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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A vivid and textured novel,
By
This review is from: The Pornographer (Paperback)
The Pornographer is a complex novel, wonderfully vivid and textured in its mining of the human condition. It is a disturbing and yet calming warm bath of words, swirling with components of love, lust, loss, disenchantment, duty, and denial. Above all, however, I'd say this is a novel about growth.Michael is a young man who writes pornography for a living, although he doesn't particularly enjoy the writing. His life experiences and trysts, however, mirror his stories in their shallow sex-based origins. He meets 37 year-old virgin Josephine, and their affair, in which she craves and he obliges sex every time they meet, mirrors Michael's stories. But Michael's feelings for Josephine do not run beyond the physical, and when she gets pregnant, his apathy and life choices are put to the test. The great irony and juxtaposition of the work is that in the midst if Michael's indifference to Josephine and the child she carries is his devotion to his dying aunt, whom he visits every week. Michael's visits and emotional pain are suffused with a felicity that opposes his personal life. While he deals with his aunt's dying, he also faces the growth of a new life with his love child, and the possibility of a new life as a married father. Despite his apathy, love slowly burgeons in Michael's life from an unexpected source, showing him that loss can lead to discovery and growth. Michael learns he must resurrect the corpse of his tattered heart, shattered by lost love, and allow it to love again. McGahern's writing is as resonant and stirring as always, proving again his mastery of English prose. He deals with the realities of life, its disappointments and hardships, in a way that a great novel should: without pulling any punches or emotions, but leading you deftly by the hand into a world rich in meaning, emotion and irony. Despite the wonderful content, the great allure of McGahern's writing is its poeticality. It lulls you into another reality, enmeshing you in its fictional world in so smooth and comforting a way that you must shake your head and remind yourself where you are every time you close the pages.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sex and Love and Death set In Dublin c 1970,
By Kiwifunlad (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Pornographer (Paperback)
Written in 1979 and presumably set in the 1970's (the option of going to England for an abortion puts it post 1967). 30 year old Michael, the narrator of the novel and writer of pornography, goes to a dancehall and meets an attractive 38 year old woman, Mavis who he sleeps with but does not love. Mavis is totally in love with him and when she announces she might be pregnant their dilemma is an age old one. McGahern intersperses a couple of Michael's pornographic writings which are entertaining and feel more contemporary than the majority of the book which centres on Michael's rather mundane and near reclusive life: Michael visits his dying aunt in hospital regularly, sees Mavis a couple of times a week and has a drink with his boss about once a week. The book had a timelessness about it due to the near total lack of reference points and often I felt confused as to the period it was set. For me it often felt as though it was set in the 1950's and written by a much older author than McGahern was at the time, 44. McGahern style is clear and evocative and a great recording of Irish life but like its subject matter I was left disenchanted.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Endurance,
By
This review is from: The Pornographer (Paperback)
His aunt is ill, his uncle visits the hospital, and he tells his uncle there is no chance he will return to his parent's farm. Michael is faithful in visiting his aunt. He prepares work for his employer, Maloney, and begins a liaison with someone who is older than he. He keeps reminding her that their connection is not love.Michael has doubts his aunt is returning home cured. He gets the loan of an automobile from Maloney to go on an excursion with his friend. She has worked out a way for the two of them to take a boat trip, and Michael feels he can use such an outing for his writing. The circumstances of the main characters aren't pleasant, but I do get the sense that the description of them is realistic and, in a sense, loving, compassionate. When the relationship is tense, Michael schedules a meeting with his employer, Maloney, an ex-newspaperman. The central character, Michael, feels he has been lucky in general. He lost his mother early and was not the center of the existence of his aunt and uncle or anyone else. His salvation is sensitivity to his surroundings and that good upbringing he received from his aunt and his uncle. Readers should love this novel teeming with ideas and sentiments and descriptions of Irish concerns, (psychology and preoccupations).
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