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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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Werner Herzog says it's not good to circle 'your own navel' but wrote a memoir anyway

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Werner Herzog says it's not good to circle 'your own navel' but wrote a memoir anyway

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Werner Herzog looks back in ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ : NPR



Werner Herzog looks back in ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ The German filmmaker reflects on his unusual life and the curiosity that has fueled his career in the memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Originally broadcast Oct. 25, 2023.

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Josh Allen Says He Was 'Very Nervous' For Hailee Steinfeld Proposal

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Microfeminism: The next big thing in fighting the patriarchy

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Microfeminism: The next big thing in fighting the patriarchy

An abortion rights demonstrator holds a sign near the U.S. Capitol during the annual Women’s March to support Women’s Rights in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8, 2022.

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If you have ever intentionally addressed your female colleagues first during a meeting or shut down a guy trying to manspread on the subway, you may have been practicing microfeminism — small but meaningful acts of uplifting women in male-dominated spaces.

“When I send an email, let’s say to a CEO, and you have to copy their assistant for scheduling purposes, if the assistant is a female, I will always, in the ’email to’ line, enter their address before the CEO’s,” Ashley Chaney said in a viral TikTok post this year.

“That’s my favorite form of microfeminism,” she said. “What’s yours?”

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Chaney did not invent the term, but with her video garnering thousands of comments and video responses of other people explaining how they go about promoting women’s voices, she introduced the word to a new audience.

“I always call the dads first when the kids are sick and the moms for billing questions,” one preschool worker wrote in response.

“I write real estate contracts and I always put the wife’s name first,” another respondee wrote. “The [husbands] question it a lot even though it makes zero difference to the contract, just their ego.”

These acts might seem trivial to some, but experts say the little tricks can have a big impact.

Little “winks and nods”

Chaney, the woman behind the viral TikTok, said she was inspired to talk about her acts of microfeminism after an upsetting day of dealing with a male coworker.

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“I remember particularly just thinking, god, there are these things that happen to me on a daily basis that drive me crazy. And I know in my head that I’m doing these little sort of winks and nods to the women around me. I wonder if they notice,” she said.

The response, Chaney said, has been overwhelming.

“It is something that women A) notice and just like me are also trying to do, which I love. And moreover, if they hadn’t heard of it, they’re now inspired and they’re seeing tiny ways in which they can uplift women around them,” she said.

“I think that people really resonate with that because it gives them something to do that’s not going out to march or burn your bras or whatever. It’s like, ‘Hey, these are things that I can do and I can actually affect change in a small way.’ “

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The backlash

While many of the comments were positive, Chaney said there was also a wave of mostly men who ridiculed and derided her stance, with some going so far as to say she should die.

“In the comments, I got people saying that I was a misandrist and that I was doing witchcraft,” Chaney said.

“The first thing they attack is your physical appearance. So I got everything from fat, ugly, old, to stupid and a dumb woman,” she said. “Honestly, it scared me so much.”

While the backlash Chaney received was frightening — she stopped posting online for weeks after the episode — ultimately, it made her more secure in her beliefs.

Kelly Crowder, center, holds up a sign as thousands of protesters gather for the Women's March against President Donald Trump Jan. 21, 2017, in Los Angeles.

Kelly Crowder, center, holds up a sign as thousands of protesters gather for the Women’s March against President Donald Trump Jan. 21, 2017, in Los Angeles.

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“It has inspired me to identify more loudly and publicly as a feminist,” she said. “My entire platform is not dedicated to feminism, but I am being louder about it, particularly as people have criticism or critiques of it. I’m like, OK, that means that there is a need for a loud voice here.”

Everyday sexism

Research has shown that everyday instances of sexism affect women at all levels, including in matters of physical and mental health.

Microfeminist proponents hope to mitigate some of those effects in their own personal ways.

Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, Ph.D., is the associate director of the Feminist, Gender, Sexuality studies program at Stanford University.

She says it’s important to normalize addressing everyday gender biases in order to make bigger changes.

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“When you start to adjust society’s norms, then that has a lasting effect. That has a conscious and a subconscious effect,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.

She said that small things like changing male-centered language — for example, using “guys” as a catchall term for people — are the kind of changes that are easy to make and will benefit everyone in the long term.

“Knowing that to keep things more neutral really kind of helps everybody because the patriarchy hasn’t even helped masculinity,” Kazem-Stojanovic said, noting that patriarchal expectations of manliness lead to strict limitations on how men can present themselves and express their emotions.

Feminism after Roe

Demonstrators hold up their banners as they protest on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017.

Demonstrators hold up their banners as they protest on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 4, 2017.

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Kazem-Stojanovic said that working against the patriarchy is as important now as ever before, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrictive abortion bans that have cropped up across the country in the years since.

Despite these changes in the current political environment, Kazem-Stojanovic said that the virality of Chaney’s TikTok video gives her hope that the younger generations understand how important it is to fight for women’s rights, no matter the scale.

“I’m a mom of two girls, teenagers … and I see them engaging in social media. And I think there’s this recent interest with microfeminism stems from a video from TikTok, which my girls are always on,” she said. “I find it interesting that little snippets of these long-held kind of feminist ways of thinking and being and embodying feminism have kind of come out in these modern multimedia little videos, which I find really interesting, which makes me happy to see.”

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