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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.
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 and widowed, 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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"I first came across Edna O'Brien's work as a teenager when I happened by chance upon a slim though enticing paperback misplaced on a random library shelf. That Saturday afternoon, I found myself thoroughly immersed in the dark and passionate world of 'Johnny I Hardly Knew You' (1977), its overtures to the classic ballad enveloping a morose tale of murder. While homicide is not necessarily... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) par for the course in reading O'Brien's novels, she has sundered the human spirit in a myriad other ways over the span of her prolific career. She specializes in portraying the intensely coupled yet disjointed asymmetries of mother and daughter, husband and wife. In the midst of these unholy tangles lurk also the drunken, brutish father, wayward sons and married lovers. And then there's the over-bearing Church with its legion of faithful, ever ready to judge, torment and chasten her scandalous protagonists — those naive or forceful women who seek to escape the rigors of social convention and rural constraint. Eleanora, in O'Brien's latest novel, 'The Light of Evening,' is a famous writer, estranged from her mother, Dilly, and from the Irish motherland, whose history, landscape and people she recreates in a contorted act of veneration, at once rebellious disregard and steadfast filial duty. As Dilly lays dying in a Dublin hospital bed, she remembers an earlier life in New York, a lost love and an awkward marriage, and she calls her prodigal daughter home to the family fold. The novel moves from Dilly's first-person account of her youthful adventures to a collection of scenes from Eleanora's tempestuous life and, finally, to the damning revelations of Eleanora's journal. O'Brien includes within these narratives a number of letters, all of which reveal, to varying degrees, the absolute neediness and utter reproach that mars these characters' ability to connect with those they love. This sentiment is contained in Dilly's last, painful meeting with Eleanora as she 'holds her in a tight, clumsy, angry, desperate, loving, farewelling embrace.' In the background stands the decaying family home, Rusheen, and Dilly's failed attempt to change her will and pass on the estate to Eleanora. Faulkner's pithy observation that 'The past is never dead. It's not even past' cements the novel's thematic attachments of kinship and land, the tense confluence of past and present. Some critics lament a certain redundancy in O'Brien's endless rewriting of her autobiographical struggles, but I found that the oft-rehearsed sketches of her fictionalized experience — the bitter demise of conjugal bliss, the demoralizing affairs, the liberating quest for artistic fulfillment — capture everything that makes her previous work so satisfying, in its contrite, worldly prose and its refusal of easy redemption. The deliciously absurd interlude of Eleanora's exchange with a London neighbor who bequeaths to her, and then abruptly retracts, the gift of a box containing a wig of once lustrous red hair is O'Brien at her luminous best: 'That small transaction an instance of their small lives in their small houses and their small gardens, their hearts contracting day by day, visiting little malices on one another in lieu of their missed happiness.' Given the imaginative terrain of the immigrant's tale, one might presume that Dilly's expatriate episode in the 1920s and her return to Ireland would serve as the novel's major stimulus. Yet the opening sections are somehow sadly lacking. Composed of a series of short vignettes, these moments are flattened into stock tableaus, devoid of the prosaic depth one might attach, for example, to a figurative snapshot simply titled 'Ellis Island.' Such instances are, like the novel as a whole, imbued with pathos, but they lack the weighty meaning and forceful energy found in some of O'Brien's earlier books. In this regard, 'The Light of Evening' strains to find a compelling close. While O'Brien is well-versed in capturing the brutality of grief or ennui, the overly constructed attempt to shock the reader at the novel's end, to bring things full circle yet atone for the prologue's epic mode — 'Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers' — simply doesn't ring true. For O'Brien, the real poetry lies in the silent gesture, what's not said, the failure of communion. Louise Bernard is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University." Reviewed by Louise Bernard, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
With its loving evocation of the Irish landscape, its cinematic portrait of New York in the 1920s as seen through the eyes of an immigrant, and its central mother-daughter relationship, "The Light of Evening" is certain to bring this daring writer her widest audience yet.
EDNA O'BRIEN is the author of eighteen works of fiction, including the New York Times Notable Books and Book Sense picks Wild Decembers and In the Forest, and Lantern Slides, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2002 she won the National Medal for Fiction from the National Arts Club. An honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, O'Brien was born and grew up in Ireland and has lived in London for many years.
Product details
304 pages
Houghton Mifflin Company -
English9780618718672
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"In her 20th work of fiction, O'Brien meditates with haunting lyricism on the lure of home and the compulsion to leave. Dilly, 78 and widowed, 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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
With its loving evocation of the Irish landscape, its cinematic portrait of New York in the 1920s as seen through the eyes of an immigrant, and its central mother-daughter relationship, "The Light of Evening" is certain to bring this daring writer her widest audience yet.
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