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The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm
The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm
The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm
Audiobook7 hours

The Farmer's Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm

Written by John Connell

Narrated by Alan Smyth

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

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About this audiobook

For fans of The Shepherd's Life, a poignant memoir-and #1 Irish bestseller-about a wayward son's return home to his family's farm, and how he found a new beginning in an age-old world

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm.

Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day-cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when illness breaks out, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.

The Farmer's Son is the story of a calving season, and the story of a man who emerges from depression to find hope in the place he least expected to find it. It is the story of Connell's life as a farmer, and of his relationship with the community of County Longford, with his faith, with the animals he tends, and, above all, with his father.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 7, 2019
ISBN9781684574063

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I may be very wrong about this, but when I read a book written by a knowledgeable Irish farmer who raises beef cattle (and he tells us their breeds), I have to wonder why the cover photo is of Holsteins (dairy cows). But never mind, that's not Connell's fault. Just saying.

    I loved James Rebanks' "The Shepherd's Life," so hoped for something like. Sort of, but well short.

    John Connell, at 29, has returned to his family farm in Ireland - in return for a place to live and write, back with his aging parents, he works - oh lord, how he works - to help run the farm. He has lived in Canada, in Australia, been a journalist and a film producer, and now is back home, in a strangely enervated state. Now he births calves and lambs, and often watches them sicken and die. He moves manure, hauls feed, suffers from relentlessly cold and drenching weather, and fights with his self-righteous, demanding, ill-tempered old man. Or tries not to, with varying success. He seems to be pretty miserable. In what little he reveals of his previous life, he sounds like he was miserable then too. The tone of the writing is almost unfailingly affectless, flat, objective. He describes horrifically difficult births and diseases that nearly - or do - kill cows, ewes, and/or their offspring, in the same emotional register as he describes the ancient history of aurochs. He recalls a bullfight he attended in Spain, blandly depicting the torture of the bull and noting in Hemingwayesque language how "taut and strong" the matador's legs were, his turns "true and brave." (ugh) He also notes that his fiancee wouldn't eat the meat from the dead bull, but passes zero comment or judgment. He writes about a morally monstrous big game hunter in Australia in carefully neutered terms. Has he *no* emotional or moral reaction to these things? He can and does approach tenderness when he manages to rescue a dying animal, and speaks of reading the nature of a cow when he looks into her eyes. The animals are individuals (though they do not give them names), whom he knows, respects, and cares for. He decries American factory farming, and muses that if he takes over the farm, he would want to go the organic route, and clings to the European style of small-scale farms that allows the animals to live healthy, decent lives, well-treated to the end. And yet... when he and his father have a nasty blowup, he seems to have little qualm about retreating to his room and refusing to undertake any chores, leaving his Da and Mam to take care of everything, even when a lambing goes wrong, all in the name of "standing up for himself." He manages to overlook dead or dying stock in trouble in the field, he doesn't get around to checking on a group of cows in a distant pasture even as their food runs short (they're fine, he reports when his mother angrily orders him to go out there). He goes for long runs, he talks philosophy with the local priest. He broods.

    It is finally revealed that he has emerged from a 6-month stint of deep depression and mania, and is just finding his feet. Though he professes to find his life on the farm beautiful and important, and intends to try to continue to be both a farmer and a writer, this anhedonic, almost anesthetized, book isn't encouraging. Yes, it's probably honest; it's small Irish farming warts and all. But as he seems to be so lacking in emotion as he explores it, he failed to evoke much emotion in me either.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intimate look into one family's traditional cattle and sheep ranch in rural Ireland. An unusually beautiful account of a very demanding way of life. I leave the book with a new appreciation for cows and bulls.