The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015)

In 2012 I read and greatly enjoyed Anne Enright's novel The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch.  Set in Paraquay in the 1860s it is about  the Irish mistress of the ruler of the country.  I have also read a few of her highly regarded short stories.  

The Green Road centers on an Irish family, The Madigans.  The family consists of the mother, the father is deceased, and her adult children, two sons and two daughters.  Major publications such as The Guardian and The Irish Times have done highly laudatory reviews.  It has been referred to as a "very Irish work".  It is hard to disagree.  

The real time action is in Ireland in 2005 but much of the novel  is taken up with stories of the past of the children.  A very well realized section, focusing on Dan, the gay son who at one time wanted to be a priest, is set in New York City in the early 1990s.  Dan is engaged to a lovely woman but is heavily into gay sex at the height of the aids epedemic.  This era has been the locale of numerous literary works but Enright does a good job of letting us feel what it was like, with the special emphasis of Dan as a handsome Irish lad.   Another son is an aid worker in Mali.  We see the terrible poverty he tries to alleviate and are shown the various relationships of the workers.  One daughter stayed at home and we see her kind of cramped life.  Alcohol plays a big role in everyone's life.  The beauty and history of Ireland are wonderfully evoked in The Green Road.

In my 500 or so posts on Irish literature I have often, taking a lead from Declan Kiberd, said that one of the dominant themes of Irish literature is that of the weak or missing Irish father.  The Green Road, to me, very much exemplifies this.  The father is now dead but as he lived we see he began to disappear in silence.  The famine years play a big part in the background of the plot.   

Ireland is a magic place, one from which there seems little permanent  escape.  

The Green Road is a lovely book, with some very marvelous sections, very interesting characters skillfully set in time and place. The plot action is exciting and will keep you interested.  I recommend it to all with no reservations.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and her last novel, The Forgotten Waltz, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

I was kindly given a review copy. 

Mel u

"Revenge" by Anne Enright (1991, from The Portable Virgin, 12 pages)

                                                                March 1 to April 1

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year III

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Anne Enright is one of Ireland's leading writers, having won the Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel, The Gathering.  I have posted on a short story by Enright  during each of the last two Irish Short Story Months.  

Did you ever wonder why supposedly happily married couples place ads in publications like Craig's List looking for other couples to have sex with are like?  "Revenge", told from the point of view of the wife, is one woman's answer to that question.  I read the story in this very good anthology.

"This is a good story but very tame compared to my life" Carmilla

Mel u

"What Are Cicadas?" by Anne Enright

"What Are Cicadas?" by Anne Enright (2004, 10 pages)

Year III

March 1 to March 31

Anne Enright

Dublin

Event Resources-links to lots of short stories-from classics to stories written in 2013-all you need to participate is here.  If you know of other resources related to the Irish Short Story, please let me know.

Anne Enright (1962) is one of the four Irish writers who have won a Man Booker Prize.   I posted on short stories by her in both two previous of my Irish short story events.  I also read and greatly enjoined her historical novel,  The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch about an Irish woman who became the mistress of a 19th century dictator of Paraguay.   I found this a fascinating look at an aspect of history of which I knew nothing.

As I have mentioned before one of the themes I am looking at this year is that of the weak or missing father.  In the Irish short story one often meets a father who seems to hide behind a large body of arcane knowledge and uses his pride in this to shield himself from his failures as a father.

"What Are Cicadas" is about the life of a young man who works in the family gas station, in a time before self service.   It is also the story of the young man's relationship to his father, who prides himself on his faulty Latin.   I thought it a particularly brilliant touch when Enright made us, whether we wanted to or not, see the gas dispersal hose dispenser as both a gun and a dripping penis.

Cicadas are hatching.   As anyone who has heard them, they are only found very occasionally, they make a loud kind of mysterious buzzing noise.  They begin their lives underground and some species take 17 years to emerge from the earth, often in huge swarms.  The young man has never seen them and he asks his father what is making that noise and the father gives a very learned answer to a totally different question.

There are others in the story besides the boy and his father but they are the dominant persons.  I will quote a bit to give you a feel for the prose style of the story.

   “The place was full of secrets. You wouldn't believe the secrets, the lack of shame that people had. Children that were slow, or uncles that never took their hands out of their trousers, sitting in their own dirt, money under the bed, forgetting how to talk anymore. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, filth was only filth after all. It was the way they took it as their own. There was no modesty behind a closed door, no difference, no meaning.”

.I read this in  The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing.   I hope to be able to post on another of her short stories during Irish Short Story Month next year.   I would also like to read The Gathering, her Booker Prize novel, prior to March 2014.

Mel u

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel by Anne Enright

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch:  A Novel by Anne Enright   (2007, 242 pages)

The Irish Quarter

"Was she really Irish-and what kind of Irish was she, while we are at it?  The right kind Stewart answered, in the main her manners seemed bred, not learned.   Though it was possible she was about as Irish as any woman who wanted to do well in Paris".

Anne Enright (1962, Dublin, Trinity College) is one of Ireland's leading contemporary writers.   She won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel, The Gathering.  I have posted on some of her short stories and liked them a lot.   I wanted to read one of her novels and I read through descriptions of  her several novels on Amazon and read the blog posts I could find (I am prejudiced but I trust posts by book bloggers more than paid reviewers under who knows what obligations to publishers) and the one that sounded most interesting to me was The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch:  A Novel.  

It is based on the life of an Irish woman, Eliza Lynch, who became the life long mistress of Francisco Solano Lopez,  who was, following his father, the dictator of Paraguay. Lopez ruled from 1862 to 1870.  Lynch was born in County Cork Ireland in 1835.   She left Ireland for Paris in 1845 at age ten, with her family to escape the Famine.   At age 15 she married married a French Army officer.  Her husband was sent to Algeria where she initially accompanied him but she returned to Paris because of questions of the legalities of her marriage at such a young age.   Through some lucky contacts she began to move in elite social circles and soon became a well known courtesan (in many cases, probably most actually, this is a euphemism for expensive prostitute).   She met the future dictator of Paraguay and became his mistress and bore him six children.  (The common place comparison is with Eva Peron though Eva had some redeeming qualities and Eliza did not.)  He took her back to Paraguay with him.   We first meet her pregnant on the sea voyage from France to Paraguay (Lopez was sent there by his father to gain military knowledge in the French Army.)  

The novel is told through the perspective of Eliza and  Dr Stewart, who was brought along to take care of her and remained in Paraguay.  The high society of Paraguay look down upon Eliza as "an Irish whore" who pushed Lopez into senseless wars with Brazil and Uruguay.  Lopez's own family regarded her with contempt.  He never married her using as his excuse his prior marriage.    One of them says of her "that she would rather break bread with a nigger than eat at the house of the Irish whore."

The book does not paint Eliza in at all a sympathetic way, there is nothing especially likable about her and she was probably just very lucky to some how captivate Lopez.   The opening pages of the book give a very graphic description of her first sexual encounters with Lopez.   I think she was smart enough to see what he wanted sexually and give it to him.   

"Eliza, good job on fleecing Lopez"
Carmilla

This is a beautifully written novel.   Even though Enright does not push it to to fore that much, it is about about being Irish outside of Ireland.  In Paris in the  time of the novel's setting, Irish women were sought after as mistresses as they were considered to have a savage quality as sexual partners.   There is also a suggestion that that is the only real value of Eliza.   She was in no way a decent person, she did not give to charity, she pushed Lopez into savage brutality. She did not seem to care a lot about her children,  When Lopez was killed in the war with Brazil Enright, limited research indicates the facts of the story are correct, shows that Lynch returns to Paris.  It appears she never went back to Ireland.

I really liked this novel a lot.   It made me feel ignorant in that I had never heard of Lynch and realized once again as a side effect of the reading life the great vastness of my ignorance about so many aspects of world history.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch:  A Novel is, as far as I can see, Enright's only historical novel.    I greatly enjoyed it and recommend with the only caution that the opening pages are very graphic sexually.

I hope over the next few months to read at least one work by the major 21st century Irish novelists.   What and who should I read?

In 2004 Lilly Tuck won The National Book Award for a book based on Lynch,  The News from Paraguay.   Please leave a comment if you have read this book or any others based on Lynch.

Mel u

"Della" by Anne Enright

"Della" by Ann Enright (2005, 3 pages)

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 11 to May 1

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week, now set to end May 1 (yes long week).  There are lots of links to stories you can read for the event on my resources page.   All you are asked to do is to post on at least one Irish Short Story and let me know about it.  I am very open to guest posters and joint mini-events.   If you have any questions or suggestions,  please leave a comment or email me.      

During Irish Short Story Week last year I posted on two short stories by Anne Enright, "Natalie" and "The Bed Department".   I enjoyed both of these stories a lot and I am glad that The New Yorker has placed these two stories as well as "Della" in the free area of their archives.   I will just do a very brief post on "Della" as my main purpose here is to be sure people know you can read contemporary top name Irish Short Stories for free.  

Anne Enright (1968-Dublin) won the Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering.   Enright graduated from Trinity College in Dublin following in the footsteps of Jonathan Swift,  Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Becket.  Enright worked in television as a producer of children's programs before devoting her full time to writing in 1993.  She is married and has two children.

"Della" is a very well done and is well worth the few minutes time it will take you to read it.   It is about a lonely old woman and an even more lonely old man who lives in the apartment next to her.   Both live by themselves and are really past the age where it is safe to live alone.

As the story opens Della is awaking from a dream about naked boys swimming besides a stream.   I will quote a bit so you can assure your self of the excellence of the prose of Enright.

"Now this is a good story"-
Carmella

The man next door was going blind, but he didn’t seem to notice it. Della felt obliged to point it out to him, even though it was none of her business and she didn’t really know what to say. They had lived side by side for more than fifty years, but they never got on much. Della had liked his wife, but she was dead a long time now, and he had never been chatty. Besides, his manner with children had stung Della when she was rearing her own. Her five and his two, all gone.At least hers came back now and again—his didn’t darken the door—but they were scattered, and Della, left to herself for long stretches of time, was prone to forgetfulness and thoughts about birch trees and naked boys she had never known. Sometimes, from next door came a scratching or tapping, which made her think, What could he be up to in there? Other times, so much silence that she wrote it down: “16th October—no noise,” trying to keep track of things, in case the man died. Despite the fact that she couldn’t remember what year it was.

The man next door seems to be her only human contact.   She listens to the sounds she makes and wonders what he could be doing.   If she hears no sounds for long periods of time she wonders if she should try to get in touch with the children of the man, if she even can.   The man may be healthier than the woman thinks.   The story is a straight out of the Frank O'Connor play book short story, you introduce some lonely people with no voice in society, let us get to know them, then something dramatic happens from which the main character in the story learns something.  

"Lots of time to join us"
Rory

Mel u