Review by New York Times Review
Some of the restless, searching people in Edna O'Brien's stories confront political violence, others reflect on disappointing loves. FRAUGHANS, bostoons, coolth, coatee, turloughs, chambering, doyleys, billio. These words are all plucked from Edna O'Brien's sublime new collection of stories, "Saints and Sinners." To read O'Brien is not only to succumb to her sibyl's vision of other people's fates, it's to fall under the spell of her singular, potent language, which clings to the tactile realities of another century's earthier, guiltier sensibility - to bogs and turf fires, to poverty and proud airs, lust and furtive passions. For half a century, since her first novel, "The Country Girls," was published in 1960, O'Brien has written prose so rich and three-dimensional you can feel it land like rain on new leaves. You want to burrow into it, as one story says, "the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove." That story, "Madame Cassandra," features a married woman desperate to know if her husband has fallen in love with "a buxom young convent girl" young enough to be his granddaughter. This anxious wife, Millie, has walked for an hour in the hot sun to consult a fortuneteller in a caravan. She knows the "hussy" of a convent girl has just been there, but now the psychic won't come to the door. "You are there," Millie thinks to herself. "I know. I know it. I feel your presence in the nonrustle of the thick, dark-red lined curtain." At last, she leaves, with a bitter parting salutation: "Farewell, dear callous lady." But the fortuneteller may not be callous. Perhaps she, like the author, knows that not every wish can, or should, be granted. Over the last two decades, during the economic flowering in which Ireland came to be known as the Celtic Tiger, prosperity was accompanied by a quieting of the country's political troubles. For a while, the history of adversity that has long fed Irish fiction seemed as if it might sink into the past. But with the deepening of the global economic crisis, the specter of difficult times has re-emerged, like an unwanted companion that can't be shaken after all. O'Brien summons that specter in "Shovel Kings," in which a laborer in his mid-50s tells his story to a sympathetic listener at an Irish pub in North London. The man had left Ireland at the age of 15 to shovel trenches for electrical cable, "digging the blue clay of London, as it was then called, blue from leaking gas and sticky, so sticky you had to dip the shovel in a bucket of water every so often, then wedge it in under the soil to try and shift it." Almost bashfully, he tells her of the "fraughans" - tart wild blueberries that grow in Ireland's wooded hills - that he picked with his mother the night he left home, their hands "dyed a deep indigo" from the juice. Mother and son succumbed to a rare fit of riotous laughter until she told him she loved him "more than anything on this earth, more than her hot-tempered husband and her two darling daughters." But, he confesses, this "was too much. It was too much to be told at that young age, and I going away forever." Forty years on, the stain remains. The stories collected here travel across boundaries of time, class, culture and nation. Some touch on politica] violence, others on sordid or thwarted encounters. A handful, like "My Two Mothers," "Green Georgette" and "Old Wounds," revisit places and people from such earlier books as "A Pagan Place" and "Lantern Slides." In "My Two Mothers," a writer living in London receives 40 unsolicited "doyleys" from her disapproving mother back in Ireland, talismans of a life of "unceasing toil." The mother, who mistrusts literature (as did O'Brien's), writes that these bits of fancy lace must be washed and starched. She has sent them forth as if to seed the clouds of her daughter's ambition with grounding feminine duty. In "Old Wounds," two cousins, a man and a woman, reconcile after time cools a family feud. The man tries to teach the woman to hunt woodcocks - "their beaks like crochet hooks" - and lets her practice by shooting at a saucepan lid. But a huge black dog disturbs them, attracted by their picnic lunch, snarling at them "like a phantom or an animal from the underworld" and setting the lid "rattling like billio." Eventually, their hostilities will rekindle. In "Green Georgette," a little girl whose mother (like O'Brien's) once worked in America, suffers as she watches her mother fawn over a haughty lady who has asked them to tea to thank them for giving her cream from their cows when she was entertaining "people of note" at a fancy supper party. But their hostess soon ditches them; they're only being used as cover for her visit to a handsome married doctor. The mother calls the woman's conduct "decidedly fishy," but her daughter can't help admiring their hostess's silver filigree shoes. ("I could have knelt at them.") You sense that when this little girl is a grown woman, she'll be the one running off to the forbidden, handsome man. SUCH a woman appears in "Manhattan Medley," a breathless, careening story set in New York City in the late 1980s or early '90s, where the narrator succumbs to a "simmer" with a famous, married man. Overcome by "the taste, the smell, the touch, the aftertouch and the permeability" of him, she reels through the city like an errant nymph. When they are together, they stroll and stroll, "unable to let go, and melting." She sees them as "the truffle hound and his moll, chambering." What a rollicking verb that is, "to chamber." In the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition is "to behave wantonly or lewdly; to have sexual relations with a person." O'Brien fans the forgotten word back to flame-hot life, and lets it smolder again. In "Inner Cowboy," a story set in Ireland during the age of the swaggering Celtic Tiger, she sets an honest, simple-minded village boy named Curly against a cold, ruthless mogul, McSorley, who has made his fortune in the quarries. The boy loves the "flat, watery land," the "turloughs that filled up in the rain" and the peaceful bogs, "stretching to the horizon, a dun brown, with cushions of moss and sphagnum and the cut turf in little stooks, igloos, with the wind whistling through them." McSorley despoils that landscape. Unlike "lesser men" who might "luxuriate in that maudlin stuff about hunger and privation," he wastes no tears in false nostalgia for the pig's feet and turnips of Christmas dinners past. Nor does he show mercy to poor Curly after the boy accidentally sees something he shouldn't, down at the quarry, while helping a strayed cow birth her calf in the fields above. Innocent and childlike, Curly is afraid "the McSorleys would punish him." He lacks the wit to defend himself, or to see that others are more to blame than he. With "Saints and Sinners," Edna O'Brien continues her tradition of making monuments to her countrymen and countrywomen. She doesn't gild them or encrust them with ornament; rather, she marks their presence in proudly simple declarative stone. Like a turlough in her karsty native land, which fills with the rain, dries out, then fills again, any new book by O'Brien is a recurrent wonder, shimmering with her matchless prose. The stories in O'Brien's latest collection travel across boundaries of time, class, culture and nation. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 15, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The world, if viewed in cliched terms, is indeed populated by the two types of individuals cited in the title of this new collection of short stories by the doyenne of contemporary Irish literature, an acknowledged master of the form. But that is all that is cliched about this splendid book. Witness the story Send My Roots Rain. Miss Gilhooley is a small-town librarian in provincial Ireland who arranges a first-time meeting in Dublin with her favorite poet, who, with no word left anywhere, simply does not show up, leaving Miss Gilhooley to get back on the bus and go back home, defeated. But O'Brien renders this character sympathetic, not pathetic, avoiding stereotype altogether. In the staggering Black Flower, O'Brien reaches into the recent Irish past to capture, in brief pages but intense comprehension of the psychology involved, the long grim chain of reprisals resulting from the bloody triangle of British, Protestant, and Catholic political interests and programs. Eleven stories in total bring literary lovers' rapt attention to this author's clear, immaculate style and her brilliant selection of detail, nimble plot construction, and astute character delineation. Recommend O'Brien along with William Trevor and Alice Munro. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Winner of both Irish and American literary awards, O'Brien will be featured on NPR's Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in New York on May 25, 2011; she will be granting interviews in print, online, and on the radio; and print advertising will appear in the New Yorker, where O'Brien is frequently published.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
O'Brien (The Light of Evening) mixes her trademark lyricism with a brutal depiction of lives marred by violence, whether a pining lover whose life has been upended or a dreamer whose fate leads him to a cold death in the wild. "Sinners" depicts one night in the life of a fusty innkeeper whose prudish disgust at a trio of guests is slowly revealed to have roots in her own loneliness. In "Black Flower" a former prison art teacher drives to the countryside with a newly released veteran of Ireland's freedom fights-and a likely target for revenge. The narrator of "Plunder" is a young girl caught in a civil war who describes cowering in fear and her torments at the hands of the enemy. Another young girl narrates "Green Georgette" and endures the emotional hardship of class divisions, while in "Send My Roots Rain" a woman sits in a Dublin hotel lobby awaiting a reclusive poet and thinks back on love affairs and disappointments. And in "Manhattan Medley" a transplant to the big city begins an affair with a man and describes in rich prose how it has permeated her life. Throughout, tragedy mingles with beauty, yearning with survival, and destruction with moments of grace. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
We feel that we know O'Brien's displaced characters, like Rafferty, of Donegal, from the opening story "Shovel Kings," who in his youth joined hundreds of other able-bodied Irishmen digging the trenches for London's Underground and, sinking into late middle age and still in London, slowly downs his Guinness at Billy Mulligan's Pub. O'Brien's women, who usually own the first-person narrative, are likewise unforgettable. Funny, smart, rueful, and unlucky in love, they wait in Dublin hotel lobbies and wander through foreign cities. One unnamed narrator, in the story "Manhattan Medley," tells us, "Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair...in a forest or a cornfield...somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In the city there are places to remind us of what has been." VERDICT In her best stories, O'Brien conveys the trajectory of a life so seamlessly that we almost forget these are words on a page. Her longtime readers will be pleased, and those encountering her stories for the first time will be grateful for a wonderful find. [See Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
