Oona

What is the sound of a voice that is alienated from itself? How can one truthfully represent the creative process of an artist? Oona, an artist-in-the-making, lives in an affluent suburban culture of first-generation immigrants in New Jersey where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail, and the denial of death is ubiquitous. The silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona is not told while her mother lies dying of cancer upstairs. Afterwards, a silence takes hold inside her: her inner life goes into a deep freeze. Emotionally hobbled, she has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other trials of adolescence. Lyons’ first novel gives voice to a female character on her fraught journey into adulthood and charts her evolution as an artist, as her adolescent dissociation is thawed through contact with the physical world, the materials of painting and her engagement with Irish community, culture and landscape. Set during the era of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, this is a resonant story conveyed in an innovative form. Written entirely without the letter ‘o’, the tone of the book reflects Oona’s inner damage and the destruction caused by hiding, omitting and obliterating parts of ourselves.

About the Author :
Alice Lyons is a writer whose work embraces the visual arts. She is a recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry (2002) and the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary awarded by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (2004). Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, was nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award (IFTA, 2010). Originally from the USA, where she was Radcliffe Fellow in Poetry and New Media at Harvard University 2015/16, she has lived in the west of Ireland for over twenty years. She lectures in writing and literature at the Yeats Academy of Art, Design & Architecture, IT Sligo.

Review :
Oona, a book without an ‘o’, is an ingeniously crafted marvel’ An intriguing, innovative story of loss and acceptance. The novel (with the exception of its title and one short intermezzo intentionally headed ‘– o –’) is wholly bereft of the round vowel, whose hermetic glyph can articulate surprise, lyric utterance, sexual pleasure and, of course, elegiac grief. Oona is exactly the type of book to read if you want to restore your faith in writing and new and experimental approaches to fiction. Its beautiful descriptions of place and sparkling use of colour are so incredibly vibrant it feels at times more like a painting than a novel. A plot that sounds very simple and familiar, what you could call a fairly standard coming-of-age story, becomes an original and very special read in Lyons’s masterful hands. Calculated though its constraint may be, dictatorial in its Oulipian demands, there is nothing cold or soulless whatsoever in Oona: it is all verve, all vitality. ‘A virtuoso work … a delight to read’ —EOIN MCNAMEE ‘Oona is bildungsroman unlike any other, a documentation of an artist’s growth in which each lacuna, each silence, and each erasure reveals the depth of its subject. Exceptional.’ —DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA ‘In a voice and tone that never falters, Alice Lyons has delivered something extraordinary. On the rare occasions I noticed the absence of the letter ‘o’, it was to briefly marvel at the care and innovation it has taken to pull this off. For all her struggles, Oona fizzes with life and hope.’ —LOUISE KENNEDY ‘A study of grief and recovery through the lens of art, colour, and landscape. Lyons charts a compelling journey towards wholeness, full of vivid imagery and astute observations. Moving and wise, few portraits of grief are so life-affirming.’ —JESSICA TRAYNOR ‘A virtuoso work … a delight to read’ —EOIN MCNAMEE ‘Oona is bildungsroman unlike any other, a documentation of an artist’s growth in which each lacuna, each silence, and each erasure reveals the depth of its subject. Exceptional.’ —DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA ‘In a voice and tone that never falters, Alice Lyons has delivered something extraordinary. On the rare occasions I noticed the absence of the letter ‘o’, it was to briefly marvel at the care and innovation it has taken to pull this off. For all her struggles, Oona fizzes with life and hope.’ —LOUISE KENNEDY ‘A study of grief and recovery through the lens of art, colour, and landscape. Lyons charts a compelling journey towards wholeness, full of vivid imagery and astute observations. Moving and wise, few portraits of grief are so life-affirming.’ —JESSICA TRAYNOR