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Summary
Summary
The much-anticipated new novel from the literary world's master of storytelling, Edna O'Brien.
A woman discovers that the foreigner she thinks will redeem her life is a notorious war criminal.
Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child. All of that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed.
Fidelma, disgraced, flees to England and seeks work among the other migrants displaced by wars and persecution. But it is not until she confronts him-her nemesis-at the tribunal in the Hague, that her physical and emotional journey reaches its breathtaking climax.
The Little Red Chairs is a story about love, and the endless search for it. It is also a story about mankind's fascination with evil and how long and crooked the road towards home is.
Author Notes
Writer Edna O'Brien was born in Clare County, Ireland, in 1930 and attended Pharmaceutical College in Dublin.
O'Brien, winner of the Kingsley Amis Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Price and the European Literature Prize, has written short stories, novels, plays, television plays and screenplays. She has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal and The New Yorker.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a melodramatic (and appropriate) opening, it is a "dark and stormy night" when stranger Vladimir Dragan arrives in Cloonoila, a small village in rural Ireland. Handsome, white-bearded Vlad calls himself a poet and healer. He ingratiates himself into the community, offering rejuvenating massages. An Irish village is, of course, O'Brien's (The Love Object) traditional domain, and as usual she conveys the close, warm, slightly claustrophobic web of small-town relationships. Vlad is eventually revealed as "the Beast of Bosnia," a ruthless military leader responsible for thousands of deaths in the recent genocide. But meanwhile, Fidelma McBride, a beautiful, sexually starved young woman married to an older man, is transfixed by Vlad's charismatic personality. She abandons discretion and arranges trysts so that Vlad can fulfill her yearning to have a child. Tragedy ensues: Fidelma loses her marriage, her self-respect, and is forced to leave Cloonoila. The scene shifts to a vibrantly intense London, where a penniless Fidelma must take menial jobs. Vlad's trial for war crimes in The Hague is another jarringly effective shift of scene; it serves as the culmination of his victims' harrowing memories, which are scattered throughout the narrative. (The title refers to the 11,541 empty chairs set out in Sarajevo in 2012 as a national monument to represent people killed during the siege by Bosnian Serb forces.) Against this dark subterranean thread O'Brien interjects lines from classic poets-Virgil, Yeats, Byron, Dickinson-who attest to the enduring power of love. Fidelma's eventual redemption seems forced, but O'Brien's eerily potent gaze into the nature of evil is haunting. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Ltd. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* While O'Brien retains every element of her gorgeous writing significantly, a mastery of relevant detail, expressed with eloquence, precision, and passion as she limns individual struggles to safeguard personal dignity in the face of uncertain love, romantic and familial her new novel nevertheless expands her domain beyond the usual Irish and English contexts of her previous fiction. It places the theme of community outcast, which certainly is not new to her, in a more geopolitical situation than she has explored before. As the story opens, a stranger comes to town (the second predominant theme upon which the narrative rests), namely Cloonoila, Ireland. The stranger is Dr. Vladimir Dragon, who bills himself as an alternative healer and sex therapist hailing from Montenegro. Beautiful Fidelma McBride, married and trying to conceive, goes to him for treatment and succumbs to his seductiveness. Circumstances erupt that reveal Dr. Vlad as a wanted man a Serbian war criminal, the former president, in fact. Echoing the treatment of Nazi collaborators at the end of WWII, Fidelma's disgrace is complete and life-threatening. Dark fairy-tale threads give the story a magic-realism effect, but ultimately this novel, the author's twenty-fourth book, is starkly realistic. O'Brien speaks to contemporary political violence in a suitably audible voice. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Select appearances by this revered writer along with a major national television, print, radio, and online publicity campaign will herald her latest novel.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÁIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D
Guardian Review
A fictional version of the fugitive Radovan Karadzic arrives in a credulous and gentle Irish village In July 2008 the Butcher of Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic, was finally arrested for his crimes. He'd been hiding in plain sight in Vienna, working as a new age healer and sex therapist, disguised simply but effectively in beard and ponytail. In her latest novel, Edna O'Brien boldly transplants this haunting example of the banality of evil to her own country: a small seaside village in the west of Ireland. When "Dr Vlad" arrives in Cloonoila, he sits by the river in the mist and listens to the sea and the screeching peacocks: had he read a few more novels and a little less Serbian nationalist poetry, he might even have recognised the place as an Edna O'Brien landscape. The year, however, is 2013, and O'Brien shows us how the Irish countryside has become conscious of its own loveliness, adding a sculpture to its river and a hotel to its castle, and even "old farm machinery" and a "replica of an Irish cottage" to the village. The villagers, though, remain, as O'Brien says, "innocent", and she lets them speak to us directly in her characteristic, slippery mixture of poignancy, forthright wit and blatant, endearing self-deception. There is Father Damien the priest, Fifi the misty and lonely widow, Sister Bonaventure the ancient nun, and Dara and Mona who run the pub and hence everything else. Most importantly, there is Fidelma McBride, our classic O'Brien heroine: very beautiful, "with a crop of black hair and the whitest skin"; in possession of a gothic past -- she grew up in a "dirt poor family" she associates with "the skeleton of a rotting horse that died on us, its bones bleaching in the field" -- a missing patrimony, in the shape of a boutique once furnished with "glass floor lamps and pale Flemish tapestry", and an oppressive, much older husband, Jack. Jack and Fidelma, in fact, with their gramophones, raspberry canes and bicycles, their nastily sexy virgin marriage and curious honeymoon in Rome, seem to belong more to the 50s than the present. But there is a more contemporary set of voices here too. The kitchen staff of the Country House Hotel are "Burmese, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Slovakian, Polish", and of an evening entertain each other with lengthy, uninterrupted accounts of their migrant journeys. Their voices are less inflected than the villagers', their characters more solidly virtuous, and no one has a solid grasp of verb forms or the definite article. As a result, they tend to sound rather similar - "He say 'Let's go for a walk Hedda.' He very insistent"; "I go back to Switzerland and am alone. In time I recover. I think in basement of my cousin's house. I have plum brandy from 1967, fifty percent proof." The effect of these bleak, strip-lit testimonies set against the shaded, shifting, shifty voices of the village is an odd one: like a documentary intercut with a Renoir film. The dreams of Dr Vlad, meanwhile, supply images from a third genre -- Dr Strangelove, perhaps, or German expressionism -- for Vlad is periodically haunted by "his old friend K", who seems to be both Kafka and Conrad's Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. K can conjure up not only nightmarish pictures of chopped limbs and kohlrabi, but pages and pages of highly formed rhetoric, literary references and direct historical accusation. As other people's dreams so often are, K's sections are rather dull to read: it's not just that he can't paragraph, we also can't know what his terms are, or where he is coming from, or what to believe. We do believe, though, all too well, Vlad's progress in the credulous and gentle village. Mona and Dara lead him into cosy pub chats. He rescues Fifi's trapped dog with horrible and attentive tenderness. Father Damien debates orthodoxy with him; Sister Bonaventure visits him for a hot stone massage and then brings him to the village reading group. In a moment of high comedy, the gardai nearly arrest him for breaching health and safety regulations. Soon "his name is on everyone's lips, Dr Vlad this and Dr Vlad that"; poor, lonely Fidelma has fallen in love with him and wants him to father the child she never had. We, too, are teased into complicity. We don't want the villain to be caught, because we don't want Fidelma to be hurt. Soon enough, however, the documentary voices catch up with Vlad: "All boys he round up. Many thousand in one day." At the same time, the Kafkaesque nightmarish punishments catch up with Fidelma: the moment when "rats come to sup and she can hear their tongues lapping up their pools of warm blood" is far from the worst of it. From here on, the nightmare and documentary strands take over the novel. Fidelma goes on a picaresque tour of immigrant London, and witnesses dozens more testimonies in broken English covering every issue from FGM to exploitative cleaners' wages. She also makes a visit to Vlad's trial in The Hague, some of which is Kafkaesque and some of which seems to be actually a nightmare, though the texture of both is the same. Edna O'Brien apparently researched this novel carefully: it shows in the variety of stories and range of reference and facts. It does not show, however, in authenticity of character and voice: these spring from her own vast experience and writerly imagination. None of the moments O'Brien adapts or borrows, even from Kafka and Shakespeare, is as piercing as the moments she invents herself. None of the stories here, however terrible in content, brings evil home as well as the moment the dictator digs the jack russell from the ground: "He worked the spade gently, until the frozen clay began to shift ... and eased her out. She looked like a rag, muddied, one ear torn, and quivering all over. 'She's been in the wars,' he said." * Kate Clanchy's latest book is The Not-Dead and the Saved (Picador). To order The Little Red Chairs for [pound]15.19 (RRP [pound]18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Kate Clanchy.
Kirkus Review
An Irish town is touched by the war crimes in Sarajevo when an outsider sleeps with a local woman and she's driven by shame and brutality into exile. Wearing a long dark coat and white gloves, the mysterious Vladimir Dragan arrives in Cloonoila, a backwater of western Ireland, sometime after 2012. He says he's from Montenegro and asserts that there are links between Ireland and the Balkans. He soon sets up shop as an alternative healer and sex therapist. For 40-year-old Fidelma, who's suffered two failed pregnancies and no longer expects much from her older husband, Vlad may be a last chance. She and the rest of Cloonoila don't know he's a wanted war criminal based on Radovan Karadzic, the man behind the siege of Sarajevo, where 11,541 red chairs were set out to commemorate the siege's victims in 2012, including 643 of the title's little red chairs for children killed. When men pursuing Vlad brutally abort Fidelma's new pregnancy, she chooses exile in London, joining the streams of refugees moving all over Europe, the unending diaspora fueled by war, fundamentalism, hatred. Some are among the half-dozen nationalities of the staff at Cloonoila's hotel who trade personal stories of displacement on a veranda after midnight. Fidelma also will hear refugees' tales in a makeshift London shelter run by a Sarajevo survivor where "the flotsam of the world" gather to share their narratives. As O'Brien (The Love Object, 2015, etc.) brought the larger world to Cloonoila through Vlad, she ends by giving her West Country woman a seat at Vlad's war-crimes trial. O'Brien's writing in this rich, wrenching book can be both lyrical and hard-edged, which suits a world where pain shared or a tincture of kindness can help ease the passage from losses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Dr. Vlad Dragan, a holistic healer from the Balkans, arrives in the western Irish village of Cloonoila and quickly becomes its cure; married but childless, Fidelma McBride enlists the mysterious doctor to impregnate her. As the tale of their affair circulates, Dragan disappears, and a bereft Fidelma is devastated to learn that he is accused of the deaths of thousands during the Siege of Sarajevo (1991-96) and has been sent to the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Rejected by her husband, Fidelma flees first to London, where she attempts to re-create her life as a refugee, and then to the Hague to settle matters with Dragan, assured of nothing except the vastness of his evil. Having lost her home, husband, and ideals, Fidelma opens herself to new possibilities, including hope. -VERDICT This 18th novel from O'Brien (Saints and Sinners) delivers noble truths as well as atrocities. Her fictional depiction of Serbian war criminal -Radovan Karadzic' will chill readers not only because it convincingly exposes the egoism of a rational madman but also because these horrors happened. O'Brien's mastery of symbolism and natural description remain unmatched in modern fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]-John G. Matthews, -Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
