Cadenza

‘It’s just like this: I don’t want to go home and I can’t stand Dublin nor any place between the two of them either or at all...’

After a harrowing trip to the dentist, Desmond, the narrator of Ralph Cusack’s Cadenza, boards a train, locks himself in cabin 304D, and decides to take up residence indefinitely. Between room service sandwiches and whiskey, he sifts through his faulty memories of childhood, family, friends, and past lovers.

Cusack’s fleet-footed prose carries us lightly from one vignette to the next, from gorgeous descriptions of Irish landscapes to hilarious character sketches and erotic incidents worthy of a screwball comedy. Interwoven temporalities fight for our attention in the second-ever title to be published by Dalkey Archive Press, written—as Gilbert Sorrentino says—“with an Anglo-Irish arrogance worthy of Beckett.” Dismissed as an autobiography when first published, Cadenza is a pioneering work of Irish autofiction. Toeing the line between what is real and imagined, memories and wish-fulfillments, Cusack's stream of consciousness prose begs to be followed to the very last page.