Dolors's Reviews > Midwinter Break

If Grace Notes was a symphony, Midwinter Break is a fugue.
A quiet, intimate composition built in the two voices of an Irish elderly couple who spends a long weekend in Amsterdam after the Christmas holidays.
Gerry and Stella have been married for more than 40 years, raised a son who now lives in Canada, had careers in architecture and teaching and now face that stage of life where old age marks the pace of their daily life.
Stella, a devout Catholic, patient and compromising.
Gerry, a lively man who drinks far too much but denies having a problem.
They co-exist in their individual cocoon and share only the necessary, keeping their distance in a shared loneliness that has started to be too evident to ignore.

McLaverty’s title is doubly intended. What might be Gerry and Stella’s “midwinter break” might also refer to a possible rupture in their marriage, and it is through a long list of the minuscule trifles of daily life that we get as close as we could get to the reality of married life, to the burdens of a joint history that makes words inadequate, to the lazy companionship that evolves into silence, to the shocking realization that “this is it”, this is what life has to offer…and what now?

This is my second novel by this Irish author and recurrent themes seem to be ever present in his novels: the inevitable distance that grows between couples, the destructive power of alcohol that haunts men of all ages, the religious prejudice in Northern Ireland and the violence that marked the years of a generation.
MacLaverty is a meticulous, unhurried writer. His prose is pregnant with symbolism. Even Joycean at times. Stella needs to lubricate her dry eyes and Gerry seems unable to stop his uncalled tears, an indication of their divergent personalities and the huge chasm that his marriage has become.
A dance alternating intimacy and separation, a meditation on the challenges of growing old next to a person who has become soulmate and stranger at once, an unflinching glance at the indignities of domestic miseries, this novel makes for a compulsory reading at any stage of life.