{"id":405,"date":"2021-04-21T11:18:16","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T10:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=405"},"modified":"2021-04-21T11:18:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-21T10:18:16","slug":"ten-days-by-austin-duffy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/04\/21\/ten-days-by-austin-duffy\/","title":{"rendered":"“Ten Days” by Austin Duffy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Irish novelist, Austin Duffy\u2019s second novel, Ten Days<\/em> is mostly set in New York. Photographer, Wolf is visiting the city with his daughter Ruth so she can take part in her late mother\u2019s family\u2019s celebration of the ten High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The visit will culminate in a ceremony to scatter Miriam\u2019s ashes over the Hudson River. Miriam has recently passed away after a short battle with cancer. Though, at the time, separated from Wolf, she\u2019d asked her husband to return to the family home so they could be together for the last few weeks. She\u2019s also left him strict instructions concerning both her funeral arrangements and plans for Ruth to be part of the extended family\u2019s holiday celebrations in New York. Wolf is neither Jewish nor in the family\u2019s good books. They rightly judge him for his treatment of Miriam. He feels excluded from the celebrations and yet continues to persevere with his in-laws. It\u2019s essential that his daughter is accepted and feels at home within the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wolf has been diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s. Though he doesn\u2019t tell his wife or daughter, he\u2019s made an elaborate plan to provide for Ruth when he can no longer look after her. He\u2019s booked one way tickets from London for both of them. The novel implies that Wolf intends to kill himself in America, whilst he\u2019s arranged for Ruth to move in with her Jewish in-laws in New York. I\u2019ll not give any spoilers away but it\u2019s enough to say his plan doesn\u2019t work out quite as he\u2019d intended. The novel ends a little differently from how I\u2019d expected and ultimately I was grateful for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved Ten Days<\/em>. I loved the writing. It\u2019s sharp, well-crafted and pacey. It\u2019s very much a city novel and there\u2019s a definite urban tightness to the way it\u2019s written. I loved the depictions of Jewish culture and the way they\u2019re seamlessly woven through the book. I also loved the occasional dips into the world of artists and musicians -some real, some fabricated- which Wolf has built his career around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duffy\u2019s penned a great depiction of strained relationships, put under further pressure by the increasing confusion Wolf\u2019s experiencing. He\u2019s not particularly close to his daughter. He\u2019s been ostracised by his in-laws. And yet he\u2019s trying his best to prepare for their future together, even as he begins to forget who they are. There\u2019s a woozy quality to the way Duffy writes dementia. Both time and spatial awareness come in and out of focus, sometimes repeating in a loop. I found this a very effective mode of capturing the dementia experience of a man who\u2019s desperately trying to hold on to his sense of reality. It\u2019s also a novel which explores power and ego. Wolf is a man who\u2019s been used to riding roughshod over others\u2019 feelings; the central section of the novel, where he discovers his mother\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s, then coldly and pragmatically dispatches her to a nursing home, is quite a hard read. Now, he\u2019s increasingly dependent on other people, some of whom he\u2019s treated poorly in the past. This wasn\u2019t the dementia narrative I was expecting to read. I enjoyed it all the more for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten days was published by Granta in 2021 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Irish novelist, Austin Duffy\u2019s second novel, Ten Days is mostly set in New York. Photographer, Wolf is visiting the city with his daughter Ruth so she can take part in her late mother\u2019s family\u2019s celebration of the ten High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The visit will culminate in a ceremony to scatter Miriam\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,6,49,4],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-alzheimers","tag-family","tag-irish","tag-novels"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}