Colm Tóibín
IN HIS THIRTEEN-LINE POEM “Scotland,” the Scottish poet Alastair Reid invokes a perfect day when “the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels” and “sunlight / stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.” When the poet meets “the woman from the fish-shop,” he marvels at the weather, only to be told by her in the poem’s last line: “We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!” Although it explores a childhood in a northern France blighted by poverty, misery, and prejudice, The End of Eddy differs from the work of Ernaux and Eribon because it is not a return home during a middle age tempered by literary success; it is not replete with emotion recollected in tranquility. It is written in the white heat of recent experience. (Louis was born in 1992.) But it connects with the other two writers in the urgency and honesty in its tone as it attempts to shatter the image of French refined manners and social equilibrium. It connects with Eribon 
In A Legacy, first published in 1956, Sybille Bedford writes about a Germany in the years before the First World War that had almost disappeared even as it seemed to be in full bloom. This world of privilege and entitlement and eccentricity is presented as normal and natural and at a stage of rich development for those who inhabited it. But the author knows, and the reader too, that it is doomed. I grew up in the town of Enniscorthy, in the southeast of Ireland. Every year in the summer, we held a strawberry fair, and every year, too, the elders would meet to select a Strawberry Queen. One year, they asked a contestant what she would do with the prize money if she won. “I’d feck off to England,” she said. 
In a time of insurgency or civil war, the literary text has a way of seeking out shadow and unease to protect itself from political rhetoric or easy drama, as though avoiding gunfire or shrapnel. In Ireland, for example, in the period between the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the end of the civil war, W. B. Yeats wrote poems filled with inwardness, with self-questioning and ambiguous tones. The violence made him wonder (“Was it needless death after all?”). And made him unwilling to celebrate the heroism or the sacrifice (“Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the