Reviews

Another beautiful offering from Cynan Jones telling of a day in drought plagued rural Wales when a pregnant cow leaves the barn and wonders the fields. In that day Jones explores the farmers’ lives both in the family and the community. He captures a world, a lifetime, in a moment.

His beautiful prose paints a nuanced picture of the natural world and the rolling Welsh farmland. The stories and events that happen happen to all of us in a way from childhood to old age, life and death. Good things come in small packages.

leerazer's review against another edition

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3.0

Hard English prose on a Welsh farm. The Long Dry might refer to: a drought afflicting the land; the daylong thirsty wandering of a lost cow about to calve; the sexual and emotional difficulties of Gareth and his wife Kate. Set during the Cow's Day of Wandering, with peeks forward and back.

Jones beats the reader over the head with Death. Of a calf, cows, parent, rabbit, dog, child. Of romantic desire, intimacy, the ideal self. At the last he tries to make up for it, fresh rain and rekindled vision. Nope, I'm not having it. An unhappy sketch of life, well written, particularly a scene of two brothers and a dying rabbit.

levineaviya's review against another edition

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3.0

Oh, de kwetsbaarheid van dit boekje. Ik was een beetje bang dat ik teleurgesteld zou worden na 'Inham', maar ook hier zijn alle details en onopmerkzaamheden (is dat een woord?) juist zo overbelicht dat het die kwetsbaarheid zo mooi weergeeft. De manier waarop Cynan die terugkerende herinneringen in de gedachten van de boer naar voren laat komen paste in het concept en maakte het einde adembenemend. Toch vond ik soms dat er iets te veel werd gedacht en kon ik even niet meegaan. Dat is misschien ook wel het risico van zo'n kleine, poëtische roman.

shimmer's review against another edition

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5.0

Simply, this is a magnificent novel. It's a gem of compression and poetic focus, cramming so much life — family life, human life, animal life, plant life, the life of an abandoned car in a field and a rickety van still on the road — into barely over one hundred pages. More astounding is the deep care and respect paid to each of those lives: nothing is slighted, however slight it might seem beside the "big" events of the novel, and nothing is shied away from either in the birth and death and blood of farm life. It is big-hearted and clear-eyed, and risky that way because (and I won't spoil anything) there are moments and details dropped casually into the flow of the novel that in any other book would have been the book, and it's easy to imagine a reader so unsettled by those moments that Jones might not win them back from that jolt as they want instead to follow that cast aside story. It's such a brave move, to unsettle our expectations of what "matters" most but it's all of a piece with a novel that treats all life — and all death — so equitably.

lee_reads's review against another edition

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5.0

119 pages about a welsh farmer looking for one of his cows in a heatwave are actually 119 beautifully written pages about life, memories, love, marriage, nature and yes, cows.
The descriptions are so beautiful I felt as though I was walking with Gareth as he looked for his cow.
A poetic, sad and wonderful read.
Very moving.

bartvanovermeire's review against another edition

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5.0

Cynan Jones, 'The long dry': 105 pages of distilled language, not a single excessive word and still so much life in this book. A real gem. Book of the year? Could very well be.

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