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Title: House of Splendid Isolation
Author: Edna O' Brien
Narrator: Fiona Shaw
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-06-12
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
Josie, the ailing, elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion, dwells in the shadowy world of remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and tenderness, but there is an inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police net closes. With extraordinary skill and empathy, Edna O'Brien shows two faces of a divided land: the yearnings of a woman whose youthful joy was broken, and the intransigent idealism of her captor.
Members Reviews:
In tact
For a "used" book, I was impressed with the shape it was in when it arrived at my house. No tears, and the cover had no watermarks, rips, ect.
Very Interesting Short Novel with Excellent Discussion Potential
I chose this book for a recent meeting of my book club when it was my turn to select and host, I wanted a work by an Irish author to mark St Patrick's Day. The reasonable number of pages helped make it appeal to busy book club members. Edna O'Brien was new to me and the other book club members, but that was a good thing, because if a book or author is really hot or classic, then too many members will have already read it.
The plot and themes sounded as if they would make for an interesting discussion. This book turned out to be have wonderful discussion potential. For example, the history of "the troubles", attitudes toward the rebels within each side, the two very interesting and complex main characters, what exactly the author was implying in the title, love, abortion, murder, aging, war, loneliness and much more.
Some readers may find the way the plot unfolds is choppy and out of chronological order, but I found it similar to how one learns about people in real life. Often I learn new and surprising things about my friends' past lives as I get to know them better. Events in the present trigger a revelation of past events. That's how I thought O'Brien seemed to be telling the story.
Splendid writing, spendid story.
If you read the Kirkus Review above, you won't even have to buy the book, if all you are interested in is the plot.
Fortunately, there's much more here, and I wish I knew how O'Brien does it! Of the thousands of books I've read, this is the first one which really made me feel that the author "let the story tell itself." For most of the book, there's no sense that an author is pulling strings or trying to create. She "merely" presents fully drawn characters, and they truly live on the page.
Yet at the conclusion, the admiring reader realizes that every conflict and ultimate reversal in the book has had a fine hand guiding, but never obviously controlling, it--from Josie's psychological imprisonment to McGreevy's escapes, from her frustrations in love to his satisfactions, from her experiences that life is something that happens to her to his belief that one must mobilize to work toward a higher goal, from their attitudes toward the church to their conflicted feelings about the IRA.
Somewhat extravagant in its romanticism at the end, that extravagance, nevertheless, is totally appropriate to its subject, its characters, and its Irish setting.
Spare Prose and Extraordinary Power
Edna O'Brien in general and this very fine novel in particular deserve a much greater readership.
