Seán O'Faoláin (1900–1991)

This set of stories is more "contemporary" than the last set -- I read earlier this year, those were set in childhood, youth, Cork. These are stories of emigrants and Cork folk relocated to Dublin. Love stories, many of them. In a word, they felt dated in that way the work of many men who wrote in the first half of the 20th century does. An effort of some sort is being made to view women as fellow travelers, but not a very serious one. There are unvarnished moments: "Love, my dear, poor boy, is a sedative disguised as a stimulant. It's a mirror where man sees himself as a monster and women as a thing of unvarnished beauty,. If it wasn't for that all men would, otherwise, and normally, fear all women. You fear women. I fear women. But because we need them we have to have them. And that's where they have us, in the great and final triumph of women over men, called--by them not by us, and well called--Happy Wedlock. Love is a prison staffed by female warders . . . " Now this speech is given by a friend and the narrator, in the story, ends up in a sturdy friendly marriage, yet, in story after story in the collection this first sentiment is present. Or there are two sorts of men (and to be fair, women)--the dull and faithful and the fun and untrustworthy. He's a good writer, O'Faolain, knows his craft, but I did find myself skim-reading by the end. Several stories have an homage to Joyce feeling to them, especially the very short final story, "Passion." In his preface O'Faolain makes a distinction between story and tale (think blunt and incisive versus wandering and intuitive) that was perhaps the biggest takeaway for me. ***1/2… (més)

O'Faolain takes on the emerging middle class post-independence in Ireland (with occasional earlier forays --[A Nest of Simple Folk] being one--a novel that leads a country lad inexorably to the Easter Rebellion in 1916) and the Irish "character" in general. The short story was considered his forte. These are the stories of an older person, almost all of them male, and they are full of nostalgia and sadness but without self-pity, more a sort of wonder at the folly of human behaviour. An older man meeting a woman he knew as a lad ". . . nobody knows what life is until he has lived out so much of it that it is too late then to do anything but go on the way you have gone on, or been driven on, from the beginning." Or an older man regarding a young lad of 15: "Each of them is imprisoned in childhood and no one can tell him how to escape. Each of them must, blind-eyed, gnaw his way out, secretly and unaided." "At certain moments all through our lives we touch a point where ignorance is teetering on the brink of some essential revelation which we fear as much as we need it." The stories are dated now in that they portray a time and a way of being that is fading, but the subject of this collection, the folly of youth and the wisdom of the elders, alas, is a theme that remains untouched and likely will for all time. ***1/2… (més)