Exquisitely crafted novel. And I do mean BEAUTIFULLY written — images, word choice, lovely repetition of motifs. It really does deserve all the plaudiExquisitely crafted novel. And I do mean BEAUTIFULLY written — images, word choice, lovely repetition of motifs. It really does deserve all the plaudits and would not at all surprise me if it takes the big award. It’s a debut novel, for heaven’s sakes!
The audio is also beautifully read.
It would be silly to summarize. It deserves to be discovered in its own right....more
Powerful. Especially the last chapter, or actually the Epilogue. The three books of the trilogy are so different, reflecting different periods of the Powerful. Especially the last chapter, or actually the Epilogue. The three books of the trilogy are so different, reflecting different periods of the principal characters’ lives. It would be worth rereading all three. These audiobooks were all read by the author and I loved her presence throughout. The passion of her reading of the epilogue blew me away, in fact....more
**spoiler alert** I found the second installment of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy much more absorbing than the first. Perhaps it was becaus**spoiler alert** I found the second installment of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy much more absorbing than the first. Perhaps it was because I knew the characters better and they’d grown on me. But I think the real reason is that the romance between Cait and her older lover Eugene allows O’Brien to dig so deeply into the impoverished souls of her Irish characters, shaped as they were by experiences of brutal loving family, brutal absolute religion, brutal drink. Still O’Brien’s characters are complex and none is completely irredeemable, although Cait’s father comes close.
The love affair between Cait and Eugene explores the connection between two people attracted to each others differences—age, background, sophistication, relative wealth—until they aren’t, until the gulf separating them becomes too great. Cait dislikes Eugene’s friends and comes to feel he is only truly hers when they are making love. He tires of her emotionality, however well earned from the abrupt loss of her mother and her brutish drunk of a father. Eugene tells Cait that she needs to grow up and learn to control her emotions, because « the world is not just us ». If Eugene is, as Cait accuses him, so sure of his rightness, she is not hesitant in trying to manipulate him into telling her what she wants to hear, into doing what she wants. I felt great sympathy for both of them.
By the end of the novel, Cait and her best friend Baba are heading for London. Cait has waited to the very last moment of departure believing Eugene will come and get her, she will run to him, and their stable disequilibrium will be restored. Thankfully he doesn’t come. As he said, she needs to grow up. Baba worries that Cait will persist even in London in reading and wearing flat shoes, evidence to Baba of being « a right idgit ». But Cait tells us that, in fact, she was just finding her feet.
O’Brien writes with a wonderful lyricism and this audio version of the series is read affectingly by herself.
It took me awhile to get into this novel but once I did it absorbed me completely. The novel reminded me of John Lanchester’s Capital, another novel oIt took me awhile to get into this novel but once I did it absorbed me completely. The novel reminded me of John Lanchester’s Capital, another novel of London up to the minute, serious but also comedic, slightly ripped-from-the-headlines but in a good way.
O’Hagan is a Scottish writer and I’m so glad to have discovered him. He is a skillful and elegant writer, I think. He has tremendous mastery of his characters (there’s a list at the start of the book which I found helpful), of the many walks of British life they represent. The story traces bad behavior in all the -isms, money laundering, human trafficking, influence peddling, and more. Yet O’Hagan writes his characters with heart, there are some bad ones but most are caught up in their failings without having quite thought through to the consequences that await them. The book is also centrally concerned with a decent, privileged white man who wills coming to terms with his complicity in the workings of the world and the consequences for those who are not white, not rich, not connected to any levers of power. This experience devastates him in a way that I thought was brilliantly expressed and believable. Just how much reality can any of us admit to consciousness?
Great book, highly recommended, and not a downer despite the foregoing....more
My second Ginsberg novel. I preferred the first, The Dry Heart. This one did not capture me and became a chore to read. Maybe it’s the spare language My second Ginsberg novel. I preferred the first, The Dry Heart. This one did not capture me and became a chore to read. Maybe it’s the spare language when I’m in the mood for something more floral....more
I did not like this story. I thought it was sentimental and not in a good way. The beginning was stronger than the end and I began to flag in my tolerI did not like this story. I thought it was sentimental and not in a good way. The beginning was stronger than the end and I began to flag in my tolerance around the midpoint. It’s not a long book, but I thought it dragged. Another reviewer said it seemed a lot like auto-fiction which is not something I gravitate toward. There is a sort of happy ending which made all that preceded it seem pointless. Not my cup of tea. Booker long-listed? That is a mystery to me. ...more
This is my third Trollope novel: I read The Warden and Barchester Towers; now I’ve completed the first volume of the Palliser series—I’d always meant This is my third Trollope novel: I read The Warden and Barchester Towers; now I’ve completed the first volume of the Palliser series—I’d always meant to go back to the series after watching the TV production from the 1970s, wherein I first met and fell in love with Lady Glencora and Planty Pal. Now I mean to get serious and finish the Palliser novels, then go back to complete the Barchester series.
I ran across a questionnaire recently that asks you to identify your favorite female and male characters from literature. I’m quite sure Lady Glencora is my favorite female character.
So what does Trollope have to offer the reader: beautiful writing, wonderful plotting, deeply drawn characters, real suspense, laugh out loud humor, reflections on men and women, periodic direct communication between you and the author, happy endings.
There is much about marriage and gender relations, codes of duty and obedience, that is jarring to our beliefs and sensibilities. As I read Can You Forgive Her?, I found myself trying to imagine how the characters in the novel might have understood themselves and the constraints they lived under. Yes, a woman’s husband was her lord and master, but the main female characters were by no means powerless nor unmindful of freedom. One of the core themes has to do with two characters married off to each other against their wishes and how they come to terms with that. Hint: people change, minds change, people aren’t always what they first seem, sometimes one doesn’t know what is best for one.
All the forces guiding who marries who—family, fortune, class, are not perfectly deterministic and the phenomenon of true love keeps slipping in sideways. It made me wonder whether freedom of choice might be as limiting as freedom from choice. How are happy lives, and happy marriages, pulled from the ether?
A minor but important character, the widow Mrs. Greenow, has considerable power in matchmaking and manipulation. Here she is coaching a poor and not especially well favored young woman to accept the marriage proposal Mrs. G is working to extract from the wealthy but hapless farmer, Mr. Cheesacre:
“ ‘You don’t mean to tell me you’d go and fall in love with him if he was like Bellfield, and hadn’t got a rap? I can afford that sort of thing; you can’t. I don’t mean to say that you ain’t to love him. Of course, you’re to love him; and I’ve no doubt you will, and make him a very good wife. I always think that worldliness and sentimentality are like brandy-and-water. I don’t like either of them separately, but taken together they make a very nice drink. I like them warm, with ……, as the gentlemen say.’ To this little lecture, Miss Fairstairs listened with dutiful patience, and when it was over she said nothing more of her outraged affections or of her disregard for money…”
This is a rich and rewarding novel. Every now and then, Trollope checks in with the reader about the question, Can You Forgive Her? Most of us, as well as most of the novel’s characters, require forgiveness. Trollope is one who tends to forgive. ...more
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