≡ PDF Free The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue Edna O'Brien 9780452263949 Books

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue Edna O'Brien 9780452263949 Books

Download As PDF : The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue Edna O'Brien 9780452263949 Books

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue Edna O'Brien 9780452263949 Books

I read these three novels in quick succession. The girls grow up in poverty and use whatever talents they have to get ahead. There's lot of black humor and stark tragedies caused by the girls themselves and the people in their lives. It's a coming-of-age story couched in a damning expose of Ireland itself and its poverty, drunken men, oppression of women, and cruel Catholic Church. No wonder it was banned in Ireland in the 1960s.
If you grew up on "great" literature written by men, edited by men, published by men, given awards by men, reviewed by men, and taught by men then The Country Girls will come across as both a breath of fresh air and a much-needed punch in the head.
And if Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt still lives in your head and makes you smile, Edna O'Brien will replace it with something more enlightened.


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The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue Edna O'Brien 9780452263949 Books Reviews

I love this (out of print!) book about Kate and Baba, two country girls from a small Irish town, who get themselves kicked out of boarding school and move to Dublin.

I admire the way Baba is authentically written--she's the sharp-tongued, doesn't-give-a-crap girl friend, more worldly-wise and sophisticated to Kate's callowness and inexperience. This trope is common, and can become stereotypical, but here it is done really well. The characters are so real, they can't help but move the story along and get into all sorts of trouble.
I discovered Edna O’Brien in a New Yorker article that covered her recent trip to New York City. Intrigued, I watched her video, where she spoke about the loneliness of being a writer. I wondered if her work lived up to her artful use of “spin.” So I picked up her first work, “The Country Girls,” an ensuing trilogy that includes an epilogue. She captured Irish life and culture; I was transported to a world where melancholy and beauty became suffused with light and melded together as one. I became intertwined with the two characters, Kate and Baba, and they became one with me. It is a terrible thing to lose one’s innocence, but Innocence must be there from the start. Kate and Baba lose their innocence and struggle with this loss for the rest of their lives. For tough, little Baba innocence was never so grand in the first place, but for the sensitive and introspective Kate, her tender heart will never recover. Is author Edna O’ Brien all she’s cracked up to be? Her work is much more than a masterful rendering of her craft as a writer. Instead her work is a powerful retreat into life’s somber beauty. I can see why Irish Catholic priests banned and burned this trilogy; they were unable to reckon with the truth embodied by the inner workings of two girls, who might muse about sex, especially when we all know that girls were never valued by the Catholic Church. These girls stubbornly defied the social norms to live out a larger story of unbridled human passion, and ultimately they paid the price.
I had first red these books several decades ago. At the time I felt that I had been given the chance to explore a world as foreign to me as any to be found in science fiction. This was the life lived by two poor Irish Girls as they moved from some tiny rural village into the city life and relative wealth. Their religion, sex, economic status and nationality were unknown terrain and reading Edna O'Brian was to be an explorer.
Now it is 2014. Ms. O'Brian has published her memoirs Country Girl A Memoir. Re reading the Country Girls Trilogy is to be part of my preparation for reading the Memoirs. This edition The Country Girls Trilogy and Epiloguemade iteasy to have them in one place, in the right order and complete with the epilogue. So far so good.
Ms. O'Brian writes very strong images with great efficiency. She is deft at using words economically to establish character, moods and environments. This time however I felt the weight of her two Girls Kate and Baba's hard won self-destruction. O'Brian's Ireland, and Irish experience is not the home of smiling Irish eyes.

The Country Girls introduces us to our two protagonists. Kate is the only daughter of one of the town drunks. We are told he is abusive, but his wife dies, drowned and we never witness his violence. The fear he has instilled in his house is no bluff. Kate is,, we are told, smart, pretty and romantic, but suppressed, eager for love and readily mislead. Baba is a thieving bully from an apparently stable, well off home. The two will cleave together as a dark female version of some buddy flick. Think, Thelma and Louise without any real gumption. Baba will make Kate her special target for all that is good and bad in Baba.

Between Book 1 and 2, The Country Girls and The Lonely Girls the two will be exposed to worlds of ever wider horizon, first as Convent School Girls and then as two independent spirits in the big city. Kate is the center of the narrative. We are told she is the brighter of the two, having won a scholarship, been head of her classes, always reading and so forth. Yet we find she has no wisdom, no culture, little religion, no conversation. Every drunken bar Irishman has an instinctive sense of Irish history and the reasons to hate invaders, yet Kate has no clue about any of this. She has an eye for older married men and no awareness that this may be a problem for her or her Irish Catholic community. Kate will spend increasing amount of time crying and being tragic. She is indeed a lonely girl.
In book 3, Girls In Their Married Bliss we finally get to hear from Baba. Now that we hear her very different voice, we find that education has failed, indeed is a total wasted on her. She is sarcastic, bitter but at least has spirit and strength. She has an eye for men an unaccountable willing ness to put up with and out for Male oddities. Baba is admirable in ways Kate cannot be, yet she is superstitious, ignorant, defiant as a cover to her ignorance and manipulative.

Men in these books range from drunken bullies to emotionally cold intellects. There may be some individuals who are truly sympathetic but they are either briefly portrayed or otherwise marginal. One husband is remote and judgmental and ultimately not that likable. The other husband is almost unknown to us as we only see him through his unhappy wife's eyes. However there is only money to make him attractive. If you are expecting any bliss in book 3 it's not there.

The epilogue tells us the end of the tragedy. There are a few interesting turns, but in terms of adding to the existing narrative it is not that important. What lifts the Epilog is its homage to James Joyce. O'Brian's skill as a story teller is effectively joined to the stream of conscious style of Ulysses. Once you adjust to its deliberate disjointed construction, you become much closer to the mind of the narrator as she brings herself to terms with her life and marriage and the events of her lifelong friend. Lineal story telling would have been dull. This abrupt change is more like how a complex mind would think through the events of the day and of the last twenty years.

These novellas relate unhappy stories. Of the three the first is the most readable and the second the least. On this point one has to be specific. The stories are sad and therefore demanding on your emotions. The story telling is eloquent. And again the term eloquent refers to the ability to explain and describe with a minimal of elaboration. I will be reading more O'Brian before I turn to her memoirs, but this is the place to learn what it is to be a skill writer.
I wanted to read some Irish lit. The lists of great Irish books I found should have been called great Irish books by men. I swore off books written by men a few years ago because, like, what else do they have to say? Nothing to me. Anyway, I googled Irish books by women and this came up. I had no idea what I was about to read and was completely blown away by the first of these three novels. It’s is one of the best books I’ve ever read. If that had been it, it would’ve been enough. I read the other two because they were there. They’re both good, but not the same kind of good. By the time I got to the end of these three novels, I appreciate 2 and 3 more than I did while reading them. I’m bothered by the racism in the epilogue. I don’t know why it’s there, even though I think it fits the character. Still, I would say the first novel is a masterpiece and the rest of this book is worth reading. I can’t believe it’s been out there all my life and I only just found it.
I read these three novels in quick succession. The girls grow up in poverty and use whatever talents they have to get ahead. There's lot of black humor and stark tragedies caused by the girls themselves and the people in their lives. It's a coming-of-age story couched in a damning expose of Ireland itself and its poverty, drunken men, oppression of women, and cruel Catholic Church. No wonder it was banned in Ireland in the 1960s.
If you grew up on "great" literature written by men, edited by men, published by men, given awards by men, reviewed by men, and taught by men then The Country Girls will come across as both a breath of fresh air and a much-needed punch in the head.
And if Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt still lives in your head and makes you smile, Edna O'Brien will replace it with something more enlightened.