My Dream of You (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes the old feminist adage one step further: the personal is invariably political in this exquisite first novel, while its politics feel very personal indeed. The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that's been her home for two decades, Kathleen's is a life gone "even and dry." Love has been her traditional panacea: "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell in place around it." But the only love that comes her way these days takes the form of grim, anonymous sex--and even that grows harder to find.

Oddly enough, it's history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life.

My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life, the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness:

It was never real excitement that got you into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the way you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast, that the roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was just coming into view.

The suffering of Irish peasants during the famine might be a grander subject than a solitary woman's search for passion. Yet one is as real as the other. In the Irish experience, as in Kathleen de Burca's, the movements of history leave ghostly tracks across individual lives. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Well-known Irish newspaper columnist O'Faolain made a splash in 1998 with the publication of her unsentimental yet poignant memoir. The essential themes and many details of her evocatively atmospheric first novel will be familiar to readers of Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. Expatriate Irishwoman Kathleen de Burca, an unmarried, middle-aged travel writer, lives in a dreary basement flat in London. Although she is professionally successful, her quest for passion has devolved into a series of increasingly rare one-night stands. She justifies the unsatisfying nature of her relationships by characterizing herself as "a generous woman." When her best friend dies of a heart attack, Kathleen decides to quit her job and write the book she has been contemplating for years. She returns to Ireland, where she immerses herself in research into an 1856 divorce case involving an alleged affair between Mrs. Talbot, the wife of an Anglo-Irish landowner, and William Mullan, their servant. Kathleen is also discovering truths about herself, her family and her country as she (like Mrs. Talbot) confronts the dilemma of whether to seize what may be her last chance for love and passion, albeit with a married man. O'Faolain's novel-within-a-novel device effectively mirrors one of the author's themes, the ultimate unknowability of a past always viewed through the lens of the present. The humor, honesty and moral seriousness with which Kathleen assesses her life and the conditions of her heart and her soul acquire a moving resonance as the imagined lives of her characters achieve resolution and her own life flowers into another phase. And O'Faolain's depiction of the west of Ireland during and just after the Famine surpasses any historical recitation of the "facts." (Feb. 19) Forecast: O'Faolain's memoir was a bestseller, and the 125,000-copy first printing and 17-city author tour scheduled for the novel anticipate another run on the lists for the Irish author. Foreign rights have been sold in the U.K., Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. BOMC and QPB alternates.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (February 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221775
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221771
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #864,984 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than a romance, February 25, 2001

By	Bridget Rampton "muswellhillmum" (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

The title of this book might lead you to think that you're in for a good soppy holiday romance, and that's exactly what I thought I was buying as I headed off to the sun. Very quickly into My Dream of You, I realised that I had lucked onto something far more sophisticated and special. What a great book. The main character of the book, Kathleen, finds her life rocked after the death of her closest friend. Unsure of how to proceed with her life she throws herself into a project of investigating an ancient Irish love affair and in the process finds herself discovering some truths about herself. A gripping read - lets hope Nuala O'Faolain writes a second novel.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard to forget, March 18, 2001

By	Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

A phrase you see on a lot of back-cover-blurbs is that a book is like "Possession." I've always wondered what that meant -that the novel delivers the same kind of engrossing, teasing literary thrill that A.S. Byatt's novel did, or does it mix a modern tale with one placed in the past? Usually it's the latter, with the touted book offering a disappointing shadow of the satisfaction given by Byatt's book.

Nuala O'Faolain charged on the literary scene several years ago with "Are You Somebody?" which intrigued a lot of readers. Her first novel, "My Dream of You" meets everyone's expectations. It is like "Possession" in that it is completely engrossing, teasing, thrilling, moving, and yes, it does include a story rooted in the past. But then, for the Irish, so much is rooted in the past.

Kathleen de Burca is a travel writer whose carefully chaotic life is thrown in to real disorder by the loss of her dearest friend and retirement. She goes back to Ireland to research a novel on a story that's always intrigued her about an English lady's alleged affair with her Irish stableman during the Famine. Her return to the country of her birth brings her back to the land of her wretched childhood, but also throws her into a love affair which turns her upside down.

The characters are so well drawn that it's hard to believe they're not really in the library or behind the bar or in the shop where Kathleen meets them. Ireland, with its rich, conflictive history and wonderful contrary people comes across in all its complexities. Kathleen's physical and spiritual journey is completely involving, and this book lingers long after you've turned the last page.

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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A DEFT MEMOIRIST NOW A BRILLIANT STORYTELLER, March 18, 2001

By	Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Part shocking history, part sexual odyssey, all lyrical prose, Dublin journalist Nuala O'Faolain's first fiction is stunning as she interweaves past and present in parallel stories of two women seeking fulfillment.

Ms. O'Faolain's bestselling memoir, "Are You Somebody?," won accolades for its utter honesty and brilliant craftsmanship. These attributes shine as brightly in "My Dream Of You."

Kathleen de Burca, an unmarried 50+ travel writer is a woman who "believed in passion the way other people believed in God; everything fell into place around it."

Yet to date her life has been a series of meaningless, rueful-in-the-morning liaisons. Compounding her unhappiness is the sudden death of her best friend, Jimmy, a gay fellow writer.

Hoping to begin anew, Kathleen takes a leave of absence and returns to her native Ireland. Memories of her homeland are disheartening. She recalls her mother as oppressed and the children as "neglected victims of her victimhood. Villain? Father. Old-style Irish Catholic patriarch; unkind to wife, unloving to children, harsh to young Kathleen when she tried to talk to him."

Nonetheless, Kathleen wants "....my life given back to me, so I can live it again better." She has become fascinated by the Talbot affair, an actual event which took place during the Potato Famine, some 150 years ago. According to records, Marianne Talbot, the wife of an Anglo-Irish landowner, was seen by servants en deshabille with William Mullan, a stableman.

"There could hardly have been two people less likely to be drawn to each other than an Anglo-Irish landlord's wife and an Irish servant," Ms. O'Faolain writes. "Each of them came from a powerful culture which had at its very core the defining of the other as alien."

Intrigued by the disparity between the apparent lovers and the fact that Marianne is found guilty of adultery, Kathleen determines to write their story.

She travels to Ballygall, site of the former Talbot estate, where she is aided in her research by Miss Leech, a feisty spinster librarian; and cosseted by Bertie, a widowed inn owner.

As Kathleen delves into the past readers are reminded of the grim devastation wrought by the Famine. Those were days when the still living "had to open the pit in the top field to push in more bodies," and Marianne could hear through her drawing room window the cries for food, when "the low noise of pleading and begging swelled to shrieking."

Surely few have painted the Famine's stark reality as movingly as Ms. O'Faolain. Her descriptions constrict the heart, enabling readers to see anew a mortally wounded country and its people.

As Kathleen unearths surprising data about the Talbot scandal, she also discovers some truths about herself. It's at this juncture that she finds another opportunity for romance, but at what price?

With "My Dream Of You" Ms. O'Faolain clearly shows that she is not only a deft memoirist, but a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of humankind, and a compassionate chronicler of a still present past.