.
First published in 2007 by Altera Publishing House, Sofia, Bulgaria, in Bulgarian translation by Vergil Nemchev. Published by Scotus Press, Dublin, Ireland, in 2008. Published in Russia in 2020 by Direct Media (Moscow and Berlin) in Russian translation by Ruzana Pskhu. This new edition is published by Scotus Press in 2023.
Media Response:
Without any doubt Jack Harte is in the tradition of Joyce, Becket, Shaw…because of his ability to sharpen the language and to position it between irony, nostalgia, and absurdity; because of the hypnosis of death and pain; because of the obsession with belief; because of the articulation of the scorching pain, the instinct for suicide, the feeling of being lost and deserted. It is this mixture of darkness and enlightenment, sadness and hope, which is the essence of ‘Reflections in a Tar Barrel’.
Jack Harte makes no
compromises to sell books. He is
perhaps one of the very few
present-day Irish writers who
has his own things to say and
(a rare corollary) the ability to
say them.
The First (Bulgarian) edition:
Reflections in a Tar-Barrel was first published in Bulgaria, where it was launched at the Appolonia Festival and became an immediate success, the book everyone was reading and discussing. Here are a few of the comments from the reviews on Goodreads where it received 4.17 stars out of 5, from 75 ratings and 19 reviews.
- Reflections in a Tar-Barrel by Jack Harte is one of the best books I've ever read. It’s so good, in fact, that I'll probably find the next five books, however valuable, to be mediocre. … Jack Harte has the gift of those old storytellers, like O'Henry and Steinbeck, who make you lose track of time and sweep you into the stories.
- In short, Reflections in a Tar-Barrel is a very human book that tells what it's like to be afraid not just of our shadow, but of our voice as well. Only one who is at the bottom of innocence can emerge and find logic and explanation for the inexplicable.
- Stars accumulated in my head gradually (while I was reading the book) and because of the last pages they became 5.
- I immediately put it among my favourite books. It is an honour that it was published for the first time in Bulgaria. Lofty excited me a lot. If Of Mice and Men and Flowers for Algernon moved you, then this novel is for you.
- I'm going to have a hard time reviewing this book. It is an inner human world with all the questions, all the handicaps, all the searches, all the emotions, all the fears, all the complexes. Reading, it was like I was looking through the eyes of the narrator ... and I saw a lot of things through them - truths, pain, injustice, love, humanity, death in its different dimensions, faith in its different dimensions, the contradictions of the characters. I'm writing, but it's hard for me to catch my breath, influenced by the ending.
- A strong, very strong book, you finish reading and you are anything but indifferent!
- One of the most underrated books.
- At first I was worried that it might be overhyped and the reality might not live up to expectations. I don't worry anymore. Great book!
See also www.jackharte.com
Reflections in a Tar-Barrel (2023 edition)
ISBN 9781-739173746, price €14.00
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