Intriguing vision

In the first book from Irish writer Kevin Breathnach highlights photography, film and literature and long autobiographical pieces that describes coming of age and recalls the spirit of Irish Modernism.

The rise of the “Lyric essay, a hybrid of memoir, prose and poetry and cultural criticism that the American polemicist David Shields has argued is designed to reflect our fragmented times.

Tunnel Vision sets out as a study of a seven-hour Norwegian film about a train journey, but the author starts interjecting his analysis with recollections of drug-taking, masturbation an intimate portrayal of unstable masculinity and sexual repression.

Kevin Breathnach, a mediocre student, lazy teacher and failed footballer, mocks his aborted attempts to write novel often pricks his own pretentiousness: “ I have kept up the habit ( annoying to some) of pausing any film I’m watching the moment an intriguing or pleasurable shot comes one screen to take a screenshot. Now, in a fairly transparent effort to construct a public image for myself, a cultural identity, I mostly just post these stills to Twitter.”

He confesses  to being an intellectual fraud in his youth by giving an account of living in Paris in 2007, and having sexual relationship with a man. Breathnach remembers that he “complained to an attractive English woman with a managerial role in Shakespeare & Company about the state of her bookshop’s essay section.”

Breathnach’s essay “Death Cycles”, concerns his great uncle Liam Whelan, who was one of the Manchester United players killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958. While living in Munich with his girlfriend Colette, Breathnach visited the site of the tragedy and said “ It seemed written that I would follow in my grand-uncle’s footsteps and play professionally”.

Instead he became a rebellious teenager and quit football. “ I started skateboarding. Liam had never skateboarded.”

 

Tunnel Vision by Kevin Breathnach, Faber £14.99, 304 pages