Edna O'Brien

Edna O’Brien (2016)

Sarong nobelista (2015)

Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer and playwright, who was resident in the United Kingdom from the late-1950s. Her first seven novels were banned in Ireland on publication, but she found an appreciative audience in her adopted country and in the United States.

Quotes

• I waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come home, my father.
  • The Country Girls (1960) first lines

• "We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable."
  • Girl With Green Eyes (1962), Chapter Twenty-One

• The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.
  • Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 78

• Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.
  • Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 119

• All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.
  • from the story "The Love Object," first published in The New Yorker (1967) and collected in The Love Object': Selected Stories' (2013)

• [On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused.
  • "Is 'August' a Wicked Book", The Guardian (8 October 1965), p. 5
  • Speaking in Dublin to promote her novel August Is a Wicked Month which was then on limited sale in the city's bookshops.

• It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
  • New York Times Book Review (14 February 1993)

• Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.
  • The Light of Evening (2006), Part Two

• She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
  • from the story "Manhattan Medley," collected in Saints and Sinners (2011)

• That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
  • Country Girl: a Memoir (2012), "The Doll's House" section

from interviews/conversations

• It is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)

• Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)

• I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them. (1995)

• [A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them. (1995)

• I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn.
  • From O'Brien's appearance on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio, 14 January 2007), as quoted in "Edna O'Brien, groundbreaking Irish novelist, dies at 93", The Washington Post (28 July 2024).

in Irish Women Writers Speak Out (2003)

book edited by Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson

• Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination.

• To make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find it stimulating though a little daunting, but as reader and writer I am not interested in anything less.

• (Do think of your work as political?) O'BRIEN: Well, everything is political: one's upbringing, the culture in which one grows up, even religion is political, whether we like it or not. Religion is supposed to be spiritual but we all know it isn't.

• (Do you have to cultivate a distance between you and your friends to have space to write?) O'BRIEN: Yes. One must live the inner life to the utmost. Samuel Beckett wrote a preface to a book of Jack Yeats's paintings, and he said: "the artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere. And he has no brothers." Well, of course, he does come from somewhere and that somewhere informs and permeates the work as it did for Samuel Beckett and it did for Jack Yeats, but solitary is how an artist has to be. It's crucial to the work. And painful for the life!

• County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. (Is it always familiar territory?) O'BRIEN: Yes and no. With each book I hope to dig deeper. That is all I ask.

in Tasting Life Twice (2005)

book edited by Ramona Koval, subtitle: "Conversations with Remarkable Writers"

• There's nothing like obstacle to make a writer

• When we're young, we leave home and we think we're leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and that's a great thing.

• one of the things about writing is that each book is a beginning. Each book is another hurdle up the ladder or up the mountain of one's country and one's own sensibility.

• What literature does, if it's any good, is to open the soul, the mind, the psyche and the body of a reader. I'm always looking for that - and in some cases getting into trouble for even attempting it.

• A lot of young writers send me books and they want to be published, 'to be famous, to be known'. That isn't the job. That comes later, if it comes at all. A writer has to love that vocation - and it is an extremely unbefriended and difficult vocation.

• I believe in Kafka's maxim that literature, whether it be poetry or prose, is disturbing. It's many other things as well- it can be exciting; it can be an ecstasy; it can be, to use a modern word, it can be a trip. But the inner core of human existence is about disturbance and writing comes from conflict.

• I suppose the themes we choose - because there are many stories I could have chosen to write about, but I chose this one - are as much about us, the writer, as about the story. You have to live a story. You have to take it in and stay with it and hopefully bring it back out

• What has happened (it's funny, but it's also very serious) is that language is used now to cover up language is used as a deception, in every country, in every area, whereas great language and the imperative of great language is truth.

• Forests have always been used in stories down the centuries. The forest is life - there's beauty, there's danger, there's threats, and, at the same time, potential safety. So without wanting to sound too pompous, I suppose a forest is a metaphor.

• A work of art has a big space. If for a moment we think of something else - and I won't dodge the question of Picasso's 'Guernica', or Pieter Bruegel's 'Hunters' - they're huge canvasses in which everything is allowed. Everything is painted in, everything is depicted, so that the viewer enters the whole world of that story or that tragedy, or that war or that hunt. It is quite different — and must be — to reportage.

• Literature and spirituality are very close. It doesn't matter if there's erotica in the book, or if there is very vivid description, or if there's hatred in the book. I think God and the gods watch over the writer or poet who for the duration of the writing is kind of blessed, is in a spell - not in a happy spell and not in a sweet or calm one, but to stir up that part of the mind, to find knowledge and words and narrative that one did not know one had, is a mystery. And having been brought up very religiously, I ascribe that mystery to God. The Greeks ascribed it to 'the gods'. But whether it's singular or plural, it is an energy, a force outside oneself, that comes to cause this stuff.

Quotes about Edna O'Brien

• She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse.
  • Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, January 1, 1978

• Certainly I admire Edna O'Brien's work greatly. It would be difficult for any Irish woman writer to ignore the impact of her work during the repressive Ireland of the 1960s.
  • Miriam Dunne, interview in Irish women writers speak by Caitriona Moloney (2003)

• (Tell us about your favorite short story.) “Old Wounds,” by Edna O’Brien, haunts me as though I’ve lived it.
  • Louise Erdrich interview (2016)

• Edna O'Brien transforms the lives of Irish women into a liturgy of premonition, doom, and enigmatic redemption...For all O’Brien’s sacramental melancholy, she exudes a worldly passion for the moment. She seduces readers with her direct, piercing gaze and pleases with the rhythms of her storytelling diction. Most of these tales are set in a territory between human brutality and inexplicable salvation. O’Brien takes it all in—the small-mindedness, gossip, superstition, death of the spirit, and destruction of the body. Her characters dance on the edge of the grave, yet, perhaps because despair is for Catholics the only unpardonable sin, O’Brien often tosses them a mysterious line of absolution and hope.
  • Valerie Miner, 1990 review of Lantern Slides, collected in Rumors from the Cauldron : selected essays, reviews, and reportage (1992)

• ...her perspective is women centered but not feminist: her works usually depict the traps of femininity rather than liberation.
  • Ann Owens Weekes, Foreword to Irish Women Writers Speak Out by Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson (2003)

External links

• GoodReads page