{"id":6684,"date":"2016-12-07T06:52:06","date_gmt":"2016-12-07T06:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6684"},"modified":"2016-12-08T11:44:42","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T11:44:42","slug":"under-the-rose-by-julia-ofaolain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6684","title":{"rendered":"Under the Rose by Julia O\u2019Faolain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Selected Stories<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Faber 17 March 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

384pp, paperback, \u00a313.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018A Citroen raced past, slick as a wet cockroach.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

These twenty stories by acclaimed Irish writer Julia O\u2019Faolain are drawn from anthologies and from her own celebrated collections.\u00a0 Written between 1968 and 2006, they range in setting between Ireland, England, France, Italy and America, as has their author.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Faolain was born in London, brought up in Cork and Dublin, educated in Paris and Rome, married in Florence and lived in America, and it shows.\u00a0 Her urbane, cosmopolitan, modern voice is refreshingly direct, pitching us into her stories with vigorous elan <\/em>and unpredictable language.\u00a0 This effect – that the reader never quite knows what to expect – is illuminated in O\u2019Faolain\u2019s brief \u2018Afterword\u2019, where she says that she was often impatient with her characters.\u00a0 This lack of sentimentality (\u2018emotional toughness\u2019, one reviewer calls it) allows her to explore both everyday life and extremes of emotion with impressive irony.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Daughters of Passion\u2019, convent girls share a flat in Camden Town.\u00a0 So far, so Edna O\u2019Brien, you might think – then a boyfriend describes the coldness of one of them as \u2018like eating Baked Alaska\u2019 (beneath her cold crust he\u2019d counted on finding lava\u2019).\u00a0 In \u2018Oh My Monsters!\u2019, a cynical good-time girl berates her sister, who just wants her to be \u2018normal\u2019:\u00a0 \u2018I have an impulse to die when I make love,\u2019 she reports. \u2018That\u2019s why I keep the Nembutal in the garage.\u2019\u00a0 The delightful \u2018Rum and Coke\u2019, a story of romance and hypocrisy featuring the splendidly named Miss Artemis Sheehy, hotel receptionist, could be by William Trevor, were it not for the sharp detachment of O\u2019Faolain\u2019s tone and imagery:\u00a0 a dead adulterer \u2018looked worse than dead\u2026put together from that grey stuff with which wasps build their nests\u2026or papier mache made from old, pulped bibles.\u2019<\/p>\n

Repression and its dangerous effects is another theme.\u00a0 Rule-bound Mr Condon, in \u2018The Knight\u2019, \u2018had certainly bound himself by a remarkable number of controls\u2026one might have supposed him intent on containing some centrifugal passion liable to blow him up like a bomb\u2019 – which is indeed what happens.\u00a0 Conversely, the gloriously frank and cynical title story, \u2018Under the Rose\u2019, depicts a minor poet of \u2018ravenous charm\u2019 cutting a swathe with his stories of incest and his \u2018words like oysters\u2019.\u00a0 He should perhaps have been introduced to the spinster pilgrims of \u2018Her Trademark\u2019 – those \u2018toughish, thirty-fivish, die-hard Dianas\u2019 whose \u2018chiffon scarves from Galeries Lafayette wavered on the gaunt masts of their tailor-mades\u2019.<\/p>\n

A collection to relish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*A 2016 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

In \u2018Daughters of Passion\u2019, convent girls share a flat in Camden Town. So far, so Edna O\u2019Brien, you might think – then a boyfriend describes the coldness of one of them as \u2018like eating Baked Alaska\u2019 (beneath her cold crust he\u2019d counted on finding lava\u2019). In \u2018Oh My Monsters!\u2019, a cynical good-time girl berates her sister, who just wants her to be \u2018normal\u2019: \u2018I have an impulse to die when I make love,\u2019 she reports. \u2018That\u2019s why I keep the Nembutal in the garage\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6684"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6728,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6684\/revisions\/6728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}