User:Maxorover/The Day We Met Roddy Doyle

The Day We Met Roddy Doyle is first Max O'Rover's book.

It has been published by Querci & Robertson (Dec 21, 2008).

Book Description
An Italian guy who feels irish, an Irish father immigrant in Italy, an Irish girl who does not feel irish and a very very special Irish-Italian daughter.

All of them in Dublin, in the days around Bloomsday, each of them with their own hopes and sorrows, all of them linked together by a book: a Roddy Doyle's book.

Synopsis (SPOILER!!!)
The Day We Met Roddy Doyle is a tribute to Irish literature and to Ireland itself, but it is also a journey, both spiritual and physical, of four people who, for some reason or another, suffer pain, uncertainty, but above all, cherish wishes and dreams to achieve an umbilical cord that links them to Ireland.

Structured on three narrative levels (story, reality, hyper-reality), which are declined according to the characters’ point of view, the novel has Massimo, as its backbone, and who, being the typical product of an alienating society, feels Ireland like a love, a goal, a cure.

Just about Bloomsday, Massimo gets invited to Dublin for a job interview in the online games field that could change his life. If he got hired he could, finally, move to Ireland. In any case, Massimo, who is mainly a creative spirit, leaves for Dublin taking his stories with him, having the intention of “selling” them, along with the Guinness card game created by himself.

Robert, known to his friends as Bob, is an Irish immigrated to Italy, who runs a pub (or better, who ran a pub, given that the pub is on sale and on the brink of bankruptcy) that for Massimo represented a sort of ‘little Ireland’ where he could take refuge. Aoife, who hates the word ‘legendary’ and names herself Laura, is the daughter of Bob and an Italian woman.

Bob, whose father has just died, leaves for Dublin in the same period as Massimo. Laura/Aoife has promised to join him for the funeral. In fact, Laura wants to be in Dublin to meet Patrick, an Irish boy with whom she had (for now, only) virtual sex.

In Dublin there’s also Deirdre Doyle, a girl who works at the airport Guinness Store and who hates Guinness because she holds it responsible for her father’s alcoholism and therefore for the most of her family’s disasters.

The characters in the story, along with elements of Celtic mythology and the literary-dreamlike interludes of Massimo, will be linked by beer (which is the Devil and the Madonna to turn to, the anchor of salvation and a sea of drowning at the same time) and a... book: The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

It happens to be that Patrick has sold a signed copy of the book (which he has stolen from his father, a policeman and friend of Roddy Doyle’s agent) to Cathach Books, a Dublin shop of rare books and special editions.

Massimo buys the same book as a gift for his wife with the idea of getting the author to write a dedication to her, during the presentation of his new novel (the third of the Paula Spencer trilogy). Deirdre is obsessed by the same book because it reminds her so much of her own story, that she wrote, and then repents for having written, a raving threatening letter to Roddy Doyle.

When Aoife/Laura gets to know that Patrick has sold the book, she flies into a rage because she is a Roddy Doyle fan (although the earrings that Patrick gave her as a present, and which were bought with the money that he earned by selling the book, are somehow ‘magical’ and linked to her ancestral forefathers).

With the funeral of Bob’s father, the adventures and misadventures of Patrick with unbiased Aoife/Laura and a memorable victory of Ireland vs All Blacks, the characters get together for the presentation of Roddy’s book. Everything will go wrong and Massimo and Deirdre will even get nailed by the Garda.

Released from the jail, thanks to a good word from Bob to Patrick’s policeman father, Deirdre and Massimo are then to meet again with Bob and others at the pub, to drown their sorrows in Guinness and to plan their futures as well: what could result from melting literature and beer in the Not Another James Joyce BookPub?

A year later, on Bloomsday, Roddy Doyle enters the BookPub for a Guinness and he is presented with three copies of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors to be signed: one for Massimo’s wife, one for Laura / Aoife and one for Deirdre.

Italish Project
The Day We Met Roddy Doyle is first book of the The Day We Met trilogy, part of Italish Literature Project.