Customer Reviews

A Pagan Place

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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.

"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.

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".