At a New Year's Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after
passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another
planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the
night's events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent
by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American
cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to
human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain,
where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as
Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a
trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman
who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship
floats them asymptotically toward world's end. Christ turns out to be a
girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett,
Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are
characters in themselves.
The Irish Sea is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A
meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for
what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth
through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature
intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader
and his other, unknown self.
