Edna O’Brien performs a sort of tight-rope act, strung between the stream-like nature of her prose and the painful shards of her story. Brutality stomps through the pages of her new novel, astonishing in its recurrence and terrifying in the variable justifications that underpin it.
In 1976, I sat in a Dublin bookshop, taken hostage by Caithleen, her Dada who drank and hadn’t come home, and her poor Mama off on a fateful row in the lake. In the Country Girls trilogy, Edna O’Brien’s boisterous prose grabs and never lets go.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized what I’d been searching for all along. An avid reader, I absorbed a variety of books during my childhood and adolescence. These were carefully screened by my well-meaning but stifling folks, who paled at the thought me reading about sex and infidelities, teenage…
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