Leonard and Hungry Paul: A Novel

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If I'm honest, I am probably closest to Grace, who spends her days being super-efficient at work but needs a boyfriend she can trust enough to be a flake with at home. Grace’s wish for her brother to be more independent provides a gently poignant yet masterfully rendered understanding of family dynamics. In terms of a plot, well, there’s Leonard and Shelley, of course, and the preparations for Grace’s wedding form a kind of backbone to the novel, but you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for dramas, with not even a hint of a real disaster on the Dublin horizon. It's about quiet, finding one's path, knowing one's mind and going on, rather than doing little things and telling all the world all about them as loudly as possible.

I have a long standing interest in meditation and there’s something zen like about this, particular in the monk-like Leonard. A strange choice of main character, you may think, and you’d be right: this is very much a two-hander, and without the low-key dynamism of Leonard as a counterbalance, Hungry Paul’s story would go nowhere.güzel iç görüler ve gözlemler barındırıyor eser ama yazarımız bunları dev aforizmalar gibi suratımıza çarpmak yerine iddiasız biçimde metninin içine yerleştirmeyi seçmiş ve ne iyi etmiş.

In the same sentence he can be heart-rending, adding that Leonard chose not to go because “nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts”. And there were many genuinely well-observed passages written about Leonard or Paul but there were just too many excursions into farcical unreality so I found it a bit disappointing. It gave me some reservations about what the rest of the book might be like, but I didn’t get the same feeling subsequently, so perhaps I was just taking time to adjust to the author’s style.I know, I know, some of you are thinking that these guys are losers, but that's where you'd be wrong. To begin with I thought it was going to be ‘uplit’ fiction, but it became something different (Eleanor Oliphant came to mind). Downstairs, he took a moment to sit in stillness, listening to the silence and the gentle high frequency tingling in his ears that was barely audible except at quiet times like this. There’s not a lot of action, or many other characters, so it does allow you to spend time with the two mains and Hungry Paul's sister Grace, and is all the better for it. He still lives at home with his parents, and his older sister’s wedding is a central focus of the plot.

Leonard is a bit lonely perhaps, but also getting on with things – but is prepared to take a chance when an opportunity presents itself. But when you read a book about two single men in their 30s who both have no “get up and go” (their idea of a “good night” is sitting at home playing board games and neither of them has ever left their childhood home) and then introduce other members of their families in stories that are also not very exciting, it is just not very, well, exciting.It helps that Hession has created an appealing narrator, one who seems just as idiosyncratic as the two men he’s describing. It is about those uncelebrated people who have the ability to change their world, not by effort or force, but through their appreciation of all that is special and overlooked in life. It’s a cheerful, meandering affair in which the reader spends a few months in the lives of two friends, men in their thirties who are more than happy with a quiet life. Perhaps fittingly enough for the book, my life didn’t slow down so I was forced to carve my own bit of calm to make space for it. Irish debut Leonard and Hungry Paul is its opposite: a charming, warm-hearted celebration of all that is treasurable about everyday life, “stories of overlooked people who had simply lived their lives as best they could”.

It’s such a wholesome book, and a perfect bit of peace which is desperately needed in the world today. At times, their happiness felt a little unearned, with Shelley slightly underdeveloped and Leonard too passive. His occasional work as a postman leaves him financially dependent and his acceptance of this frustrates Grace. Compared to his good friend Hungry Paul, though (no, the name’s not explained, just go with it), Leonard’s virtually a human dynamo.Overall a novel I would recommend, and although not quite to my personal taste (which errs to the bile of Bernhard, the apocalypses of Krasznahorkai, and to the unlikable female narrator genre rather than uplit), that is more a failing of mine.