A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'brien [Hardcover]

Edna O'Brien (Author), Philip Roth (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 461 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) (November 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374153426
• ISBN-13: 978-0374153427
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,913,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" Trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fanatic heart, a painful heart, March 11, 2000

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Mar - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien (Plume) (Paperback)

It is a collection of short stories already published under different titles; they are summoned now with a common objective: to show a deep and complete analysis of women's world. The presence almost overwhelming of feminine figures (rural and urban women, young or elder, married or single, raw and sophisticated...) is the leading thread of this collection. Their decisions, vital choices, their problems, the situations they have to face due to the fact that they belong to the so-called "weak sex" (the girl deserted by her boyfriend after the engagement, the doubts before birth, the anguish of the eldest girl, who has disappointed deeply her mother's expectations over her...etc) are portrayed in a sympathetic and honest way; you can't avoid feeling sorry for some of them: the heroine that has made the wrong choice, the mother submitted to an inebriate husband, the woman that can't escape from an adulterous love.... In this sense the last sentence of the first story, The Connor Girls, is revealing: "By such choices we (women) gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone", because it introduces what is going to be one of the main points of most of the stories: loneliness, women's loneliness in the face of men, in the face of other women integrated in the system, in short, in the face of this world of men. What is the result of all this? I think that the feeling that pervades the whole book is that of sadness, an acute pain with which the writer could be exorcising her own.