5/30/2023 0 Comments Anna burns the milkmanFurther disrupting novelistic conventions is the book’s opening, which, in one sweep, gives away the plot’s resolution, thus dispensing with the usual technique for building suspense: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. The 18-year-old narrator, her “maybe-boyfriend,” her “wee sisters,” her “third sister” all remain anonymous, a strategy reflecting one contrivance for survival in a police state. Yet Burns mentions neither the place nor the time of the unfolding events-the reader has to stumble along until page 60 to be told “this was the Nineteen-Seventies.” Burns also refuses to bestow upon her characters the least we expect from a storyteller: names. The book is a deep immersion in the sensibilities of the characters living through “the Troubles,” those decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, during which at least 3500 people died, more than half of them civilians. Milkman, by Anna Burns, is both a fascinating and challenging read: It reaches the mind and the heart but also the marrow.
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