Synopsis
A novel, originally published in Welsh in 1961, about a sensitive boy growing up during the homefront privations of World War I.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-02-01 | | Series: | New Directions Classic | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 176 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 7.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
Caradog Prichard's One Moonlit Night, first published in 1961, is a Welsh literary masterpiece: "one of the most impressive novels to be published in Wales since the Second World War" ("The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales"). Just recently translated into English, "One Moonlit Night" recalls the pathos and beauty of Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood". Told from the standpoint of a compassionate young boy coming of age in a small North Welsh village, much of the novel is autobiographical: the author's hometown, Bethesda, a childhood under the shadow of World War I, the boy's depressed, ailing mother and his heartbreaking empathy for her. The novel is told with a remarkable shifting between formal narrative and local dialect, the young narrator recounting moments in his life with poetic language and tenderness. But it is with a catastrophic act of madness that the novel culminates, carried out, in the words of H. Pritchard Jones, "to the accompaniment of a De Profundis-like psalm, an invocation of all the mother figures in the narrator's own life."
Industry Reviews
"Caradog Prichard creates characters whose inner lives open to the reader through their dialogue and through their voiced narration of interior thoughts, leading us into a world that is simultaneously real in the daily sense and highly imaginative and poetic. Mitchell's resonant translation retains the distinctive cadences of the original language."
Washington Post Book World - Paula Friedman (03/30/1997)
"...Prichard knows his way around an artfully embellished anecdote....Readers will inevitably be reminded of another Welsh work, Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood,' that portrays various colorful inhabitants of a minuscule community....[F]ar from diminishing the power of the telling, the ambiguity and dreamlike strangeness of his story serve instead to enhance it."
New York Times Book Review - Joel Conarroe (08/03/1997)
"The publication of this first full translation into English provides welcome exposure for a remarkable book."
Christ
"The only important fiction...by a Welsh journalist and poet (1904-80) whose who memorialized in its crisp, racy pages his own loss of a father and a troubled relationship with a mother whose grief drove her to madness....A haunting story, almost a small masterpiece."
Lingis
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