I Could Read the Sky

This is a quietly ambitious, grave and earnest book that mixes the elegiac prose of Chicago-born novelist O'Grady (Motherland) with the haunting photographs of Englishman Pyke to establish, remarkably, a quintessentially Irish novel. It's a tale, in the form of a lament, about sadness, longing and resignation, the story of a west of Ireland man who leaves for England in search of work sometime in mid-century. O'Grady's text consists of impressionistic sketches of a hard but colorful youth left behind, of an entire family marked by poverty and transformed by the dire requirements of growing up poor. It's all recalled from a kind of old-folks home, as the narrator remembers the things he could do--""Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds.... Read the sky.... Remember poems""--and those he could not--""Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch.... Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen.... Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering."" The keening of the narrator is peculiarly uplifting, distinguished by a teary-eyed lucidity. Pyke's photos support this mood like a fiddle might back an Irish air. Unrelated in subject matter to the text, the images nonetheless underscore displacement while extending the sense of loss into real bogs and real faces and incredibly gnarled ""spalpeen"" hands. (Mar.)