Customer Reviews

THE LAND OF SPICES, A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a neglected but absolutely gorgeous novel. If you've read James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," you'll find this novel of a young woman's coming of age in an Irish convent a fascinating contrast. Highly recommended.

Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices tells the story of a woman who betrayed herself as a young girl--becoming a nun as a reaction to the shock of discovering her father's homosexuality. O'Brien brilliantly shows how Catholic doctrine made it impossible for the protagonist to interpret her father's homosexuality as anything other than a violent betrayal. In cutting off her father whom she loved more than anyone in the world, the protagonist cuts herself off from her own heart and proceeds to live an emotionally hollow existence as a nun. While rapidly rising through the ranks of the international order she belongs to, she is appointed to run a convent in Ireland. As an Englishwoman in Ireland, she feels more lost than ever and yearns to quit her post. Then she begins to have a relationship with a 5 year boarder, who is there because of her own family problems. The little girl reminds her of being a happy little girl with her father. As the nun grows to love the young girl, she gains the ability to understand that she still loves her father and that she has made a terrible mistake, both in judging him and in choosing life as a nun out of fear. This is a moving book well worth reading.

In a convent school in the Ireland of the 1930s, O'Brien weaves the parallel tales of a sensitive young pupil and the lonely mother superior who sees promise in her. Anna Murphey, daughter of an alcoholic father, weak mother, and dictatorial grandmother, finds solace only in the companionship of her younger brother, Charlie. Away at school from a young age, Anna's academic talents create a barrier between her and her classmates, and they run her afoul of certain of the most jealous nuns. Compounding Anna's problems is the fact that she is emotionally isolated from her mostly useless family. Her drunk father, her dominating grandmother, and her spineless mother all exist outside of Anna's emotional world.

O'Brien is clearly cognizant of the dangers of convent education for sensitive young women like Anna. The book suggests that loneliness and unhappiness is the lot of the thinking, feeling woman, as epitomized by Anna and the mother superior. Loneliness is endemic. The only happy women in the book are some of the simpering, unthinking elder students.

The book also provides a strong indictment against the provincialism of Irish nationalism. The Irish nationalists in O'Brien's work are univerally short-sighted and unsure of why they support their cause. In short, they are incapable of seeing the forest for the trees.

This is an interesting, thinking novel, which provides a fascinating look at life in a convent school.

The book was in excellent condition and arrived within the promised date. I would recommend this company.

Hmm.

O'Brien's style immediately conjures up (in my mind at least) contemplative memories of Henry James and Sherwood Anderson--and for completely different reasons respectively: the former for O'Brien's effusive disgorging of psychological states, reflections, and descriptions that seem to endlessly divagate into nowhere in particular; and the latter for her "nearly impressionistic" style--impressionistic, not in the strict aesthetic sense as much as the vague and nebulous sense. Her sentence-ideas conspicuously lack referents that can be easily concretized by the reader and, more often than not, inundate the reader with an uncontained and unidentified blank passion that flounces and dances around _whatever she is trying to write about_. In no way is her style endearing to me, but I can just as well understand why another would love it.

It wouldn't be a disingenuous criticism to say that her book suffers from too much information, inhibiting the "profundity of subtlety" that characterizes fine literary art: her narrative lacks action (that is, depiction); instead, the reader is treated to a surfeit of description--pages and pages of descriptions that preclude the cherished violence of substantive or existential influence or shock. Ebullience, when contained, certainly can produce excellence; but I'm having a hard time figuring out _where all these words are going_. Of course, that may just as well be the idea, but it loses its efficacy on a reader like me.

Anyway, it's not easy to get through twenty pages of this novel, much less 300. This novel took me a full week to read (along with two other books I was reading at the same time), which, for me, is abnormally long.

It's supposed to be a "spiritual novel' or a "religious novel"; I'm not so sure about that. There is religion in it; of that much, I can assure you. That a deep understanding of the religion in any way informs the novel's main themes, I cannot.

There's almost nothing here, even though the novel's set up is perfect. That's the rub: this could have been great, but it fell way short. Not a single moment in the novel proffers the reader with any kind of epiphany; not a single character transformation leads into a broader statement about humanity and its relationship to God; instead..."words, words, words."

2 Stars.

As Continental forces and Virginia militia units were engaged in winning independence, American quartermasters and provisioners struggled to provide these units with all the necessities of life, from meals and guns to meat, fodder for horses, the horses themselves, firewood, and every other type of material. Much of this was requisitioned from the civilian population and certificates were issued payable in either continental or state funds, depending on the units supplied, upon presentation to court authorities. Thousands of these certificates issued to Virginians were duly entered by the courts, and they provide a fascinating insight into the period of the Revolution. These "Publick" Claims booklets contain interesting and useful information about the contributions of ordinary people to the Revolutionary War. They provide some details of people's service in the militia or as guards for prisoners of war; they indicate where some bodies of troops were at particular times; and they identify providers of horses, wagons, cattle, grain, or other supplies. Much of the information in these booklets cannot be found anywhere else, which makes the surviving records particularly valuable. Also remarkable is the fact that records survived from virtually every county in the state at that time with the exception of the newly formed Kentucky counties. This makes the collection even more valuable in covering areas which heretofore in this time period have suffered from a lack of personal data. The "Virginia Publick Claims" are published by counties. In addition to a faithful transcription by Janice Luck Abercrombie and the late Richard Slatten, a complete index is provided for each county booklet. This series is an extremely important genealogical tool for searchers in Revolutionary-era materials.