Tunnel Vision

Review The answer lies in Breathnach's self-lacerating honesty and his skill in arranging fragments to create the momentum of a short story ... Overall the book is a high-risk enterprise. But its innovative impulse is feisty and thought provoking. And Breathnach is a winningly unguarded narrator, owning up to fibs, thefts, plagiarism and posturing, while simultaneously staking his claim as a serious-minded cultural commentator ... The book resonates as the story of many a twentysomething ... Tunnel Vision is written in that spirit: trying things out, not always successfully, but with inventiveness, candour and the promise of more to come. -- Blake Morrison ― Guardian Kevin Breathnach is making what seem to me substantial contributions to the field of essay-writing. He brings a keen sensitivity to the practice of criticism and a superb critical intelligence to his own intimate personal narratives. His essays demonstrate not only an impressive depth of learning, but an even more necessary depth of feeling. He is certainly one of the most interesting writers working in Ireland today. ― Sally Rooney Blessed with a bracing critical intelligence, an urbane comic sensibility, and an extraordinary prose style, Kevin Breathnach is among the most original and exciting non-fiction writers to emerge in recent years. ― Mark O'Connell An extraordinarily intelligent, mobile and sensitive body of writing on subjects as wide-ranging as the work of Berenice Abbott, desire, pretentiousness, the Goncourt Brothers, loneliness, memory, and attachment ... Powerful. -- Kate Briggs ― The Tangerine The latest example - following Sin�ad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - of Irish writers dazzling with essays ... When Breathnach does choose honesty, it is unflinching ... So enjoyable to read. ― Guardian Recalls the spirit of Irish Modernism ... He's imbibed the masters of the form, writing perceptively about Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, and cultivating a way with digression and drollery that makes him sound like a millennial Geoff Dyer ... Moving ... This singular debut suggests that in the essay he's found his form, but it will still be intriguing to see if he reapplies his vision to fiction in the future. -- Max Liu ― Financial Times His prose style is a studied blend of literary registers, combining the abstractedly mechanical didacticism of an exhibition catalogue with the unhurried languor of the travel writer, and a sprinkling of Sebaldian lugubriousness ... He is acutely sensitive to the role of aspiration and artifice in shaping the artistic persona; how the accumulation of cultural capital entails a certain vulgar acquisitiveness ... The conspicuous erudition is mitigated by a disarming self-awareness as Breathnach frequently sends up his own earnestness [during] the naive hinterland between adolescence and mature adulthood ...'Growing up in public' is widely held to be unseemly, but in its best moments this candid portrait - of the young writer as flaneur, fanboy, sometime chronic masturbator and occasional cad - makes a good case for ditching that taboo. -- Houman Barekat ― Irish Times Breathnach shatters the essay form completely. Opening with a poem, ending with words that seem to visually dissolve on the page, Tunnel Vision can loosely be divided into six personal narratives set in Munich, Korea, Paris and Madrid, and six critical essays, but none can be clearly defined ... Some moments are sublime, particularly two essays on photography, where Breathnach takes a scalpel to self-portraits by Berenice Abbott and Andr� Kert�sz with startling deftness and insight. Other essays are more daring. ― New Statesman A deft and seductive blend of literary criticism and life-writing through essays that take in Berenice Abbott, visual culture, mephedrone and more. ― AnOther Magazine A shape-shifting debut. Daring. It does not conform to the codes and conventions of what is traditionally thought of as the essay . These essays are fragmentary, and ep