Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION OBR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION OBR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Brimming with the lyricism and earthy insight that are the hallmarks of Edna O'Brien's acclaimed fiction, The Light of Evening is a novel of dreams and attachments, lamentations and betrayals. At its core is the realization that the bond between mother and child is unbreakable, stronger even than death.
From her hospital bed in Dublin, the ailing Dilly Macready eagerly awaits a visit from her long-estranged daughter, Eleanora. Years before, Eleanora fled Ireland for London when her sensual first novel caused a local scandal. Eleanora's peripatetic life since then has brought international fame but personal heartbreak in her failed quest for love. Always, her mother beseeches her to return home, sending letters that are priceless in their mix of love, guilt, and recrimination. For all her disapproval, Dilly herself knows something of Eleanora's need for freedom: as a young woman in the 1920s, Dilly left Ireland for a new life in New York City. O'Brien's marvelous cinematic portrait of New York in that era is a tour de force, filled with the clang and clatter of the city, the camaraderie of working girls against their callous employers, and their fierce competition over handsome young men. But a lover's betrayal sent Dilly reeling back to Ireland to raise a family on a lovely old farm named Rusheen. It is Rusheen that still holds mother and daughter together.
Eleanora's visit to her mother's sickbed does not prove to be the glad reunion that Dilly prayed for. And in her hasty departure, Eleanora leaves behind a secret journal of their stormy relationship -- a revelation that brings the novel to a shocking close.
The Light of Evening is a contemporary story with universal resonance. In this beautiful and moving new novel, Edna O'Brien delves deep into the intense relationship that exists between a mother and daughter who long for closeness yet remain eternally at odds.
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her 20th work of fiction, O'Brien meditates with haunting lyricism on the lure of home and the compulsion to leave. Dilly, 78, lies in a Catholic hospital in rural Ireland waiting for her elder daughter, Eleanora, to arrive at her bedside. In gorgeous stream-of-consciousness from the masterful O'Brien (Lantern Slides), Dilly recalls her early years as well as decades of misunderstanding and conflict with Eleanora. Dilly's past unfolds in fits and starts: she leaves her mother behind in a small village in Ireland to seek a better life in 1920s Brooklyn, returning after a failed affair and the death of her brother, Michael. She promptly marries the rich Cornelius; they settle at Rusheen, his dilapidated family estate, and have two children. For Eleanora's story, O'Brien shifts to the third person: the daughter moves to England, marries an older novelist and begins a successful career as a writer before divorcing him and embarking on a series of affairs with married men, a life that Dilly both envies and scorns. The award-winning O'Brien evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
\rtf1\ansi\deff0O'Brien remains one of contemporary Ireland's most prominent and enduring novelists, her reputation having survived early-career book-banning in her native country. She has come full circle, now honored in Ireland as highly as she is in the rest of the world. Her new novel trains a spotlight on the personal experiences of one Irishwoman, Dilly, her story proffered by O'Brien as a paradigm of the reality of twentieth-century Irish life. Richly layered plotting and an impressive evocation of setting make for a good foundation for O'Brien's deft, poised, and compassionate fashioning of her chief character. The novel's "real" time is the present day as Dilly, now an old woman suffering from a serious illness, lies in a Dublin hospital and waits for her daughter to join her at her bedside. The situation prompts a journey through Dilly's memory, "the crux of her thinking being her family, her children, disentangling the hurts they have caused her." She recalls her time spent in America as a servant and the man she fell in love with there, as well as the man she married upon returning to Ireland and the estate they lived on. Speaking specifically to mother-daughter relationships, this poignant novel also explores the larger issue of the Irish American consciousness: why Irishmen and -women came to America, what they did here, and why many returned home. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
Edna O'Brien was the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex - the rest just had children. This was a heroic and sometimes difficult position to maintain in the national imagination, and it is no wonder that she occasionally sounds a little defensive. O'Brien's women criticise themselves so much that you wonder why anyone else would want to join in. Still, they sometimes do join in, and she remains an unsettled, unsettling figure within the Irish literary pantheon. If only she would give us heroines with the candour and clarity of Caithleen in her first book, The Country Girls - good, honest, peasant sexiness, fresh from the convent school - then we would know where we stood. But she will not. Her women are not safe from the world. These are porous creatures: O'Brien writes about women who are not strong; they are subject to doubts, panics, vanities and confusions - and they know all this, and it still does not make them strong. Dignity is their solace, and dignity makes them foolish, and they are always undone by desire. They are, as you may gather, completely honest, completely courageous, and heroic on the slenderest and most absolute of terms. The Light of Evening hinges on the relationship between a rural Irish mother and her wayward writer daughter; it is rich with the older woman's voice. "Dear Eleanora, Thanks a million for your all to me and may the New Year bring what is best for you . . ." The accuracy of O'Brien's inflections in this portrayal bring a pang of nostalgia for the language of Irish countrywomen: the way they feel "nettled" instead of annoyed, the "coolness" that might happen between people instead of a fight, the way they want to cure you, like a sick hen, "of the pip". As the book opens, Dilly is travelling up to a Dublin hospital in what will turn out to be her final days. From her sickbed, she recalls the most vivid part of her life, when she emigrated to America and fell in love. The trials and humiliations of a life in service did not suit her, however, and when her beau seemed to jilt her, she took the offer of a ticket home. There, she married Con, owner of a fine house on the verge of collapse, and together they eked out a shambolic farming life, having two children as they went. The book is full of petty slights and long-held grudges, wrangles over land and money. They are a messy family, prone to frights and grievance. The father drinks, runs horses and gambles, the daughter bolts, the son plots to deprive his sister of her inheritance. The one thing that holds true throughout is the love Dilly has for her daughter; constant - stolid, almost - this love is indifferent to the outside world. "People here say they'll take an action against you for putting them in books and the dead people would take an action if they were alive." Their relationship is marked by an excruciating exchange of failed gifts, but though the mother's taste is more limited than her daughter's, they both love a bit of glamour. Dilly does not pretend to understand her daughter - she does not feel the need to, perhaps - and she can't seem to get in a tizz about her love life: the mother's own regrets give Eleanora licence to love where she can. And she does. Eleanora's last visit to her mother's sickbed is cut short by her need to rush back to the airport and a disastrous Scandinavian romance. In her haste she leaves her journal behind, and the idea that her mother might have read it tortures her ever after. What is revealed in the journal is not scandalous - it is much more primary and chaotic than that. Eleanora has written, in her slanting hand, about the murderous nature of the love that is between them; the image of her pregnant mother bleeding into the grass, and the way her mother's milk is "turned to marble" inside her. Eleanora, like Caithleen, the heroine of O'Brien's first three books, is sometimes tragically loved by men. She experiences their desire as unsatisfactory, even maddening, her own desires being equally hopeless and misplaced. The reader might wonder what the problem is, why the whole business of love is so terrible to her, why no one can get it together (this is a novel written, after all, by the first Irish woman ever to have sex). After Dilly dies, a man called Flossie goes to gather moss for her grave. The lining of graves is a forgotten craft but he makes this last trip in order to honour her, because when he was a child he stopped her from killing herself. He did this by standing his ground when he saw her pacing the river bank, though her eyes implored him to leave. This child, a mute witness to Dilly's despair, loves her, in a small way, for the rest of his life. This is perhaps what O'Brien's heroines offer: turbulence, self- destruction, a black mirror for the desires of men. The Country Girls presented us with a young woman who was sexually interested in sad old men - and was completely cheerful about it. Over the course of the next several books, however, damage rose to the surface of O'Brien's work, like a slow bruise. It became apparent what was actually remarkable about her writing, what had been remarkable all along: it was not sex, at all, but honesty. Anne Enright's latest book is Making Babies (Vintage). To order The Light of Evening for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-obrien.1 Edna O'Brien was the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex - the rest just had children. This was a heroic and sometimes difficult position to maintain in the national imagination, and it is no wonder that she occasionally sounds a little defensive. O'Brien's women criticise themselves so much that you wonder why anyone else would want to join in. Still, they sometimes do join in, and she remains an unsettled, unsettling figure within the Irish literary pantheon. If only she would give us heroines with the candour and clarity of Caithleen in her first book, The Country Girls - good, honest, peasant sexiness, fresh from the convent school - then we would know where we stood. But she will not. Her women are not safe from the world. These are porous creatures: O'Brien writes about women who are not strong; they are subject to doubts, panics, vanities and confusions - and they know all this, and it still does not make them strong. Dignity is their solace, and dignity makes them foolish, and they are always undone by desire. They are, as you may gather, completely honest, completely courageous, and heroic on the slenderest and most absolute of terms. The Light of Evening hinges on the relationship between a rural Irish mother and her wayward writer daughter; it is rich with the older woman's voice. "Dear Eleanora, Thanks a million for your all to me and may the New Year bring what is best for you . . ." The accuracy of O'Brien's inflections in this portrayal bring a pang of nostalgia for the language of Irish countrywomen: the way they feel "nettled" instead of annoyed, the "coolness" that might happen between people instead of a fight, the way they want to cure you, like a sick hen, "of the pip". - Anne Enright.
Kirkus Review
A novel of powerful, complicated emotions and rapturous writing suffers from its plot's soap-opera sentimentality. O'Brien (Wild Decembers, 2000, etc.) shows how much of herself she has invested in this material in the book's dedication: "For My Mother and My Motherland." Languishing on her deathbed from a disease she has done her best to deny, Delia "Dilly" Macready comes to terms with her life in general and her relationship with her daughter in particular. That daughter, Eleanora, is a novelist who long ago departed her native Ireland for London, where she has become successful and notorious by writing books that scandalize those she left behind, blurring the lines between life and art, memory and invention. Thus the novel encourages the reader to identify Eleanora with the London-based author, whose work has generated controversy in her homeland (and who drops the third-person references to the "E" character for the first-person "I" in the novel's final stages). Yet the story belongs to Dilly, and only she comes fully alive within these pages. The richest section recounts Dilly's young adulthood in America, after she had left her mother for the promise of a new world, only to find that her nationality and inexperience have consigned her to maid's work. It is there that she meets the man she will love for the rest of her life, though circumstances and miscommunication have her return home and marry a dutiful Irishman. Her two children are even less lucky in love, as Eleanora, whose true passion is literature, marries and divorces an older, domineering man with no redeeming qualities (leaving the reader to wonder what she ever saw in him), and her henpecked brother and shrewish wife scheme to inherit Dilly's once prosperous property. Through the twists of blood ties, O'Brien explores the profound ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship, but the land and the climate seem more fully developed as characters than do many of the one-dimensional humans. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The hospital bedside meeting of Dilys and long-estranged daughter Eleanora hardly clears the air, but Eleanora does leave behind a significant journal about their tough times together. With a six-city tour; reading group -promotion. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
DILLY "Will you pipe down outta that," Dilly says. "I said will you pipe down outta that Dilly says." Demon of a crow out there before daylight, cawing and croaking, rummaging in the palm tree that is not a palm tree but for some reason misnamed so. Queer bird, all by herself, neither chick nor child, with her omening and her conundrumming. It gives Dilly the shivers, it does, and she storing her precious bits and pieces for safety's sake. Wrapping the cut glasses in case her husband, Cornelius, is mad enough to use them or lay one down before Crotty the workman, who'd fling it on a hedge or a headland as if it were a billy can. Her little treasures. Each item reminding her of someone or of something. The bone china with the flowers that Eleanora loved, and as a child she would sit in front of the china cabinet rhapsodizing over the sprigs of roses and forget- me-nots painted with such lifelikeness on the biscuit barrel and two-tiered cake plate. The glass jug a souvenir of that walk in the vast cemetery in Brooklyn in the twelfth month with the tall bearded man, searching the tombstones and the flat slabs for the names of the Irish-born and coming upon the grave of a Matilda, the widow of Wolf Tone, and pausing to pay tribute to her. She is asking her possessions to keep watch over the house, to mind Rusheen. Asking her plates with pictures of pears and pomegranates, asking the milk-white china cups with their beautiful rims of gold, dimmed here and there from the graze of lips, a few cracked, where thoughtless visitors had flung them down. That raver for one, who ate enough for four men, raving on about Máire Ruadh, whoever Máire Ruadh was, some lore that Eleanora was versed in. Books and mythologies her daughter's whole life, putting her on the wrong track from the outset. The suitcase is already down in the hall, secured with a leather strap because one of the brass catches is a bit slack. Lucky it is, that Con had to go miles away for the mare to be covered. She wants no tears, no sniveling. Amazing that he had got softer over the years, particularly in the last nine months and she laid low with the shingles, often walking in her sleep, anything to quell the pain, found by him out at the water tank, splashing water on herself to ease the ire. "What did I do wrong?" he kept asking, putting his cap on and off as he loitered. "Nothing, you did nothing wrong," she answered, canceling the tribulation of years. Insisted that he take Dixie the dog with him, knowing that at the moment of leaving, Dixie would also lie down and whine with a human plaint. Dilly thumps the armchair cushions in the breakfast room, talks to them, reckons that the swath of soot at the back of the chimney will stop it from catching fire. She knows Con's habits, piling on turf and logs, mad for the big blaze, reckless with firewood like there was no tomorrow. The big note she has written is propped up on the mantelpiece: "Be sure to put the guard over the fire before you go to bed and pull back the sofa." For some reason she winds the clock that has been already wound and lays it face- down in its usual place, ticking doggedly. Out in the dairy she scalds basins, cans, and milk buckets, because one thing she does not want to come home to is the aftersmell of milk gone sour, a lingering smell that disgusts her and reminds her of sensations she daren't recall. Madam Crow is still squawking and Dilly shouts back to her as she goes out to the clothesline to hang a few things, his things, her things, and a load of tea cloths. A cold morning, the grass springy with the remains of frost and in the hollows of the hillock a few very early primroses, shivering away. Funny how they sprouted in one place and not in another. They were the flowers she thought of when she thought flowers, them and buttercups. But mostly she thought of other things, duties, debts, her family, the packets of soup that she blended and warmed up for Con and herself for their morning elevenses, comrades at last, just like her dog, Dixie, and Dixie's pal Rover before it got run over. Poor Dixie pining and disconsolate, off her food for weeks, months, expecting her comrade back. The March wind flapping everything, the clothes as she hangs them, the shreds of plastic bags and silage bags caught on the barbed wire making such a racket, and tears running down her cheeks and her nose, tears from the cold and the prospect of being absent for weeks. Yearling calves plastered in mud and muck where they have rolled, dung everywhere, on their tails and on the grass that they crop, the two younger calves frisky, their kiss curls covered in muck, playful, then all of a sudden mournful, the cries of them like a bleat as their mother has sauntered out of their view. No mound or blade of grass unknown to Dilly, all of it she knew, the place where her sorrows had multiplied and yet so dear to her, and how many times had they almost lost Rusheen, the bailiff one day sympathizing with her, saying it hurt him to see a lady like her brought so low, the bills, the unpaid bills, curling up at the edges, on a big skewer, their names that time in the Gazette. Yes, the poor mouth and fields going for a song, and her daughter, Eleanora, her head in the clouds, quoting from a book that all a person needed was a safe and splendid place. Still, her visits were heaven, a fire in the front room and chats about style, not jumping up to clear away the dishes at once, but lolling and talking, while knowing that there were things that could not be discussed, private things pertaining to Eleanora's wanderlust life. How she prayed and prayed that her daughter would not die in mortal sin, her soul eternally damned, lost, the way Rusheen was almost lost. There was the time, the once-upon-a-time, when the gray limestone wall ran from the lower gate all the way past the cottages to the town, girding their acres. But no longer so, fields given away for nothing or half nothing to pay rates or pay bills, timber taken without so much as a by- your-leave and likewise turf from the bog, every Tom, Dick, and Harry allowed to cut turf, to save turf and to carry it home in broad daylight. How many times had they come within a hair's breadth of losing it. Still, her pride was salvaged, Rusheen was theirs, the old faithful trees keeping watch and enough head of cattle to defray expenses for at least six months or so to come. Not starving like unfortunate people in countries where rain, drought, and wars reduced them to gaping skeletons. Madam Crow still in her roost with her caw caw caws, the morning still cold, but not the bitter cold of a week earlier when Dilly had to wear mittens for her chilblains, had to drag the one storage heater from room to room to keep things from getting damp, to keep wallpaper from shedding, her ornaments stone cold like they were frostbitten. And that stab of memory when she put her cheek to the cheek of a plaster lady called Gala and suddenly back in that cemetery in Brooklyn with the bearded man, Gabriel, and the kiss that tasted of melted snow, but God the fire in it. Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down. In a way she was glad to be going, glad that Dr. Fogarty had got a hospital bed for her, after months of delaying and procrastination, he believing there was nothing wrong with her, only nerves and the toll of the shingles, telling her that the shingles made people depressed, that and other bull, how shingles took a long time to abate, and she telling him that they never abated, that they were always there, worse before rain, barometers of a sort. Patsy, who had done a bit of nursing, coming twice a week to her rescue, bathed the sores, remembered a few things from her nursing days, what ointment to apply, keeping watch to make sure that the scabs had not looped around her back to form a ring, because that circular loop was fatal. Patsy giving them their Latin name, herpes zoster, describing how the pain attacked the line of the nerves, something Dilly knew beyond the Latin words when she had wept night after night, as they oozed and bled, when nothing, no tablet, no prayer, no interceding, could do anything for her, a punishment so acute that she often felt one half of her body was in mutiny against the other half, a punishment for some terrible crime she had committed. "How long more?" she would ask of Patsy. "They have to run their course, missus," Patsy would reply, and so they had and so they did and most mornings she would twist round to look in the wardrobe mirror to make sure they had not spread, that the fatal ring had not formed. She'd never forget the moment that Patsy let out a big hurrah and said, "We're winning, missus, we're sucking diesel!" because the little scabs had changed color, had got more wishy-washy, which was a sign that they had decided to recede and in time their skins would fall off. Then the next ordeal, a matter so private, so shaming it could not be discussed with Patsy and scarcely with Dr. Fogarty himself. She asked him to take her word that she was spotting blood and to please not examine her but give her something to stem it, balking at the thought of having to undress and be seen half naked and her insides probed. "You won't feel pain . . . only discomfort," he had said. "Don't ask me, doctor, don't ask me to do it," she had begged, and he could not understand the fears and eventually her blurting it out: "We were reared in the Dark Ages, doctor," and he tuttutting that, then opening a rickety folding screen for her to go behind and undress herself. Before a week, him calling in person to speak alone with Cornelius in the sitting room, and their coming out and telling her that she would have to go to Dublin for observation. Observation for what? As if she were a night sky. Indoors she pulls on her fawn camelhair coat and brown angora beret, then drags the butt of a worn lipstick across her mouth without even consulting a mirror and listens for the beeps from Buss the hackney driver, who has promised to be there at eleven sharp. Dipping her fingers in the holy water font, she blesses herself repeatedly and says to the house, "I'm off now, but I'll be home soon, I'll be home soon." To her amazement Buss has stolen a march on her and come into the kitchen unawares, and flustered now, because her hour has come, she says with almost girlish effusiveness, "You're the best man, Buss, and the best shepherd in the land." Copyright (c) 2006 by Edna O'Brien. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Excerpted from The Light of Evening: A Novel by Edna O'Brien, Edna O'Brien All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
