Edna O’Brien pays tribute to her friend and fellow writer Philip Roth.

Edna O’Bruen and Philip Roth

The Great Comic Literary Conquistador: Edna O’Brien pays tribute to her friend and fellow writer Philip Roth.

In her poem, ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’, Emily Dickinson wrote of the mind’s many niches and the spectral encounters of night. I have been thinking of the forbidding rooms of Philip Roth, a man so studiously private in life, and as an author zanily, volubly confessional. He set forth his own manifesto in a few terse words: ‘Fiction is not a beauty contest and fiction is not autobiography.’ Were he to write an autobiography, he maintained, it would make Beckett’s The Unnamable read like one of the rich narratives of Charles Dickens.

The Art of Fiction/ Edna O’Brien

© 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 / Stranger in Our Midst

 

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.

In brief / The Seduction; Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls; James and Nora – review XLISTO 2020

 

‘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.

 

Hundreds of people protested in the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, on July 29.ISRAEL FUGUEMANN (CUARTOSCURO

ELECTIONS IN VENEZUELA

Inside and outside Venezuela, pressure intensifies for a verifiable vote count

At least two people are dead and over 46 arrested as the Chavista government moves to repress the street demonstrations spreading throughout the country

Juan Diego Quesada

Caracas, 30 July 2024

Public anger over suspicions that the government committed fraud in Sunday’s presidential election has spread across Venezuela. Statues of Hugo Chávez, the founder of the left-wing populist movement known as Chavismo, were knocked down with sledgehammers in three cities. Protesters decapitated one of the statues and dragged the bronze head through the streets on a chain tied to a motorcycle, evoking what the Greek mythological hero Achilles did with the corpse of the Trojan prince Hector in Troy. People applauded as they passed.

‘Hard to believe’ / Venezuela election result met with suspicion abroad

Nicolás Maduro

‘Hard to believe’: Venezuela election result met with suspicion abroad

Nicolás Maduro faces calls to publish transparent breakdown of vote but allies hail his apparent victory

Sam Jones

Mon 29 Jul 2024 12.37 BST

Nicolás Maduro’s apparent re-election as Venezuela’s president has been met with scepticism, suspicion and calls for a transparent and detailed breakdown of the vote in Sunday’s controversial poll.

Maduro declared winner by government-controlled authority

 

Venezuela election: Maduro declared winner by government-controlled authority

Result with 80% of votes counted goes against opinion polls that suggested incumbent was facing defeat

Patricia Torres in Caracas and Sam Jones in Madrid

Monday 29 July 3024

Nicolás Maduro has been declared the winner of Venezuela’s presidential election by the government-controlled electoral authority – a result that appeared to dash opposition hopes of ending his authoritarian, socialist rule after 25 years, and which was immediately challenged by rivals and several governments in the region and beyond.

‘She’s learning that, every time she gets too emotional, the rug gets pulled out from under her’ … Dion in Nice in 2017. Photograph: Toni Anne Barson/Getty Images

Music documentary

‘In one scene, Celine Dion’s dancing. Next, she’s on a gurney’: making the film about the singer’s tragic condition

The star has Stiff Person Syndrome, meaning moments of elation can trigger potentially lethal spasms. We meet the director who captured the singer’s Las Vegas home life – and one shocking attack that almost killed her

Shaad D'Souza

Wed 26 Jun 2024 11.11 EDT

Irene Taylor has travelled the world to tell stories about sexual abuse scandals and oil spills, staunch conservationists and blind Nepalese farmers trying to regain their sight. The Portland-based film-maker is not someone you would usually associate with celebrity-obsessed mainstream America. But decidedly cushier environs are the setting for her latest project: a documentary about Canadian pop singer Celine Dion and her struggle to contend with a rare neurological disorder called Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS). The film is called I Am: Celine Dion.

Minor White / Photos

Minor White

PHOTOS

 

A sign in the Russian city of Volgograd welcoming visitors to Stalingrad, its former name.STRINGER 

WAR IN UKRAINE

Kremlin trying to change Volgograd’s name back to Stalingrad

Vladimir Putin’s party is rehabilitating the image of the former Soviet dictator and comparing the war in Ukraine with the bloody battle of World War II

El Kremlin trata de recuperar el nombre de Stalingrado

Javier G. Cuesta

Moscow, 2 February 2023

Vladimir Putin once confessed to the American filmmaker Oliver Stone that “Stalin was a product of his time.” The Soviet dictator was, in the eyes of the Russian president, a historical figure victim of “excessive demonization.” Now, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities are pressing to rename the city of Volgograd and call it Stalingrad, as it was known until 1961. The president is visiting the city on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of a tide-turning victory in the war against Nazi Germany. The glories of the past, even those attributed to Stalin, have become a very valuable political asset for Putin as he seeks to justify his actions in Ukraine.

Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali / Review by Lucy Scholes

 

Re-Covered: The Protest Writing of South Africa

By Lucy Scholes

 July 25, 2019

RE-COVERED

In her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

“The Republic of South Africa is a country divided into two worlds,” wrote Miriam Tlali in the opening chapter of her debut novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, which was published in 1975. “The one, a white world—rich, comfortable, for all practical purposes organized—a world in fear, armed to the teeth,” she explains. “The other, a black world; poor, pathetically neglected and disorganized—voiceless, oppressed, restless, confused and unarmed—a world in transition, irrevocably weaned from all tribal ties.” Set at Metropolitan Radio, a busy furniture and electric-goods store in Johannesburg, Muriel at Metropolitan depicts the collision of these two worlds. It is narrated by one of the white-owned store’s black employees, a typist named Muriel, who recounts, in dogged, meticulous detail, the reality of life in the “black world,” the residents of which live on “shifting sands” as every parliamentary session brings in “fresh, more oppressive laws” that seek to dehumanize nonwhite South Africans while maintaining the power and privilege of their oppressors. The book is fictionalized autobiography, the verisimilitude of which can be traced to Tlali’s own experience working as a clerk-typist in a Johannesburg store. “The sunny Republic of South Africa,” Muriel notes derisively, “the white man’s paradise.”

The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti / Review by Lucy Scholes

 

LORENZA MAZZETTI, 1950S. (UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER, COURTESY OF SHELLEY BOETTCHER)

Re-Covered: The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti

By Lucy Scholes

 January 7, 2020

RE-COVERED

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.