Customer Reviews

Whoredom In Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I had no idea what to expect of this book when I picked it up, but a friend of mine recommended it, and after about ten pages I was hooked. Written from a first-person perspective by an American writer living in Ireland, it offers a most engaging voice and a vivid view of modern Ireland. The writer spent half a year living in Dublin and another half year living in rural Ireland in a Norman castle in the small village of Corofin. Having lived in Ireland for nearly ten years I was awestruck by the accuracy and intimacy of her portrayal of Irish life, her very engaging sense of humor, and her great talent as a writer. Line for line this book is absolutely beautiful. Her affectionate characterizations and stories of the people she met in Ireland fairly lift off the page. Her ear for dialogue is superb. There is a great deal of information here about Irish society, including interviews with the President of Ireland, and with other prominent Irish people, but the real draw of this wonderful book is the manner in which the writer has chosen to tell the story of this small country entering into the modern world. I laughed out loud at so many descriptions and scenes, conversations in a the pub, mishaps, local oddballs, lifestyle and beliefs of the Irish people. I didn't want the book to end. It's the kind of book you read and wish you knew the person who wrote it. There's a vividness to Mahoney's writing that I have not seen matched in many works of non-fiction. Above all, what distinguishes this work most is the clear respect and love the writer has for the people she has chosen to study and portray in it. There's a deep humaneness and sympathy to her approach to Ireland and its people, even though she offers criticisms and skepticism. I was entertained, moved, and enchanted by the stories she tells and don't know why I hadn't heard of it before now. The truths put forth in this book are sometimes a but upsetting, but they are exactly that: truths. And they are truths that needed to be told. I loved it.

How can anyone spend a couple of years abroad, anywhere, and expect to portray an accurate historical account of the status of women in that country, let alone the entire people? She can't. So why are the reviewers expecting this book to be that impossible thing and to be unequivocally historically complete?

This is an autobiography of the author's experience in Ireland, not a history of Ireland. This is Ms. Mahoney's journey, not Ireland's. Take it for what you will beyond that, because it is a compelling read with wonderfully imagined and experienced events. She is honest with her material while drawing out the poetic charm of her travels. She tracks several key political movements, such as the attempts to legalize a woman's right to seek counseling on abortion, through their late-80s specific events and leaders and in relation to the deeper built-in oppressions of Irish-Christian dogma. She does not come out and condemn anyone or anything, but leaves those opinions to the reader. She paints a picture of a country that is quite progressive in many ways, even electing their first woman president, but silently the culture continues to oppress women in ways that are not befitting a 20th (now 21st) century world.

Too bad so many individuals misinterpret her work: If the people of Corofin and Dublin truly were "having their fun" with Ms. Mahoney by avoiding being honest with her in the hopes of making a fool out of her, frankly, they deserve to be caricatured. What a wonderful lesson in humility - a detail that speaks more about the state of a handful of men and women than any idealized cultural representation could have. When you have a guest to your house, do you mock them and make them out to be fools or do you welcome them and their cultural differences? I guess in some places, the tradition is to scare the outsider away rather than include them in the larger world picture.

Maith go leor, a Rosemary! Is iontach ?

I read this in preparation for a trip to Ireland--in fact, ended up reading it instead of the dry-as-dust "traveler's history" I had first purchased. The author doesn't presume to make an academic study of women in Ireland, instead she chronicles, in minute but far from boring detail, her ten-months' sojourn to the Republic, split between Dublin and a small town in western Clare. Each chapter focuses on a particular experience: interviewing a famous/notorious pro-choice advocate in Dublin, taking visitors home after an evening at the pub in Corofin, and the like. The account of her brief volunteer work with Sister Keating and the Dublin slum girls is a perfect unmade bed-- equal parts poignant, barbaric, and startlingly funny. Whenever there is a choice between giving you the broad sweep of events on the one hand and the weird, unpredictable, and telling detail on the other, she chooses the detail. And, within the confines of that, she is brilliant.

I love this book! I grew up just outside Galway and quit Ireland permanently in 1984, swearing I'd never come back. I went back last summer (1997), partly because of the nostalgia caused by this book. Apart from being occasionally taken in by "coddin'," I think Ms. Mahoney got a good take on the two Irelands, urban and rural. A good complement to this book (IMHO) is "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Ireland."

After recently reading Mahoney's account of late 80s China, "The Early Arrival of Dreams" (also reviewed by me), and thinking about her curious account of pilgrimages as "The Singular Pilgrim," which I also enjoyed, I went back to re-read "Whoredom" a dozen years after I had first finished it, when it came out to a small flurry of attention (at least in my conversations) among Irish emigres and Irish Americans, especially feminists. Taken in the dimmer light of an Ireland since riven by clerical scandal, and where now 1:3 babies are born to unmarried mothers, the transitions seem far away from the subsequent hi-tech & EU-fueled immigration booms into Ireland. Her interviews with Mary Robinson and the poet Eavan Boland are a bit too lengthy, but do document well this jittery state of change as the 90s settled in and unsettled traditional roles across the nation. I was amused, by the way, to hear Boland call herself "middle class." As Boland was the daughter of the UN's first president, with a diplomatically-raised childhood and a very posh education, it made me wonder if you'd have to live in Buckingham Palace to be any rank higher than "middle class."

Anyway, Mahoney, as in her other books, reveals very little about herself and an overwhelming amount about everyone who passes by her sharp eye and into her evidently capacious memory. Like many Irish, no matter where born, she directs conscientiously but almost invisibly her attention outside herself. So, this is not even a memoir but what's since been labelled "creative non-fiction" in its novelistic and "thick" detail--perhaps more fitting an anthropologist crossed with a storyteller.

I did wonder, especially in the Corofin pub dialogue--and most of all a drunken long night after when some of the folks followed her back to the castle for more craic and awkward conviviality--how she remembered it all in such minute incidences as the alteration in a countenance after an utterance or the shift in tone as heard in the midst of one of her "informant's" endless recitations. I presume, without discounting the essential veracity of her accounts, that she does take a bit of liberty with the re-creation of so many thousands of words after perhaps hundreds of nights whittled down to the best bits from her many months.

While some castigate the author for trying to fit into the JJ Smythe lesbian pub scene by "passing," Mahoney does explain in retrospect that she did not do this lightly, and acted on the spot half out of embarassment or fear, rather as any willful and premeditated desire to deceive her companions. She describes well the mingled excitement and terror that she feels when put on the spot in a setting she never before had entered.

Similarly, I do not believe that she tricked any of her Corofin conversationalists; they all knew her as a writer and her task being to observe them all for a book in the works. The accusations she relates while--fittingly--being driven off from Clare by way of Ennis while being tongue-lashed by a madwoman driver who disdains her passenger's scribal vocation which the driver knows by repute: this subtly portrays the tensions that she stirred up among the local people.

Mahoney's characteristic approach being rather to let herself be self-effaced and to blend into what she is experiencing and then conveying to us makes her style admirable for its technical skill, if rather detached for the lack of a strong first-person presence. I realize that this is her chosen vantage-point, but it makes the hints she gives out--alcoholic strife, no mention of a father, only the barest asides to her own Boston formative years--all the more mysterious. Judging from her previous China and her future pilgrimage books, I suppose she wants to remain more enigmatic--an intriguing trait for a non-fictional writer who tells of her own encounters.

A few typos marred an otherwise thorough effort: on pg. 265 she misspells what should be the writers Walter "Macken" and Austin "Clarke"; the next page shows her twice giving out Eric Cross' folkloric and once notoriously banned (and de-banned) account as "The Tailor of Ansty" when the "of" should be "and."

She has done her homework. Her careful attention to what she hears and how it's spoken makes her a thoughtful and slyly entertaining guide. Her paragraphs on pp. 10-12 showing us what her castle looked like marvelously show her powers of summation and support. I still wish she would have delved further with her first-person narration, and told more about her own previous trips to Ireland, her studies that prefaced the months narrated, and much more about her own Irish American background.

But, her reticence amidst so much verbiage is typically Irish itself.

I've never been to Ireland, but after reading Rosemary Mahoney's splendidly eclectic tour of Irish women and Irish minds, I feel like I've had the next best experience to an extended stay on the Emerald Isle. Do not be fooled by the title, this book is not a narrowly conceived analysis of gender relations. Pay attention to the words "world of" because that is what Mahoney brings to life on every page of this highly readable work. Wow, does this author ever have the gift for developing sharply focused images that emit raw energy. She speaks with women, about their paradoxical relations with men, but also takes the risk of the literary "side trip," thus creating one of the most vivid sensations of "place" that you will find on the printed page. This is also a book of pubs, of warm and pungent Guiness poured by bartenders whose youth still haunts them, standing on stone floors worn down by storytellers and lovers of ages past. It's about foreboding castles and achingly beautiful landscapes. It's about women, where women can and always should struggle and perhaps prevail -- in the swirling context that bespeaks the joy and sorrow of life, of Ireland. Once reading this book, you may very well feel that you have to make the trip yourself, or even perhaps, that you already HAVE.

I have to agree with the other "one star" reviewers. Mahoney was very clear with her interviewees in Dublin that she was recording what they said for a book (the biggest names had both the power and money to sue her)....but did she give that same courtesy to the less affluent locals in Corofin? --Or did she encourage their friendship by hanging around the pub, inviting them drunk to her home, listening to their most personal secrets and then scribbling down the most intimate and personal elements of a person's life after-the-fact with intent to publish? Did she tell them she was writing down every word? Every "confidence" they shared with her? Did she EVER mention this during her lengthy stay? To have done so would have shown some integrity, but I would imagine she did not, because any person in any country would have steered FAR clear of a person who makes "friends" just to milk them like a cow. Zero integrity.

If the people of Corofin were angry or upset about this book, wouldn't anyone be angry to have such intimate elements of their life exposed for all the world to read? If another vulture/author had hung around her beloved Aunt Lizzie for a spell, posing as a "friend", then published every word, every intimate secret Aunt Lizzie had let slip during all those "casual conversations", would Mahoney not be angry? Would not any one of us feel incredibly betrayed by this person who acted the "friend"?

A couple of my favorite quotes:

"Saturday nights in Corofin found the men self-conscious, proud, uncertain, and boyish. The sartorial struggles were apparent, but still they looked faintly soiled and rumpled, as though their clothes had been stuffed in a peat creel since the previous Saturday. They all wore their hair slightly too long." Too long? By whose standards--Mahoney's? America's? Maybe it was just the right length in Corofin--did the American think of that possibility?)

"He lisped. And he was so gentlemanly and courtly that I forgot how ugly he was."

The insults just go on and on. And these were the people buying her beers, chatting with her, making her feel welcome in their small town. This is what the British used to do to the Irish---mock their "ugliness", their "backwardness", their "clothes in a peat creel" perceived lack of hygiene in their British comics and newspaper articles. Mahoney has taken up the mantle of insults well---and yet she claims to feel so "at home" in Ireland. Perhaps that's how it was in her home then, snide and catty comments spoken/written behind each other's backs. Outright worldwide exposure of a family member's very personal life. That, at least, would explain her lack of character. Enjoy that writing career, Mahoney. You've sure earned it.

I remember reading about this book when it first came out. The writer stayed in this small Irish village, interacted with the people, and wrote such a revealing and accurate portrait of it that one or two of the village people who were unhappy with it claimed that she had made it all up Then, when that defense didn't work, they backtracked and switched their defense to: "Oh, well, yes, but we're not really like that. We were just putting her on and stringing her along. We were just performing." Interesting. If they were just putting her on, if it was all just a performance on their part, why should they have been angry when the book appeared and it accurately captured their "performance"?

Obviously they were angry because the picture she made of them is genuine. There was no performance. To think otherwise is ridiculous. This is exactly who the villagers were in 1991. I, too, lived in a small village in western Ireland. Funny and sad though they may be, the stories in this book are quite serious. Some of the men were obviously showing off, but that was sincere too. There aren't many writers more attuned to the complexities of human nature than Mahoney. When I read this book (Ive read it three times now) I was amazed by the accuracy of it, the truth of it, and the fairness of it. It's completely implausible--and even laughable--that an entire village could possibly be pulling the writer's leg for months on end. Whoever thinks these people were just performing and having the writer on doesn't know the Irish. More important, what exactly is it that these few naysayers here object to? Is there something wrong with the way the Irish live, the way they act? I don't think so. They are human, and those who try to say this book is not representative is basically denying the humor and verve and conversational genius of these village people. This book struck a nerve because it was one of the first to portray the Irish the way they are, rather than the way they have always perceived to be: as some fairyish, innocent, infantile and sickly sweet people.

Some of the readers here can't allow that this portrait is genuine because they don't like the picture it resulted in. But why don't they like it? Do they want the people of Ireland to be perfect, conventional, boring, and ordinary? Why be ashamed of this wonderful human reality? What is it in this picture that's so dramatic or bizarre or unbelievable that it would suggest that the people of this village were weaving some kind of fiction? Nothing. The telling fact about the truth of this book is the strength of feeling, humor, and poetic expression in the people. They are beautifully alive. This is the reality. Why say this portrait isn't who they really are? There's a fantastic spontaneity in them that, sadly, some would try to deny.

So many native Irish people have attested too the accuracy and sensitivity of this book, some of them among Ireland's best known writers. Attempts to deconstruct the portrait as untrue or inaccurate are cheap and offensive. I loved this book because I love Ireland and the Irish.

Being neither Irish, nor a woman, I read this book because I had thoroughly enjoyed two of Rosemary Mahoney's other books, Early Arrival of Dreams and A Singular Pilgrim. She has an incredible talent for vividly describing people and their idiosyncrasies. While she has more in common with the Irish than the Chinese and the pilgrims she meets in her other travels, her observations about Ireland and the Irish make it seem like an equally fascinating, equally foreign land. While Rosemary does paint pictures of people that are tend to be more critical, she is equally critical of herself, and at this stage of her life, quite unsure of whom she is.

If you are someone who enjoys visiting new places not just for the scenery but for the people, then you will thoroughly enjoy this book. Not many of us will be able to live out of the country long enough to know specific individuals with such depth as described here. I appreciate that she shares her subjective perspective with us; it makes me love the world in which we live and wish that I could have such experiences myself!

Both Whoredom in Kimmage and Early Arrival of Dreams give you a rare view into the people of Ireland and China from an American's perspective. The fact that both countries have changed so much in the last decade makes these books so much more precious and enjoyable to read. Highly recommended.

I've been in corofin several times and I know all the people in the story. It's really a true story.
Maybe the writer and me met one day in the
past.I know she isn't wanted anymore in the
village for writing her "false"story,but I can tell you,the book is really the complete truth and
worth reading.Very good!
It all happened!! The book is magnificent.