1. The narrators have a mordant contempt for everyone and everything, including themselves.

2. McInerney faces these questions through Patrick, who is the most recent of a line of self-deprecating McInerney narrators.

3. For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, chivalry, and destiny riffs on romance, while the tales of working-class narrators are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sexual deviance, and slapstick.

4. Share this: Soon after translator Pablo Strauss approached me with the project of translating my first book, a collection of stories entitled Atavismes, we dove in and ended up with what I thought was an amazingly similar book.The distinctive voices of its thirteen idiosyncratic narrators remained in the new language.