Writer and critic Stephen Romei, writing for The Saturday Paper, has given a lovely review of Running with Pirates.
His comments include,
Gíslason writes beautifully and perceptively about the emotional duality a parent feels as a child moves into adulthood. You want to protect them and you want to set them free. Though the settings are different, he is on the same emotional page as the Australian writer Maggie MacKellar in her recent memoir, Graft, set on a sheep farm in Tasmania. [...]
Vladimir Nabokov described his characters as “galley slaves”. Gíslason certainly holds enough of a whip hand over his characters to make parts of this book a page-turner.
He withholds information to keep the reader guessing about the real intentions of the Pirate in 1990. And the obvious question in the second timeframe – is the Pirate still there? – is left dangling for a good while.
When the answers arrive – in each timeframe – they leave a hollow in the author’s life that he can’t quite explain. But his present self knows it’s connected to his feelings about fatherhood, and he is grateful he was able to take his sons to Corfu. “Fatherhood,” he concludes, “ultimately faces forwards rather than back.”
The full review is available here.
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Also this weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald/Age newspapers included Running with Pirates in their recommendations for Father's Day reading. The full list of recommendations is here.
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| Karousades, September 2014 |
