HOLIDAY BOOKS - The New York Times

By JOSHUA HAMMER.

The New York Times  December 7, 2008 Sunday

''Treeless chunks of rock also loom large in J. M. Synge's ARAN ISLANDS and CONNEMARA (Mercier/Dufour, paper, $22.95), based on the playwright's sojourns in the west of Ireland during the last years of the 19th century. Reissued this fall, Synge's classic travel essays chronicle the harsh, dignified lives of the region's Gaelic-speaking inhabitants, who survived -- barely -- by fishing the storm-tossed waters of Galway Bay. ''The red dresses of the women who cluster round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern richness,'' he writes from the island of Inishmaan, vividly evoking a world of poverty, isolation and endurance, ''and the walls have been toned by the turf-smoke to a soft brown that blends with the gray earth-color of the floor.'' Synge's excursions in currachs -- lightweight canoes piloted by fishermen whose drowned corpses all too often washed up on the islands' beaches -- capture an existence bound inextricably to nature and intimately familiar with death. ''Down in this shallow trough of canvas that bent and trembled with the motion of the men,'' he writes, ''I had a far more intimate feeling of the glory and power of the waves than I have ever known in a steamer.''