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