I WENT TO THE WORST OF BARS HOPING TO GET KILLED. BUT ALL I COULD DO WAS TO GET DRUNK AGAIN by Ciáran Óg Arnold [SIGNED]

アイルランド人フォトグラファー、キーラン・オグ・アーノルド (Ciáran Óg Arnold)の初作品集。「殺されたいと願いながら、この世で一番最悪なバーに行った。でもそこで唯一できたのはまた酒を呑むことだった」という、アメリカ人詩人・作家のチャールズ・ブコウスキーの詩をタイトルに引用した本書は、アイルランドのサック川沿いにあるバリナスローという町が舞台となっている。「人込みの瀬の口」を意味する町名の通り、かつては人の集まる場所であったが、今では人がいないゴーストタウンのようになっている。人がいないクラブ、場末のバー、退廃した町の様子を透明人間のような視点で映し出している。文庫本のようなブックデザインからも本書コンセプトが伝わってくる。イギリスの出版社MACKが主催する過去に写真集出版経験の無い作家の出版支援を目的とする「First Book Award」の2015年グランプリ受賞に伴い刊行。

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again is a diary of sorts, following invisible men, down piss alleyways and into empty bars. The photographer accompanies the seekers of oblivion, their lopsided faces caught between ecstasy and apathy, their mouths chasing the numbness of inebriation. This is Ballinasloe, a sandstone town on the River Suck in the easternmost corner of Galway in Ireland, seen through the eyes of a native, Ciarán Óg Arnold. Within the rabble, Arnold trails after the cast-offs, invisible men who spend their time in murky corners, choosing to do nothing but drift and drink. Ballinasloe is a mouth; in Irish, mouth of the ford, mouth of the crowds. "We claim to hate it here", writes Arnold, "but the truth is that we choose to stay, hiding from reality, drowning in drink and wanting to be left alone as we await whatever fate is in store." Over the years, Ballinasloe has become a ghost town, its immobile economy holding back only the indifferent. Its empty clubs are the ordinary voids of an orthodox escapism, the unvarying nightly vocation that is also creeping annihilation. The town is haunted by the absence of those unseeable others, who have also departed – the suicide kids of Charles Bukowski’s poem, from which the book’s title is taken.

by Ciáran Óg Arnold

REGULAR PRICE ¥5,280  (tax incl.)

softcover
76 pages
160 x 220 mm
color
2015 

SIGNED BY CIÁRAN ÓG ARNOLD

winner of the First Book Award 2015

published by MACK