It is a collection of short stories already published under different titles; they are summoned now with a common objective: to show a deep and complete analysis of women's world. The presence almost overwhelming of feminine figures (rural and urban women, young or elder, married or single, raw and sophisticated...) is the leading thread of this collection. Their decisions, vital choices, their problems, the situations they have to face due to the fact that they belong to the so-called "weak sex" (the girl deserted by her boyfriend after the engagement, the doubts before birth, the anguish of the eldest girl, who has disappointed deeply her mother's expectations over her...etc) are portrayed in a sympathetic and honest way; you can't avoid feeling sorry for some of them: the heroine that has made the wrong choice, the mother submitted to an inebriate husband, the woman that can't escape from an adulterous love.... In this sense the last sentence of the first story, The Connor Girls, is revealing: "By such choices we (women) gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone", because it introduces what is going to be one of the main points of most of the stories: loneliness, women's loneliness in the face of men, in the face of other women integrated in the system, in short, in the face of this world of men. What is the result of all this? I think that the feeling that pervades the whole book is that of sadness, an acute pain with which the writer could be exorcising her own.

This is the first book of Edna O'Brien's that I've read. She is now, obviously, the flavor of the month, so I thought I'd take this book off my shelves where it has been gathering dust for years. Obviously, O'Brien is influenced by James Joyce, but her poetic language is all her own and beautiful it is. One of the stories, though, actually put me in mind of William Faulkner, another writer who can delve mysteriously into the hearts of his characters. All these stories are heartbreaking and charmingly funny and all too real. The characters are living, breathing human beings. I recommend this book highly and hope it is back in print very soon.

Having grown up in a small town much like Joyce's Dublin, this book has a special significance for me. I've seen so many people from my town graduating from high school without really understanding that there is an entire world outside the place they grew up and lacking the ambition to go explore it. I fear many of them will spend their lives "getting by" in a job they hate, raising children who will inevitably do the same thing. Joyce's "Dubliners" depicts this cycle with as much complexity and compassion as any author I've read.

In an age where the most publicized fiction tends to be simple-minded and genre-bound, it's refreshing to come across a writer with Joyce's complexity. "Dubliners" is so rich in its intellectual and symbolic atmosphere that many readers may be put off by the overall weight of the prose. The writing is so thick with metaphorical contexts that the literal content of the story occasionally becomes obscured, which can be frustrating for those not used to reading Joyce. Yet, while difficult, "Dubliners" is far from impossible to decipher, and although these stories function well as a whole, they are also more or less self-contained, which makes "Dubliners" easier to get through than Joyce's other works(it's a lot easier to take on a ten page short story than a 600+ page novel like "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake"). For readers who are new to Joyce, this would be a good place to start.

A final note: since this book is old enough to be considered a "classic," there are a plethora of editions available from various publishers. I own the Vintage edition (ISBN: 0679739904). Not only is it a quality printing (not that cheap newspaper ink that rubs off on your fingers), it also contains about a hundred pages of criticism at the end that help shed light on Joyce's often illusive themes. Normally I shun forewards and afterwards (I like to think I've read enough to discover a story's theme on my own), but in the case of Joyce I found that a push in right direction can mean the difference between enjoyment and frustration.

Dubliners is a collection of short stories ranging through chidhood, adolescence and adulthood ending with three public life stories and the grand finale "The Dead" Critics have associated many of the stories to Joyce's personal life as he to became dissillusioned with his home city of Dublin. In each story we find a struggle for escapement from each character with the ever burdening features of alcohol and religion amongst other things trapping the protaganists from breaking out of the Dublin mould. Hopes are often dashed such as those of Eveline and Duffy. Joyce intelligently creates an interplay of senses towards the end of each story which creates an epiphany and a defining moment in the life of each character. Throughout the book the characthers start in the middle of nowhere and end up in the middle of nowhere. The text starts with the phrase: "There was no hope for him this time", which symbolises the book perfectly with paralysis being a continuing theme throughout the text ending in the final component: "The Dead". Overall this is a fascinating insite into how Joyce viewed his birth place. Joyce himself can be viewed in many of the characters including Duffy who found love with Sinico in: "A Painful Case" and felt awkward at her death as he had let her go. A thoroughly enjoyable book where nothing actually happens!

My first encounter with Joyce was an English Lit. course in college, some twenty years ago now. We were assigned to read an anthologized version of "The Dead", and I initially approached it as one does all such reading requirements at that foolish age; however, this particular story ending up affecting me quite unlike anything I had ever read before. Dubliners is a beautifully written collection of thematically inter-related stories involving day to day life in early 20th century Dublin - stories that masterfully evoke what Faulkner described in his Nobel address as being the essential nature of true art: A portrayal of the human heart in conflict with itself. "The Dead" is the final story in the collection, and my favorite. I have re-read it numerous times and am so consumed by it that I'm not even able to provide an objective review. The final pages, from the point where Gabriel and Greta leave the party, to the end of the story, are absolutly stunning; the poetry of the words, the profound humanity represented - defies description. As in the final line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" - You must change your life.

I just finished Night earlier today and all I can say is, wow! The book is written by a Jewish prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and delivers a chilling perspective on the Nazi death camps. Although relatively short (about 100 pages), Night manages to deliver in the visuals and makes you feel like you are also at Auschwitz. The book tells of a Jewish father and son's struggle in the Nazi camps after being seperated from the mom and daughters. Night created a sense of sadness for me during this book but this can be expected from such a horrible event. It is truly a wonderful book and a very quick read (I finished within 2 days) It tells of the struggle of the Jews to stay alive under such hopeless conditions, the need of teamwork and individual courage to get through the difficult times, and always to help your family out. I truly enjoyed Night and its chilling first hand story it delivered.

Night is a comprehensive view of the holocaust, it tells in terrifying details the horrors that occurred. Elie Weisel, the author, is also the subject of the selective autobiography. It all begins in a Jewish ghetto, during the beginning of the holocaust. Elie and his family are taken to a concentration camp despite warnings by Mosh the Beadle, a mystic that was taken, and escaped and returned to warn his family and friends. At the first camp Elie and his father are sent to work. Elie and his father are sent to many different camps always worrying if they would be split up or not. Along the way they witness many horrors such as a child being hung before thousands of people and not being heavy enough to die immediately, a man giving up his life for an extra ration of soup, a child leaving his father because his father is weak, and even more. Every horror of the holocaust is told in this sad autobiography. Night is easily one of the best books I have ever read. It was very sad and some of the details used made me sick. The reason I enjoyed it so much is because it was a comprehensive view of the holocaust, not a "Disney version" of it. It allows people to see what really happened, feel their pain, and their hopes. This book is a must read for teenagers and older, but I would not recommend it for children because of the gruesome detail used in describing the German atrocities.

"Night", by Ellie Wiesel, explains his real life in the Concentration Camps during World War II. His family and friends who were originally from Hungary were Jewish and were forced into starving, suffering, and mistreatment by the German leader, Adolph Hitler. The Nazi death camp's horror turns this young boy into the agonized witness to his family's murder, and the destroys his faith in God. This book awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute worst and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again. The autobiographical nature of this book helps the readers identify with all the suffering and mistreatment that many innocent people had to witness and go through. Ellie Wiesel makes the scenes so real that any reader can feel like they were living in the horrible and terrifying events. The scenes are so vivid that the words can picture the Jews during the mistreatment of the Holocaust. Wiesel has described a painful journey through the darkness, through the false dawns and false days, until there are hints that tiny shafts of light can pierce the seemingly unending nights.

"In the Forest," is a novel written by Edna O'Brien in which she takes us through the twisted mind of a psychotic criminal,describing everything and leaving nothing to the imagination. The story has no protagonist to suppress or defend the intrinsic evil of Michen O'Kane, therefore leaving nearly three hundred pages to indulge in the disturbing and misguided crimes he so selflessly committs. However, this is not where the book fails in its attempt to expose the prejudices of society's outlook on the insane. A lack of connection to O'Kane or any other character for that matter, creates a feeling of isolation from truly understanding O'Kane's motives or convictions at any given time. The story tends to drag on, lacking in substance while O'Kane grows more evil with every turn of a page, transforming into an unrecognizanle form of a human being. The greatest failure lies in the pitiful attempt to include a love theme with O'Kane's proclaimed love a stranger named Eily. The plot is tedious and predictably cut short when O'Kane rapes and murders Eily and then murders her child. Referring back to O'Kane losing his mother which he explains at the end of the novel is the reason why he kills the son, to prevent him from living the life he himself has. This is the only part of the book to be grateful for because it prevents the possibility for a sequel.

Edna O' Briens In The Forest is a wonderful phantasmagoric tale of a confused and conflicted boy named Michen and how he and the others around him are changed over the period of his time, told in the creative POV of many different bystanding characters.
The story flows like oceans of pages, with each chapter entailing a different characters point of view of the story. Written in the same style as Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules Of Attraction, one cannot put the book to rest, and even when you do finally finish this gripping novel one doesn't feel at rest with what they have just absorbed. In The Forest is a desolate street on a late winters evening, or a terrible rainstorm pelting a kitchen window. It hits you in all the right places, leaving you soaking with imaginative images of Michens journey, left only to fend for yourself.
The characters in this epic all have their own agenda, while at the same time drawn to Michen's search. In The Forest is a graphic mass of hysteria that will keep one sitting on the edge of their bed way after you have completed your journey with Michen. That is what is best about in the forest. You feel sympathy for Michen, and you become partners with him in his unrelenting quest for freedom and normalcy. In The Forest is a tale you definitely suggest and tell to others, it is one to keep on the shelf next to JD Salingers CATCHER IN THE RYE, where the great storys of adolescence belong.

Contrary to first impression, this story is not centered around the gory details of violence committed by the main character, Michen O'Kane. While the brutality of his crimes adds to our understanding of his character (or lack thereof), I feel this book delves deeper, into the intricate relationship between criminal and society. We, as readers, are given a unique vantage point - one we may not be exposed to even in some of today's horror happenings. We see the situation from both perspectives: that of the many victims, and that of the "Kinderschreck" himself.
O'Brien creates eerie suspense with the best of them, though it is not rewarded (like I said, it's not about the gory details). The small, rustic towns of Ireland (complete with authentic gaelic names) in which the story takes place adds to the spookiness, much like in the movie "Fargo". The unsympathetic woods in the backdrop that stand witness to the horror add another dimension to the criminal/society theme that I mentioned before. My only complaint is that the story just tapers off at the end, not really consistent with the rest of the book.

As is almost consistently the case, the series of biographies produced under the collection of Penguin Lives has once again succeeded in providing a palatable doorway through which the hungry but busy reader can find the substance of an important if historically tough writer or artist. Edna O'Brien, herself an accomplished writer, here provides us with a fellow Irishman's view of the incredibly important writer James Joyce. Though most of us have at least read his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and have seen plays and film adaptations of some of his other works, few of us feel we understand this complexly brilliant mind enough to say that approaching 'Ulysses' or 'Finnegan's Wake' would be easy reading. O'Brien gives us not only the chronology of Joyce's life, she also picks up on individual instances in his youth and manhood that served as fodder for his detailed novels of his Irish heritage. The writing is brisk, acerbic, challenging, and ultimately rewardingly educational. Finish this brief history and you most probably will run to the book shelf for another go at the master!

Irish writer Edna O'Brien's brief (179 page) biography of James Joyce was aimed at people like me who are curious about Joyce's life, but not curious enough to undertake Richard Ellman's definitive but massive biography. O'Brien venerates Joyce's writing, but recognizes the high cost to most everyone who had any contact with Joyce.

Although she argues (without convincing me) that Joyce was not a misogynist, she does not attempt to defend him from being viewed as a monster; instead, she answers her question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create? I believe that they do."

O'Brien provides interesting responses to Joyce's life and lifework. Hard-core Joyceans will already have processed Ellman's biography--regarded by some as the best biography of any writer ever written. The somewhat curious have a fine guide in O'Brien. Her book is generally readable, and I am inclined to trust her sense (as a novelist, as an Irish novelist) of what in Joyce's fiction is autobiographical.

The volume is an excellent match of biographer and subject, like Edmund White's biographical meditation on Marcel Proust that began the series of Penguin Brief Lives, a welcome antidote to the mountains of details that make so many biographies daunting.

Biographies in this series are the perfect fun size. Light, but long enough to have a lot of real stuff in them, more than a mere introduction.

The very first sentence of this book invites you into Joyce with an imitation of his writing style, & after that Edna O'Brien shares generously & mellifluously her great understanding of the man, his life, & his work, drawing on scholarly commentary of his books & from the journals & letters of him & the people around him so that you know how they all felt about his life & their lives in themselves & for the purposes of this biography in relation to him. It's so well-written & so interesting -- what a life he had, crazy as he was, that -- I could hardly put it down. Edna O'Brien's great interest in him comes across truly.

very flowery, slow moving not up to the level of many other Irish writers, not suited to my taste such as history or amusing recollections

Excellent book. A warm intellectual stream, poetry really. O'Brien writes impressionistically of the history, and her memories of Ireland. Have a glass of wine, and read it through once: a very pleasurable task.

This is my second book by Edna O'Brien, and it only confirmed my high opinion of this talented writer. Snip: (...).

I usually love to read about books set in Ireland where the countryside is always greener than green and the dampness wetter than wet. So it was this love that inspired me to read my first Edna O'Brien novel. Set in Western Ireland in the small town of Cloontha, the story follows the quest for land and the acknowledgement of who is the rightful owner. This is an age old problem passed down through generations and, as O'Brien writes, "fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too." But she also writes that "the enemy came in the night but the enemy can come at any hour....because the enemy is ALWAYS THERE."

This is how the story begins with the arrival of the enemy -- a brick red tractor that has shown up on the fields, stuck as it was in the mud, with a driver aboard -- one Michael Bugler, noted to be a fine speciman of a man. Is it the tractor who is the enemy or the passenger? Bugler has come to claim land that he has recently inherited. There is one problem though -- part of this land is on what Joseph Brennan considers to be "his mountain". The second problem is that Joseph Brennan has a beautiful sister named Breege who has become giddy over the arrival of the new tractor and its driver. O'Brien writes that "the tractor was music to her ears and a gall to her brother's."

What follows is a fight for land, a fight for love and a struggle to keep one's sanity when all else around you has gone haywire.

Edna O'Brien writes a story laced with impending doom. You know something will happen....you just don't know how bad it will be. As she tells us, "one mad minute stretches into a lifetime." That quote is so true because you can be a model citizen for 364 days of the year and do something bad on that 365th day and the goodness is forgotten and all that remains is that one bad day.

As much as I like stories set in Ireland, this one dragged for me. I felt no kinship to the characters and, while I understood their motivations, I felt no empathy toward them. Yes, "the warring sons of warring sons are sent to repossess ground gone forever" and I'm sure love triangles and tragedy are part of the scenario. I just didn't walk away from this reading experience with any sense of satisfaction in having read this book. This is just my humble opinion and I have rated this book solely based on my enjoyment factor...certainly no indication of the author's ability as a writer.

Wild Decembers is the story of three people and the Irish mountainside they reluctantly have to share. This is a classic tragedy, full of deep love, and heartbreaking drama. Love of people, love of the land, and love of family...and how far the limits will be pushed to possess these are the elements that weave this tale. A brother Joseph, and sister, Breege, live quietly until a man from Australia, Bugler, arrives to lay claim to his deceased Uncle's land. The men argue and go to battle over land boundaries, as Breege slowly falls in love with Bugler, leading to an obvious clash of loyalties for all. The descriptions of the land read like poetry. The people are complete and full of heart and soul. You know what they are going to do and you understand why, even if you wouldn't agree with their actions.The artistry of O'Brien is that you are able to maintain hope that somehow the outcome will be different. Among O'Brien memorable cast of players are the wild sisters Rita and Reena who are nothing that you would expect! The story is beautifully sad, and classically told.

I read this book, my first contact with O'Brien, its author, after hearing a glowing review on NPR. It is full of poetic, ominously foreboding, beautifully descriptive invocations of the mountain where the action is set, at Cloontha in the West of Ireland. The protagonists are the young sister and brother, Brige and Joseph Brennan, who have lived together since their childhood when they were early orphaned and Mick Bugler, who has just returned from Australia to claim his inheritance of the land on the mountain adjacent to Joe and Brige's dairy. What follows is the inevitably tragic denoument following a Romeo and Juliet attraction between the young woman and the "Shepherd", Bugler. The struggle over old land feuds recalls today's news from former Yugoslavia, from the Middle East and yes, from Ireland. By the time I reached the inevitable tragedy at the end I could hardly breathe. The supporting characters are wonderfully drawn. This is the best new book I've read.

After repeatedly falling asleep trying to read this book, I have come to the conclusion this is some sort of communist device used to force college students to commit suicide from boredom. If you have to read this book drop the class. It's like reading grass, and moves at the same pace. Dull is to exciting of a word for this book. The word that best describes this book is dgtreed. What does it mean? I don't know! I'm still trying to find meaning!! But it's pointless!!

I bought this book preparatory to a month in Ireland, as a mental/political exercise (aware of former banning). I couldn't put it down, and got three hours or less sleep for three nights in a row. I foisted it on my mom with warnings not to begin it on a weeknight, she got hooked on a Tuesday and went downhill too. We talked for days about how tightly written it was, how clean, spare, descriptive, full of foreshadowing, and painful to any woman who knows what it is to be centally disappointed by a man. Yet the book never whines, it never pushes itself sobbing on your shoulder. It sits in dignity with sadness.

Very quietly and methodically tragic, in the Irish way that says you do not whine about tragedy, you do not make fuss of it, you just simply pray a bit and go on. What makes the book so very valuable and unusual is that it applies the Irish knack for storytelling and forthright 'un-tragic' tragedy to women's lives and women's stories. It is both an Irish book full of water and woodsmoke, and a women's book in all its painful honesty and revelatory grace.

Please read.

i heard an interview with edna o'brien on npr's FRESH AIR and was impressed with her style. i read the trilogy because of the interview, not because of the Ireland component. this book is poignant, funny, sincere, a page-turner, and honest. i keep looking at the copyright date and not believing that it was written years ago. this book is a definite breath of fresh air!

Mutual empathy and an unlikely friendship develop between an IRA terrorist named McGreevy, and an elderly widower, Josie O'Meara, in Edna O'Brien's, House of Splendid Isolation. McGreevy is on the run and desperately needs to find refuge when he comes across an old farmhouse owned and occupied by Josie. He takes the elderly woman hostage and they are stuck together in the house for several weeks as McGreevy faces a hostile standoff with the police. Once married to an abusive, law breaking alcoholic, Josie finds that McGreevy conjures up memories of her deceased husband. But soon Josie's fear and loath turn into compassion and understanding when she discovers the human side of McGreevy and learns that he too has suffered great losses in life. McGreevy, who has no desire to know the older woman, begins to admire and respect her, as she becomes sympathetic to his plight.

I looked forward to reading this politically motivated Irish story but found it to be only average. The narrative shifts needlessly throughout the book. Also, the characters are ambiguous in their feelings. For example, Josie barely knew her husband when she married him out of desperation. The marriage was a nightmare from day one, but years later she tenderly runs her fingers through the initials he carved on a tree and she saves his clothing and other belongings and holds them closely as she reminisces? Lastly, O'Brien's long-winded sentences and verbose prose detract from the story instead of enhancing it. The following is a sample sentence from page 94: "He'd love to take her off then, him and Nellie, across the lake and up the lordly Shannon, the Pilgrim's Way, a thing he'd always wanted to do, go through the big locks and the swing bridges, find a mooring at dusk, up to the town to a pub, wakening to the breath of nature, the herons, the grebe, and the mute swan, all around the hills bestirring themselves, heaving up out of the plains, blue and lilac, hills magnifying into the mountains." Whew! Believe it or not almost every sentence in the story reads as such.

The disjointed approach and wordiness of the book makes me only marginally recommend it to those, such as myself, who have a keen interest in the struggles of the Irish. However, if looking merely for entertainment, I'd skip by House of Splendid Isolation.

Josie O'Meara, an aging Irish widow, lives in a large West Country house, alone with her ghosts. Years ago, her drunken loutish husband was gunned down by the Guarda after hiding IRA arms on the property. Now, McGreevy, an IRA gunman on the run, has chosen her house as a hiding place. The two start as bitter enemies, but gradually develop a tentative understanding, as they come to understand the losses that the other has suffered. But all ends in tragedy, as the Guarda returns to the House.

O'Brien writes in luxuriant prose, but it's that kind of writing where you think there are sentences or words missing. She seems to assume that you understand more than you do.

But the bigger flaw in the book, is her misunderstanding (shared by many) of the Irish troubles in their modern form. She sees them as something intrinsic to Ireland and the Irish, a bitter violent history seeping from the soil. In fact, the really violent period of Irish history was an outgrowth of the Cold War. The struggle had long ceased to be about Ireland & unity & had devolved into a simple matter of radical Left opposition to the British. As a result, the collapse of the Soviet Union has taken the IRA with it & brought an end to the "troubles".

That said, her unique prose style & her obvious empathy for her characters, make this one a marginally worthwhile read.

GRADE: C

Edna O'Brien in general and this very fine novel in particular deserve a much greater readership. The plot here -- IRA fugitive, McGreevy, hides out in the crumbling home of an aged widow, Josie -- is the simple premise on which O'Brien builds a vertiginous, multi-layered tale of fatefully intersecting interpersonal and national histories. The third person narrative points of view are multiple and, especially in the quick cuts to those on the fugitive's trail, occasionally confusing. McGreevy and Josie are both superbly drawn and utterly convincing, although their emotional linkage is achieved too quickly, just as the flashbacks to Josie's horrid marriage make her reveries of quiet good times with her husband scarcely credible. The prose is spare, with no wasted words, and one of the wonders of this novel is that O'Brien nonetheless thoroughly conveys the lushness of the drizzly Irish countryside, the complexity of the struggle and the underlying sense of national unity that all the characters -- no matter how harshly at war with one another -- feel. And she has packaged all that in what is also from start to finish a superbly suspenseful tale. The 230 or so pages flash by, making The House of Splendid Isolation an exciting and rewarding one-sitting read.