#BookshelfSpotlight-‘The Weight Of A Human Heart’ by Ryan O’Neill

About the book…

‘The Weight Of A Human Heart’ by Ryan O’Neill is available in ebook format only via the Eye Books website, also as a Kindle Unlimited ebook.

*There is a 30% discount available for books purchased from the Eye books website using the code RACHELREADIT throughout August*

A series of graphs illustrate the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary brawl – and an affair – play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother’s disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter.

Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, this collection by the award-winning author of Their Brilliant Careers turns the rules of storytelling on their head.

Ranging in setting from Australia to Africa to China and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart was the first published fiction by this remarkable Scottish writer based in Australia.

All of these stories represent the brilliant, chameleonlike writing abilities of a master craftsman. It takes skill and ingenuity to vacillate between wringing alternate emotions from a reader which is what he did here. From complicated family relationships to explorations of the words we casually use, ignoring their essential meaning to the horror of genocide, all of human life is captured here in these pages. Life, death, birth, love , all are put under the microscope of Ryan O’Neill’s keen gaze and laid bare for the reader to revel in.

The title refers to the very first tale,’Collected Stories’ which is the narrative of a girl growing up with a writer as a mother,Charlene, who records everything that she observes, including her child, as material for her books. Her insistance on veracity in ‘research’ leaves her daughter Barbara basically raising herself and becoming a doctor dealing with solid facts rather than abstract feelings. Charlene weighs every book that she writes, refusing to read,or write, anything that weighs over half a kilo (perhaps a commentary over bloated popular fiction?)Even to the very end of her life, she refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing in her life-and she has done plenty-quoting her own works so they could be immortalised as a great writer’s last words.

As a mother, she wrote out the story of her daughter’s life, stealing things that happened in Barbara’s life,giving away her moments, even killing her over and over. It’s such a tense and well structured story that fits an incredible amount of life within such a short space of time-the deft strokes which paint each character are enot lingered over, these people simply are. And the title-surely all of us are a collection of stories, as human beings, it just remains to be seen whether proofs of our lives are ever read after we depart and what impact we may have is negligible.

‘Cockroach’ focuses on the fate of a little girl growing up in Rwanda, through her we see a child’s perspective on the Hutu/Tutsi genocide which is heartbreaking in its simplicity and depiction of one side, from the other as ‘cockroaches’ which need stamping out and putting down. The problem, as the reader is well aware, is that using this phrase actually confers survival potential on the Tutsi people rather than seeing them as pests and this is reaffirmed in the haunting last line.

‘English As A Foreign Language‘ I found really sharply humorous in its’ depiction of an English teacher whose focus on the correct use and pronounciation of words is so consuming that he forgets the meaning of them and the weight that they carry-to the extent that he marks, and corrects, his Hungarian wife’s love letters. The denouement of this tale is particularly satisfying and perfect!

In ‘Speeding Bullet’, a tale from the perspective of a boy who rationalises his life by comparing it to comic books, he writes-

”My mother wore huge flowery dresses and had long brown hair and a round face with sad eyes.Old photographs showed a different woman, thin and smiling so that I began to think all her fat was a disguise,like Superman’s glasses. She was very gentle,but she always had an exhausted and agonised air,as if she had just been taken down from a cross.”

His command of the English language is obvious in how he revels in words and their meanings.In ‘Seventeen Rules For Writing A Short Story’ a story is formed using ‘rules’ from famous writers-an ingenious way of making something entirely unique from held ,literary, thoughts. It is a great forerunner for ‘The Drovers Wives’, a prologue for how the same thing can be said in so many ways that each time shakes the concept, yet adds something to, the central story being told.

Each tale is entirely different from the rest, the only thread of commonality is the love of words from an author who masters so many styles and ways of saying the same thing about the human condition. As much as words can define, illustrate and explain, it is the form that you arrange them in that really exposes the feelings and notions behind them. Each is a miniature masterpiece, perfectly formed like a clutch of eggs,each of which contains an entirely different inhabitant,only visible when the smooth,intact exterior is cracked by the reader.And then, the contents are swallowed whole.

About the author..

Ryan O’Neill was born in Glasgow in 1975 and lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Australia.

His short story collection ‘The Weight Of A Human Heart’ was shortlisted for the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards.

His debut novel ‘Their Brilliant Careers’, first published in Australia in 2016, won the Australian PM’s Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

He lives in Sydney.

Twitter @EyeAndLightning

This an absolutely fascinating interview on Australian literature including Ryan O’Neill, which is interesting for both readers and writers alike.