Summary
Kevin Holohan: Brothers together
Ireland is a country of long and proud European Catholic traditions. One of the pillars of that tradition is church education. In Ireland, it is still almost entirely under the patronage of the Catholic Church. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, Irish society went through a kind of catharsis with the discovery of many cases of abuse in religious, educational and educational institutions run by the Church. Kevin Holohan wrote a novel about what primary schooling was like before that catharsis.
Brothers Together is a black satire about the church school of the Brothers of God's Persuasion for needy boys, a Dickensian institution in disintegration, run by a group of eccentric, unbalanced, and often violent monks. The school's reputation is unstoppably deteriorating and the brothers thirst for a miracle, which would turn their founder, the Reverend Saorseach O'Rahily, into a saint.
Holohan approached a serious topic from a satirical angle and in this way brought the reader closer to the culture and customs that allowed abuse in church institutions to go by without any sanctions for decades.
"The strange, yet terrifyingly recognizable world of Kevin Holohan reminiscent of Flann O'Brien and Monty Python, while at the same time possessing both anger and comedy of the absurd." – Joseph O'Connor
Kevin Holohan was born in Dublin. He graduated from University College Dublin, and completed his secondary education at the Congregation of Christian Brothers in Dublin. He published short stories and poetry in Cyphers, Sunday Tribune, Whispers and Shouts, Studies, Casablanca, Envoi and Poetry Ireland. He wrote literary reviews for the Irish Echo in New York. He worked for two years in the drama department of the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Brothers together is his first novel. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
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