As you walk down the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris towards the Chambre Des Députés, about a hundred yards or so after the junction with the Boulevard Raspail, there is a little street that slinks away to the left called la Rue St. Dominique. It is one of those anonymous streets you find dotted all over Paris and which invariably has a small café where life is so slow and customers so few you wonder how they survive.

During the winter of 1970, you were wont to find in this café once, or maybe twice a week during the afternoon, two young Irish students making their one cup of coffee last as long as they could and in earnest discussion over the works of Kate and Edna O'Brien ("the old mythologies die hard"), Albert Camus, John McGahern, Samuel Beckett, Julian Green, Georges Bernanos, and Francois Mauriac amongst others. In reality they were discussing their own doubts, fears, hopes and aspirations.

One was, as the English would have it, reading literature for his Doctorate, the other was also reading literature but for a Masters. Both were at the Sorbonne. The memory of these discussions is so vivid, because I was one of those students, the other was fellow Galwegian, Brian O'Rourke.

One of O'Rourke's aspirations, at that time, was to channel all these musings of his into a collection of short stories loosely linked together so as to give the work the texture of a novel, a genre whose structure always fascinated him. This ambition he finally achieved last month with the publication of his novel, which is, in fact, a collection of short stories, "An Island Heart" by that courageous Press, Wynken De Worde, courageous because it is more difficult to publish literary fiction and survive nowadays than it is to sell pork in Jerusalem.

Certainly there are strains of our discussions in the book, but its inherent interest is in the way these ideas have matured in O'Rourke's mind. Some of our old friends have lasted the course, although not all have fared as well. Camus gets a hammering, while Kate O'Brien reaches for the stars. Good old Samuel Beckett remains the enigma he always was. There are some new faces, some real, some creative and this adds immensely to the interest of the book.

There are times though when O'Rourke baffles me, as he did way back then, but he does it in such a way that I wonder whether he has disappeared into the higher echelons of philosophy and aesthetics, as he is more than capable of doing, or whether the tongue is firmly in the cheek, as it is when he sings those wonderful songs of his.

Knowing the genesis of this book - to the point of feeling that I had a share in it - and watching its progression over the last thirty five years, its ups and (mostly) downs, the hard won steps it took on its road to fruition - I am aware of the major achievement it is for the author. It is a monument to persistence.

It is also a brave book, as the author lays his heart and soul bare to us. It will irritate, confuse, delight, and amuse and because of this is open to negative and misconceived criticism. It is, in fact, an absorbing and challenging read. In its pages O'Rourke is questioning our current values and mores. He deserves our full attention.