Wild Decembers [Paperback]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 297 pages
• Publisher: McArthur & Company; First Published edition (1999)
• ISBN-10: 1552781771
• ISBN-13: 978-1552781777
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,750,882 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

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a lovely song of a book, April 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Decembers (Hardcover)

This is a lovely, sad song of a book. You know from the start the story will end tragically, but you keep reading, just like you keep listening to a sad song. Because it is beautiful. The beauty of each sentence, each paragraph keeps you reading and after you've read the last page it stays with you like the melody of a song you can't get out of your head.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE FINEST, August 4, 2000

By 

MOVIE MAVEN (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Decembers (Hardcover)

I heard a fascinating interview with the author on NPR and immediately went online to buy this novel. What a wonderful read! This is a passionate tale about love and duty, honor and sex, fidelity and family. Every single character (& there are dozens) is drawn fully and deeply, even those characters who appear only for a few pages. The story is a simple one with its routes in "Romeo and Juliet:" two families forever at war even after they've forgotten why they are feuding. It is also a story of a small town in Ireland and every single one of its inhabitants and how they effect the three principal characters: Joseph, a farmer, and his sister Breege who falls in love with Mick Bugler, a stranger from Australia, and how their love for one another changes everyone's life. You cannot help but know that the story will end tragically, but because you care for each of the principal chararacters so much and because Edna O'Brien refuses to label some good and others bad, you keep hoping for the inevitable to be put off. O'Brien is obviously influenced by James Joyce: her language is at all times ripe and imaginative and wonderfully descriptive. Her prose also reminds me of William Faulkner and the way he had of burrowing deep into the minds and souls of his complex people. This is certainly one of the finest contemporary novels I have read in many years.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars IRISH MYTHS, MYSTERY AND MADNESS, April 2, 2000

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wild Decembers (Hardcover)

As so memorably demonstrated in "Down By The River"(1997), few limn Irish life as authentically as Edna O'Brien. Add tothat realism her singing prose, which frames each scene with the myths, mystery and madness of Eire, and the result is pure enchantment. Ms. O'Brien is blessed with a cinematographer's eye and boundless original expression, whether she is bringing to life a dance, he is "steering her solemnly, as if she were an ocean liner in her peppermint green," or anger, "She is driving recklessly, her cabbage crown askew, the little bubble car like a cauldron because of her invective." It is with such delicious narrative embellishments that the author introduces us to a rural Irish village, Cloontha, "a locality within the bending of an arm." It is here that "Fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too." Joseph Brennan and his much younger sister, Breege, live here and work the dairy farm their family has held for generations. Self-educated and proud of it, Joseph takes part in a battle of wits with the local school master and wins. He works hard, overcoming the vicissitudes of weather by dint of backbreaking toil. Yet, he would change nothing if he could because Cloontha is God to him. "God," he declared, "was not a bearded man in the sky but here....in Cloontha, especially at night, alone with nature." But Joseph is not alone on his mountain for long because Mick Bugler, a shepherd from Australia, arrives to claim recently inherited acreage. It is land Joseph believed was his. There is, of course, a struggle between the two men as contretemps turns to barroom brawl and eventually escalates to a courthouse battle, in which solicitors are the primary victors. This territorial dispute is exacerbated by Breege's attraction to Mick, an emotion that concerns, confounds, and, finally, overcomes her. She is also distressed by an awareness that her brother's obsession with driving Mick off "his mountain" may be the undoing of them all. "....she knew that he was entering a zone in which dreaming and waking, wrongs and semi-wrongs, would be translated and magnified into an enormity to suit the dark mad mould of his thinking." Add to the fracas a dotty, unforgettable old derelict, Crock Hanrahan, who misses little and instigates much as he "goes his way, hopping and bopping across the fields, laughing his mirthless laugh......his body like a sack of potatoes inflating and deflating, depending on whether he was in hill or hollow." We also meet two of the most lascivious sisters to be found in literature - strumpets who sell their favors not for pounds but for land and livestock. Rita "was the brains and Reena the nymphet. She made the deals, bought and sold cattle, and harangued her friendly solicitor to write letters to make hell for this person or that who got in her way." Their seduction of Mick is one of the most risible and erotic scenes to be found. It's reminiscent of some of Joyce's finest rollicking moments. Although the tale's conclusion is adumbrated from its beginning the masterful Ms. O'Brien casts it memorably. Edna O'Brien is a treasure. Wild Decembers is one more triumph.