Showing posts with label Edna O'Brien. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Old Wounds by Edna O´Brien

Photograph By Simon Burch

Old Wounds

by Edna O'Brien

BIOGRAPHY

1 June 2009

We didn’t have a flower garden. There were a few clumps of devil’s pokers—spears of smoldering crimson when in bloom, and milky yellow when not. But my mother’s sister and her family, who lived closer to the mountain, had a ravishing garden: tall festoons of pinkish-white roses, a long low border of glorious golden tulips, and red dahlias that, even in hot sun, exuded the coolness of velvet. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the perfume of the roses vanquished the smell of dung from the yard, where the sow and her young pigs spent their days foraging and snortling. My aunt was so fond of the piglets that she gave each litter pet names, sometimes the same pet names, which she appropriated from the romance novels she borrowed from the library and read by the light of a paraffin lamp, well into the night.

Philip Roth / A Conversation With Edna O’Brien

Edna O’Brien

A Conversation With Edna O'Brien

By PHILIP ROTH

18 November 1984

he Irish writer Edna O'Brien, who has lived in London now for many years, moved recently to a wide boulevard of imposing 19th- century facades, a street that in the 1870's, when it was built, was renowned, she tells me, for its mistresses and kept women. The real estate agents have taken to calling this corner of the Maida Vale district ''the Belgravia of tomorrow''; at the moment it looks a little like a builder's yard because of all the renovation going on.

Edna O’Brien

She did not suffer a fool or hypocrite and loved a good laugh’: novelist Edna O’Brien

Ed Vulliamy

Sun 4 Aug 2024

An email correspondence about Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić led to Ed Vulliamy’s unexpected bond with the Irish author, who died last week aged 93

At first, I thought it was a practical joke, or that perhaps there were two Edna O’Briens: one was the greatest living woman writing in English (as Philip Roth described her), while the other was someone who happened to have the same name. An email arrived out of the blue from “Edna O’Brien”, wanting to meet and discuss a book with which she thought I might be able to help. I replied, delighted to oblige, trying to ask discreetly whether or not this was “the” Edna O’Brien, whose work I had admired for decades.

A boy in the forest by Edna O'Brien

A BOY IN THE FOREST

By Edna O'Brien

BIOGRAPHY

27 January 2002

The Kinderschreck. That’s what the German man called him when he stole the gun and was caught and had to be banished. Before that he was Michan, after a saint, and then Mich, his mother’s pet, and after that, when he went to the place, he was Boy, and then Child, when Father Damien had him helping with the flowers and the cruets in the sacristy, and then later still he was K, short for O’Kane, when his hoodlum times began.

Photograph by Christopher Anderson

The Love Object

by Edna O’Brien

BIOGRAPHY

Edna O’Brien / El objeto del amor

He simply said my name. He said “Martha,” and once again I could feel it happening. My legs trembled under the big white tablecloth and my head became fuzzy, though I was not drunk. It’s how I fall in love. He sat opposite—the love object. Elderly. Gray eyes. Dull blond hair. The hair was graying on the outside and he had spread the outer gray ribs across the width of his head as if to disguise the blond, the way some men disguise a patch of baldness. He had what I call a religious smile—an inner smile that came on and off, governed, as it were, by his private joy in what he heard or saw: a remark I made, the waiter removing the cold dinner plates that served as ornament and bringing warmed ones of a different design, the nylon curtain blowing inward and brushing my bare, summer-ripened arm. It was the end of a warm London summer.

The Art of Fiction/ Edna O’Brien

undefined © EDNA O'BRIEN.

Edna O’Brien

The Art of Fiction No. 82

Interviewed by Shusha Guppy

ISSUE 92, SUMMER

Edna O’Brien was born in the west of Ireland in a small village she describes as “enclosed, fervid, and bigoted.” Literature was taboo, and those books that penetrated the parish were loaned by the page. O’Brien’s father was a farmer who “carried on in that glorious line of profligate Irishmen.” Her mother, who had worked as a maid in Brooklyn, always yearned to return to America. O’Brien’s childhood was unhappy, but she believes it gave her both the need and the impetus to write. “Writing,” she says, “is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.”

‘A beacon of brazenness and defiance’: Edna O’Brien remembered by Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and more

Critics rarely picked up on how funny her writing was’ … O’Brien at her London home in 2019. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

‘A beacon of brazenness and defiance’: Edna O’Brien remembered by Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and more

The acclaimed author of The Country Girls, which was burned in the market square of her home town, has died aged 93. Here, Irish novelists pay tribute to a titanic figure who liberated their country’s fiction

Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Megan Nolan, Eimear McBride and Alex Clark

MONDAY 29 JULY 2024

Anne Enright: ‘She was all in, every time’

O’Brien blew open the possibilities for Irish fiction, not because of the taboos she broke but because she had broken them as a woman. In 1960, her first novel The Country Girls was burned in the market square of her home town of Scarriff, and every Irish woman who has published since is indebted to the hurt she took on there.

Edna O´Brien

Obituary

Edna O’Brien obituary

Novelist who scandalised her native Ireland with The Country Girls, and explored the lives of women who love and suffer

Luke Dodd

Monday 20 July 2024

Before Edna O’Brien, Irish female writers tended to come from the preserve of the “big house” or enjoyed the kind of privilege that made a life of writing possible. And by and large, their books dealt with genteel themes and conformed to recognisable genres and narrative forms.

Edna O'Brien, 1971
Photo by John Minihan

Stranger in Our Midst

James Wood
18 April 2016

People talk about “late style” in classical music, but what might “late style” in contemporary fiction look like? In late work by Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and now Edna O’Brien, you can detect a certain impatience with formal or generic proprieties; a wild, dark humor; a fearlessness in assertion and argument; a tonic haste in storytelling, so that the usual ground-clearing and pacing and evidentiary process gets accelerated or discarded altogether, as if it were (as it so often can be) mere narrative palaver that is stopping us from talking about what really matters. In much of that late work, there is a slightly thinned atmosphere, the prose a little less rich and hospitable than previously, the characters less full or persuasive, a general sense of dimmed surplus—but not in Edna O’Brien’s astonishing new novel, “The Little Red Chairs” (Little, Brown), her seventeenth. O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. It’s simply a remarkable novel.

‘Love is a paradox’: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1931.

In brief: The Seduction; Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls; James and Nora – review

A brave memoir on love and addiction, a rocky tale of therapy and transference, and a portrait of the artist as a husband

Hannah Beckerman
Sun 21 Jun 2020 11.00 BST

In a new BBC documentary, the Country Girls writer tells how
she travelled to Africa to research the plight of the young girls
who were taken by a terror group

Irish author Edna O’Brien admits smuggling £15,000 in her UNDERWEAR to Nigeria in a bid to find kidnapped girls

BIOGRAPHY

Lynne Kelleher

7 Jul 2019, 9:00

IRISH author Edna O’Brien has revealed how she smuggled £15,000 in her underwear into Nigeria last year during a mission to track down kidnapped Boko Haram schoolgirls.

In a new BBC documentary, the Country Girls writer tells how she travelled to Africa to research the plight of the young classmates snatched by the terror group from a boarding school in the village of Chibok four years ago.

Dear Mr Joyce / An essay by Edna O’Brien

James Joyce

Dear Mr Joyce: an essay by Edna O’Brien

As Ulysses turns 100, O’Brien tries to pin down what its extraordinary author was really like

Edna O'Brien
Wednesday 2 February 2022

Was he garrulous? Did he wear a topcoat? Did he hanker after renown? Such questions we ask ourselves about the deceased great, trying in our forlorn way to identify with them, some point of contact, some malady, some caprice that brings us and them closer. Such questions are not satisfactorily answered in works of fiction, writers being by necessity conjurors, ex-lovers are unreliable, friends overreaching, enemies bilious, so the closest we can get to a legendary figure is from letters. Letters are like the lines on a face, testimonial. In this case they are the access to the man that encased the mind, which housed the genius of James Joyce.

20 Great Interviews / Edna O’Brien

Edna O'Brien

20 Great Interviews:

Edna O’Brien

Susan O'Grady Fox, Contibutor

October / November 2005

From the publication of her very first book, The Country Girls (1960) to her most recent books, Edna O’Brien’s works have gained wide acclaim, particularly among American readers. One of Ireland’s most influential writers, she is famous for her rich and sensuous prose, and her books often deal with disappointments in love.

In 1986, she talked to Susan O’Grady Fox about growing up in Taumgraney, County Clare, and her early influences.

Edna O'Brien

My life in Ireland as a young girl was quite lonely and was devoid of anything literary. There were no books at all in my house. My mother was most mistrustful of the written word.

But for some reason I always had this total vocation to writing. I loved writing compositions. I would actually ask the other girls to let me write theirs.

Our house was about a mile from the village, and it’s kind of pathetic, but on the way home from school I was so excited about doing these essays that I used to sit down on the road, or on a wall, and start writing.

The Traveling Players were the other big excitement in those days. They came about twice a year and put on melodramas, always melodramas: “East Lane,” “Murder in the Old Red Barn,” and those sorts of plays. I thought they were the most truly vivid, wonderful people I had ever seen.

I dreamed of going away with them, so I wrote a little play called “Dracula’s Daughter” in which the girl went to Dracula to see if she could go away with him. When I think of it in retrospect, obviously it was complete romantic masochism.

So these were the sort of excitements of my youth.

The biggest stimulation was nature. The landscape was utterly and randomly beautiful — the bog lilies, wild irises, oak trees, ash trees — all the different trees. Then there’s the light; the evening light in Ireland seems to me to be the most beautiful thing I have ever known, and as a child I sort of imbibed it. I spent so much time out of doors, as much as I could. That was the sort of love of, and if you like, companionship of nature, I had.

Away from nature, literature and the inner self, I felt that nearly everything one did back then was wrong. I had a sense of sin and a sense of guilt just drummed into me by people who had had it drummed into them. I’m not blaming them as much as saying, just tough luck.

Religion was vitally important. Holy pictures hanging in the kitchen and every night the rosary said. I remember the kneeling down, it was a tiled floor and it was very cold, there was just one fire and just one lamp — no electricity — and there were mice. They used to come out of the shoe closet. We’d be kneeling, praying and my mother would jump up screaming because of the mice.

Then we went to Mass, of course, Holy Communion and Confession. The religious life wasn’t as in other countries where people pray and wear medals and all that — it was, so to speak, part of one’s fears, and feelings and fantasies and everything about sexual desires were all smothered over.

I remember once seeing a couple who had been courting for five or ten years. They never met except on Sunday in the afternoon, they would go for a walk — she was quite fat, this woman, she had a kind of bustle — and I remember once hearing the man, he sort of touched her on the back and said, “You have a big backside.” I thought it was the most sinful thing I had ever heard. I did not think it was crude though. I thought it was sinful. That’s how regressive it was.

The women — I can remember them all very clearly in my mind. I can go up the street of the village I lived in and think of them all swathed in clothes and knitted stockings. I think that’s where I must have conceived some love of glamour, because there was no glamour at all. Glamour was a ticket to “you know what,” to sin. So that formed part of my character and part of my fear.

I think that a lot of people who leave Ireland, and indeed many who stay there, have that [love-hate] syndrome. Love-hate seems to apply more to Ireland than to any other country. It’s amazing because it does haunt you. You do want to go back and at the same time, when you go back, you realize that you feel constrained and constricted ♦

IRISH AMERICA

Friday, May 1, 2020

Books that made me / Edna O'Brien / 'Reading Charles Darwin dislodged my religious education'

Edna O'Brien, 1971

by Cecil Beaton

Books

that made me

Edna O'Brien: 'Reading Charles Darwin dislodged my religious education'

The Irish novelist on reading prayer books as a child, her admiration for Silent Spring author Rachel Carson and how Chekhov ‘saved her sanity’

BIOGRAPHY

Edna O'Brien
Friday 1 May 2020

The book I am currently reading

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. A young Dutch author perfectly delineates the life of a farm community in all its strange variations.

The book that changed my life

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The setting was fairly familiar but the thrall of the language and the intensity of feeling gave a whole new meaning to life and introduced me to the alchemy and mystery of creativity.

The book I wish I’d written

Any story by Anton Chekhov. The first Chekhov story I ever read was ‘The Steppe’. Books we most need come to us in a time of extremity. I read several pages of it in a cornfield in Ireland. My two sons were frisking about, my husband was silent and we had stopped to have tea from a flask, having just had a bitter parting from my family. I was on the point of leaving my husband but feared I would not have the courage or the means. Chekhov’s story was that of a young boy being brought to a distant part of Russia to boarding school and though he was missing his mother, he was also observing everything around him and listening to the merchants’ droll conversations. He submerged his grief in the wonders all about him. What was uncanny for me was how convincing and immediate the story felt. I still have that edition with an inscription I wrote on the flyleaf, “This story redeemed my sanity.” It was dated September 1962.

The book that influenced me

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. He is a master of compression.

The book I think is most underrated

The works of Rachel Carson. A marine biologist, she went to the depths of the ocean and foresaw the ruin mankind was, and is, bringing to the environment. The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring are masterpieces.

The book that changed my mind

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It dislodged much of my religious education.

The book that made me cry

Many books make me cry, but when I read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope I cried that both she and her husband – the poet Osip – had suffered interrogation then been exiled to Siberia for no more reason than that he was a great poet and she was his ally.

The book that made me laugh

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. The folly and scheming of those four gallants was a long way from Heathcliff but they captivated and charmed me, partly because they were such bunglers and because of how Dickens loved them and explored every corner of human fallibility.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Don Quixote by Cervantes.

My earliest reading memory

The prayer books in our house, which included some of the most succinct and beautifully written parables of the gospels.

My comfort read

I do not read for comfort. I read to be quickened, enlightened and brought to the frontiers of feeling.

The book I give as a gift

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. It’s glorious.

THE GUARDIAN