A Pagan Place [Paperback]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2001

A PAGAN PLACE is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a woman--but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises--perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous girls and Tans with guns. Ireland has marked Edna O'Brien's life and work with unmistakable color and depth, and here she recreates her homeland with a singular grace and intensity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Edna O'Brien is...among the leading English-language novelists of the day." -- Washington Post

"If Molly Bloom had James Joyce's gift for story...she might have written O'Brien's fiction." -- Chicago Tribune

"O'Brien's evocative prose shows the chilling hold that history and the dead clamp on the living." -- Time

From the Back Cover

"Edna O'Brien is one of our bravest and best novelists." --Irish Times

"The artfully artless manner of the telling, the pared-to-the-bone prose, and richly comic overtones generate the novel's particular illumination, and it's of a high intensity…To my mind this is O'Brien's finest book." –Patricia MacManus, Saturday Review

"O'Brien brings together the earthy and the delicately poetic: she has the soul of Molly Brown and the skills of Virginia Woolf. --Newsweek

A Pagan Place is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there – of the child becoming a woman – but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises – perhaps more pointedly than in any of her other works. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods, of unknown babies in the womb, of mischievous girls and Tans with guns. Ireland has marked Edna O'Brien's life and work with unmistakable color and depth, and here she recreates her homeland with a singular grace and intensity.

Edna O'Brien is the author of numerous books, including Night, Down by the River, House of Splendid Isolation, Time and Tide, Lantern Slides, and, most recently, Wild Decembers. O'Brien grew up in Ireland and now lives in London.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (May 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618126902
• ISBN-13: 978-0618126903
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,489,184 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

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Female Portrait, May 15, 2001

By 

Erin (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Pagan Place (Paperback)

This book examines the female experience of being an artist, being Irish, and coming of age. Sound familiar? Edna O'Brien updates James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. She is sensitive, connecting paganism, sexuality and death, quickly (within the first 15 pages of the book). The protagonist struggles with her Irish upbringing, which connects Christianity with purity and chastity. Unlike Stephen Dedalus, she cannot use religion as an ordering device which he can eventually and ultimately reject. Instead, this protagonist becomes immobalized by the struggle between the two and unable to transcend the very society that entraps her. Like Joyce, O'Brien uses stream of consciousness techinques, but without the utter sense of chaos and disillusionment. She is subtle and she allows other voices to speak in her novel. For example, "You tried to whistle. Only men should whistle (parent voice). The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs (voice from church). It intrigues you thinking of the Bledded Virgin having to blush so frequently (protagonist's voice). The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the curlew (teacher's voice)." Edna O'Brien's voice is a multifarious voice which captures many of the voices that surround a child coming of age. This is a book about identity that will dazzle you with its writing and with its final outcomes. I not only read this book when I was studying in Ireland, but I now teach this book in an Irish Literature class in the United States. This is a must read.

5 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Literary intellectual exercise, but not much more than that, February 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Pagan Place (Paperback)

"A Pagan Place" is one of the earlier novels by Edna O'Brien, written in 1970. Set in an unknown place in the Irish countryside, the story has no beginning, and no end, and it's quite difficult to establish what in fact constitutes the content of this novel. All dialogues are gone, for they are embedded in the narrative, so that you not always know who is saying what, with all those pronouns; for how else would you cponstruct a dialogue when you wanted to hide the attribution of what is being said and by whom? He said, she said, he noted, she noted, he said, she said, ad nauseam. If only it were clear how to attribute the reported speech, but it is not, unfortunately. Characters appear from nowhere, without any explanation as to who they are, and truth be told, it is not all clear at the end of this novel. All these effects were intended, and one might suppose that by doing this, the author wanted to force our concentration, to have our senses sharpened to the maximum. I have put quite much effort in reading this volume, which by the way took me four months to complete, and I did concentrate, but then the end result was miserable, I must say. "A Pagan Place" is clearly inspired by James Joyce and his stream of consciousness experimental fiction. Dialogues, thoughts, narration, descriptions are all fused together and words flow in meandering streams the directional gradient of which appears to be random. The invisible narrator refers to you personally, although the persona being spoken to is actually one of the characters. It's mightly confusing, but would be acceptable if it were the only literary experiment devoured in this book. As it is, all the aforementioned elements combined make the book hardly readable. The message, if there was any, was lost. Having arrived at the last page, I thought that if the book was half shorter, or half longer, it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, and that is unforgivable. With a background of the story as rich as this one, O'Brien might have done much better. I guess she sacrificed everything on the altar of postmodern experimentation. All her books carry this stigma, but "A Pagan Place" features imbalance between traditional structure and experimentation. Therefore, reading this novel is a one-of-a-kind experience, a literary intellectual exercise, but not much more than that.

0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Literary Nonsense, December 27, 2009

By 

J. McBrearty (Lexington, KY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Pagan Place (Paperback)

I had to read this mess for an MFA class. Set aside that it is feminist crap, the book is written entirely in the second person --- if I hear one more 'you did such and such' I'll puke. It's a slog fest not worth the paper its written on. The lesson I learned? Most of what passes for "literary" is just mediocre writing by people who are friends with other mediocre writers, and consider making their work unintelligible a form of creativity. They call it "experimental".