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My Dream of You

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Part shocking history, part sexual odyssey, all lyrical prose, Dublin journalist Nuala O'Faolain's first fiction is stunning as she interweaves past and present in parallel stories of two women seeking fulfillment.

Ms. O'Faolain's bestselling memoir, "Are You Somebody?," won accolades for its utter honesty and brilliant craftsmanship. These attributes shine as brightly in "My Dream Of You."

Kathleen de Burca, an unmarried 50+ travel writer is a woman who "believed in passion the way other people believed in God; everything fell into place around it."

Yet to date her life has been a series of meaningless, rueful-in-the-morning liaisons. Compounding her unhappiness is the sudden death of her best friend, Jimmy, a gay fellow writer.

Hoping to begin anew, Kathleen takes a leave of absence and returns to her native Ireland. Memories of her homeland are disheartening. She recalls her mother as oppressed and the children as "neglected victims of her victimhood. Villain? Father. Old-style Irish Catholic patriarch; unkind to wife, unloving to children, harsh to young Kathleen when she tried to talk to him."

Nonetheless, Kathleen wants "....my life given back to me, so I can live it again better." She has become fascinated by the Talbot affair, an actual event which took place during the Potato Famine, some 150 years ago. According to records, Marianne Talbot, the wife of an Anglo-Irish landowner, was seen by servants en deshabille with William Mullan, a stableman.

"There could hardly have been two people less likely to be drawn to each other than an Anglo-Irish landlord's wife and an Irish servant," Ms. O'Faolain writes. "Each of them came from a powerful culture which had at its very core the defining of the other as alien."

Intrigued by the disparity between the apparent lovers and the fact that Marianne is found guilty of adultery, Kathleen determines to write their story.

She travels to Ballygall, site of the former Talbot estate, where she is aided in her research by Miss Leech, a feisty spinster librarian; and cosseted by Bertie, a widowed inn owner.

As Kathleen delves into the past readers are reminded of the grim devastation wrought by the Famine. Those were days when the still living "had to open the pit in the top field to push in more bodies," and Marianne could hear through her drawing room window the cries for food, when "the low noise of pleading and begging swelled to shrieking."

Surely few have painted the Famine's stark reality as movingly as Ms. O'Faolain. Her descriptions constrict the heart, enabling readers to see anew a mortally wounded country and its people.

As Kathleen unearths surprising data about the Talbot scandal, she also discovers some truths about herself. It's at this juncture that she finds another opportunity for romance, but at what price?

With "My Dream Of You" Ms. O'Faolain clearly shows that she is not only a deft memoirist, but a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of humankind, and a compassionate chronicler of a still present past.

- Gail Cooke

Nuala O'Faoloain's My Dream of You is a coming-of-middle-age tale about Irish women across decades looking for "something to love." While the novel is overtly about passion, it also explores the meaning of coming home and leaving it, of familial ties, of friendship, and, most poignantly, of growing older. Fiftyish Kathleen de Burca finds herself bereft and alone when her best friend Jimmy dies, and she begins to question the choices she has made. A persistent memory of a former lover and his "gift" to her of court documents prompt her to quit her job as a travel writer and to research the scandalous affair between a married Englishwoman and her Irish groom, an event that occurred during the Irish Potato Famine. Kathleen arrives on Irish soil after a long, stubborn absence, and there, she begins to open up, to understand matters of love and passion, to grasp the significance of her childhood, to give meaning to what it means to be Irish.

O'Faoloain's prose is lyrical, though sometimes overwrought, and its cadences propel this essentially quiet story. The historical side of the book, that of the principals in the Talbot Judgment, lends texture to the present day story, although the story itself is not as compelling as it could be, especially when Kathleen recreates it as fiction. O'Faoloain's unflinching descriptions of the realities of the aging body and its desires give this novel a freshness and an honesty. The psychology of the protagonist is revealed with equal candor.

My Dream of You should appeal largely to women, although all readers who like to read about Ireland will enjoy its textures of history and description.

Kathleen de Burca, a single, middle-aged travel writer living alone for twenty years in the same basement flat in London, finds her whole life changing when her closest friend and confidante dies very suddenly. Her loneliness is overpowering, her desire to leave her job and try a new kind of writing is growing, and as she faces the age of fifty without a family or any lover, she remarks soulfully, "I...watch the [passion] in me dying....This is the hardest thing; and no one warned me."

Possessing the court transcript for an adultery trial from the 1850's, Kathleen decides to return to Ireland for the first time since she left home, thirty years before, to look for more information about the case and perhaps to write about it. She is puzzled by the irony that the apparently unrestrained passion of the "affair" took place during the depths of the Potato Famine, and she is open to a passion of her own.

Kathleen de Burca is an unusual protagonist for a love story by virtue of her age alone, and few women will be able to resist her attempts to find direction for her life, with or without a lover. O'Faolain creates a flawed and realistic main character trying to find connections within the mess of her life--the Irish roots she has abandoned, friends and lovers she has thoughtlessly hurt, and ill-considered choices she has made. Romantic in its descriptions of the Irish countryside, this is a big, enjoyable story of love and passion as seen by a woman in her 50's and by the young wife in the court documents, leading to new perspectives and new considerations of passion in our lives. Mary Whipple