Sex, love, and the Potato Famine
Apr. 2nd, 2016 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor my vacation reading while I was in Ireland, I wanted to stay with the Irish theme (since I was in Ireland) but perhaps deviate slightly from the history books (since I would be going to a million museums, and also I was running short on Irish history books), so I instead packed — among other volumes — the copy of Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You that I rescued from my aunt's Irish lit collection over the summer. It turned out to be a perfect choice for reading on the plane, and sometimes in the car while driving around the picturesque sheep pastures of Western Ireland, and at breakfast in cute little B&Bs while eating porridge with honey and cream, and (possibly best of all) in the lounge at the Hotel Aisling in Dublin on a sunny Good Friday afternoon while drinking tea. It's not an especially long book — by my standards at least, clocking in at 544 pages — but most of these reading sessions were fairly short, as we had a pretty busy vacation schedule.
My Dream of You is not the sort of book I tend to read too much of, in that it's a contemporary realism/litfic piece that's mostly about middle-aged people and sex, but if I'm going to read a depressing litfic book about middle-aged people and sex, I think this was a good pick for me in that it also has a lot of stuff about writing and history and travel and feminism (sort of) and being perpetually single, all of which actually are relevant to my everyday interests. And barring some unexpected tragedy, I will be middle-aged someday (I hope!).
Our narrator and protagonist is Kathleen de Burca, a 49-year-old Irishwoman living in London where she has a successful career as a travel writer for a small company that is part of a larger company. When she is not traveling to glamorous locations for work, she lives alone in a basement apartment in London. Kathleen has been single since she broke up with her J-school boyfriend almost thirty years ago, but has a dedicated habit of having unfulfilling sexual encounters with every boring-ass traveling businessman or married douchebag who makes a pass at her in the course of her travels. O'Faolain's writing is engaging enough that I actually felt sympathy for Kathleen's transparently useless quest to find human connection via hooking up with randos in suits, instead of doing what I'd normally do, which is stick my nose into the air and harrumph that a fully independent, nomadic lifestyle is CLEARLY WASTED ON SOME PEOPLE. Part of this is because Kathleen's character is well-developed enough to make it clear that this lifestyle isn't actually totally wasted on Kathleen; she actually very much values her independence, especially having been raised in the stagnation and conservatism of mid-century Ireland by an authoritarian father and a chronically depressed mother. The tension between her desire to love and be loved and her desire to stay way the hell far away from the trap that was Irish domestic life when she was growing up provides a lot of the internal conflict for the book.
When Kathleen's colleague and best friend dies unexpectedly, it precipitates a midlife crisis. For Kathleen, a midlife crisis looks like retiring early and returning to the Irish countryside to do research on an 1840s divorce case that she'd been interested in since J-school, known as "the Talbot affair," in which the young wife of an Anglo-Irish landlord was accused of adultery with a groom. While she is here, she has a brief affair with a married Irish man who also lives in England, named Shay (short for Seamus), and does a lot of musing over her life — both her unhappy childhood in Ireland and the various dramas she's gotten into in England and around the world — and visits what family she has remaining in Ireland (a brother, a sister-in-law, and a niece). But the most fun bits are her interactions with the people of Ballygall (the little town she's doing research in) and the historical stuff she finds and the general low-grade absurdity of her time in the country. The hotel she checks into, the Talbot Arms, is a family-owned affair, and Kathleen quickly befriends the little clan that runs it. They keep putting her up into other accommodations for the weekend due to hosting various larger events: in a little thatched cottage during a teacher's convention, and in a very modern lakeside house belonging to some guy named Felix for a wedding. Kathleen meets Nan Leech, the ferociously judgmental and ancient local librarian, and interviews a couple other elderly locals about what they remember being told about the Talbot affair by their own elders. She pokes around the library and the old grounds of the estate, and writes a draft of what appears to be a historical romance novella about the case, the chapters of which are included within the book as she writes them. (The novella, in my opinion, is pretty good.)
Some people might find the ending of the book not particularly satisfying, since it's a bit anticlimactic from what I think a traditional sort of ending would be, but I liked it. So much of the book is dedicated to Kathleen's mental rehashing of her terrible decision-making throughout her life, and I think she makes a non-terrible decision at the end, so I think it represents her growing up more (there is still growing up to do at fifty) and moving into the next phase of her life where hopefully she will continue to make better decisions.
There are a lot of things in this book that I feel like I ordinarily would complain about, but in this case I think all work for the O'Faolain is telling (see above re: Kathleen's terrible decision-making skills). However, there are two main complaints I actually have. One is that the printing that I have has a big chunk of pages missing and replaced with a duplicate of the next chunk of pages instead — so the book goes from pages 1 to 277, then page 300-something to 330-something, then page 300-something again to the end. Obviously this is not the author's fault, as I am entirely certain she did not write it this way. My other complaint is that the novel eschews the use of quotation marks (although, interestingly, Kathleen does not in the excerpts from her novella). I'm decently used to reading things without quotation marks — French writing conventions universally use the em-dash to introduce dialogue, and My Dream of You is hardly the only English novel to forgo traditional quotation marks — but I still think it's unnecessary and a bit pretentious.
I probably won't dip back into the world of depressing realistic fiction for another several months since I do have an extremely limited tolerance for reading about people who aren't enjoying their sex lives but keep goddamn having sex anyway (JUST GO DO SOMETHING ELSE WITH YOUR TIME, THE WORLD IS LARGE AND FULL OF INTERESTING THINGS), but if all Irish women's fiction comes with such a big dose of tragic history stuff — which I suspect it might — then when I do, that's probably where I'll go. Alternately, I might read O'Faolain's memoir, a copy of which I also stole from my auntie.
My Dream of You is not the sort of book I tend to read too much of, in that it's a contemporary realism/litfic piece that's mostly about middle-aged people and sex, but if I'm going to read a depressing litfic book about middle-aged people and sex, I think this was a good pick for me in that it also has a lot of stuff about writing and history and travel and feminism (sort of) and being perpetually single, all of which actually are relevant to my everyday interests. And barring some unexpected tragedy, I will be middle-aged someday (I hope!).
Our narrator and protagonist is Kathleen de Burca, a 49-year-old Irishwoman living in London where she has a successful career as a travel writer for a small company that is part of a larger company. When she is not traveling to glamorous locations for work, she lives alone in a basement apartment in London. Kathleen has been single since she broke up with her J-school boyfriend almost thirty years ago, but has a dedicated habit of having unfulfilling sexual encounters with every boring-ass traveling businessman or married douchebag who makes a pass at her in the course of her travels. O'Faolain's writing is engaging enough that I actually felt sympathy for Kathleen's transparently useless quest to find human connection via hooking up with randos in suits, instead of doing what I'd normally do, which is stick my nose into the air and harrumph that a fully independent, nomadic lifestyle is CLEARLY WASTED ON SOME PEOPLE. Part of this is because Kathleen's character is well-developed enough to make it clear that this lifestyle isn't actually totally wasted on Kathleen; she actually very much values her independence, especially having been raised in the stagnation and conservatism of mid-century Ireland by an authoritarian father and a chronically depressed mother. The tension between her desire to love and be loved and her desire to stay way the hell far away from the trap that was Irish domestic life when she was growing up provides a lot of the internal conflict for the book.
When Kathleen's colleague and best friend dies unexpectedly, it precipitates a midlife crisis. For Kathleen, a midlife crisis looks like retiring early and returning to the Irish countryside to do research on an 1840s divorce case that she'd been interested in since J-school, known as "the Talbot affair," in which the young wife of an Anglo-Irish landlord was accused of adultery with a groom. While she is here, she has a brief affair with a married Irish man who also lives in England, named Shay (short for Seamus), and does a lot of musing over her life — both her unhappy childhood in Ireland and the various dramas she's gotten into in England and around the world — and visits what family she has remaining in Ireland (a brother, a sister-in-law, and a niece). But the most fun bits are her interactions with the people of Ballygall (the little town she's doing research in) and the historical stuff she finds and the general low-grade absurdity of her time in the country. The hotel she checks into, the Talbot Arms, is a family-owned affair, and Kathleen quickly befriends the little clan that runs it. They keep putting her up into other accommodations for the weekend due to hosting various larger events: in a little thatched cottage during a teacher's convention, and in a very modern lakeside house belonging to some guy named Felix for a wedding. Kathleen meets Nan Leech, the ferociously judgmental and ancient local librarian, and interviews a couple other elderly locals about what they remember being told about the Talbot affair by their own elders. She pokes around the library and the old grounds of the estate, and writes a draft of what appears to be a historical romance novella about the case, the chapters of which are included within the book as she writes them. (The novella, in my opinion, is pretty good.)
Some people might find the ending of the book not particularly satisfying, since it's a bit anticlimactic from what I think a traditional sort of ending would be, but I liked it. So much of the book is dedicated to Kathleen's mental rehashing of her terrible decision-making throughout her life, and I think she makes a non-terrible decision at the end, so I think it represents her growing up more (there is still growing up to do at fifty) and moving into the next phase of her life where hopefully she will continue to make better decisions.
There are a lot of things in this book that I feel like I ordinarily would complain about, but in this case I think all work for the O'Faolain is telling (see above re: Kathleen's terrible decision-making skills). However, there are two main complaints I actually have. One is that the printing that I have has a big chunk of pages missing and replaced with a duplicate of the next chunk of pages instead — so the book goes from pages 1 to 277, then page 300-something to 330-something, then page 300-something again to the end. Obviously this is not the author's fault, as I am entirely certain she did not write it this way. My other complaint is that the novel eschews the use of quotation marks (although, interestingly, Kathleen does not in the excerpts from her novella). I'm decently used to reading things without quotation marks — French writing conventions universally use the em-dash to introduce dialogue, and My Dream of You is hardly the only English novel to forgo traditional quotation marks — but I still think it's unnecessary and a bit pretentious.
I probably won't dip back into the world of depressing realistic fiction for another several months since I do have an extremely limited tolerance for reading about people who aren't enjoying their sex lives but keep goddamn having sex anyway (JUST GO DO SOMETHING ELSE WITH YOUR TIME, THE WORLD IS LARGE AND FULL OF INTERESTING THINGS), but if all Irish women's fiction comes with such a big dose of tragic history stuff — which I suspect it might — then when I do, that's probably where I'll go. Alternately, I might read O'Faolain's memoir, a copy of which I also stole from my auntie.
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