August is a Wicked Month
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
In my opinion O’Brien is a less happy and less moral Barbara Pym, she’s a MUCH happier and sexier Anita Brookner and for some reason I want to throw in W. It left me with very mixed feelings about Ellen, whilst she was in France I wanted to go up on her, shake by the shoulders and tell her not to be so stupid but whilst in the UK I wanted to give her a big hug.
Early on in the novel there is a brief reference to her having spent an “awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed” but with no further explanation, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. It’s excellent… I liked the cool restrained style of the prose and was stunned by the revelation that changes the whole feel of the story. She tells her new acquaintances that she’s English to avoid uncomfortable conversations about religion and Catholicism. O'Brien doesn't set her up as some blameless heroine, although she's swept along with the activities of this jet-setting crowd.This book filled me with an incredible sense of sadness, as in some ways I found myself in complete undersranding of ellen's emotions. If you want to see how a masterful author can develop a character so real seeming that you want to befriend, help, and guide her, this book does that and more.
I've read the trilogy's first book and I thought that O'Brien once again captured the inner feelings of women in Ireland during the time particularly their relationships with men and their place in society as a whole.
She has sex on the brain and flirts with almost every male she sees, including the man sitting beside her on the plane. Her estranged husband and child go on a camping holiday to Wales and rather than sit around stuffy London, Ellen books a flight to the Côte d'Azure, looking for sex—pure and simple. I have only been this wrong about a book, once before, when I thought The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns was a “light romance. For a while, I thought maybe O'Brien was showing the emptiness of a life based on liquor, sex, and celebrity. Perhaps because I'm not Irish Catholic, I don't feel sufficiently guilty about life to truly understand Ellen.
The central character is so lost, that you ache for her while at the same time you'd like to slap her and tell her to get over it (though I can't honestly say my choices would have been any different). She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Given the significant esteem in which O'Brien appears to be held, I will be intrigued to read others' views as it seems the book must have powers to touch other people in ways that just didn't resonate with me. O'Brien has an exciting way of showing her character's flaws, lumps and bumps without taking away any of their mystique.
She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O'Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. For example, on page 7, Ellen tells the milk boy that she has never opened wide (maybe her heart or her thighs or her vagina) to a man before. After a number of false starts with hotel staff, Ellen falls in with a louche crowd of hangers-on surrounding an American film star.
A week into her leave, a male friend she’s known for about a year drops by and kisses her in the garden.When her husband takes their son on a camping trip she bounces around her house for a bit, has a desultory sexual encounter with a conflicted neighbor, and then decides to go somewhere exciting. She is separated from her husband, lonely, and still figuring out what she wants in life - which is fine, normal, and should be talked about, especially at the time it was published in 1965. while well written and know doubt bring pleasure to a lot of readers I did not enjoy reading it no criticism is intended reading and what someone else will enjoy is an almost impossible task due to the many variables that come into play.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
-
Sold by: Fruugo