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Selected Stories
by Seán Ó Faoláin
Constable and Company, 1978 hardback
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Seán Ó Faoláin was born in Cork in 1900. He was baptized as John Whelan, but adapted
the Irish form of his name, which is in turn anglicized to Sean
O'Faolain. He fought with the Republican side in the Irish Civil War, and taught in
the U.S. in the 1930s. He edited the literary journal The Bell from
1940 to 1946. As well as novels and the short stories for which he is
most famous, he wrote biography criticism and travel books. His main
works are his short story collections Midsummer Night Madness, A Purse of Coppers, Teresa
and other stories, The Man Who Invented Sin and
other stories, The Finest Short Stories of
Sean O'Faolain; The Stories of
Sean O'Faolain, The Heat of the Sun, Foreign Affairs, Selected Stories and
Collected Stories. His novels are A Nest of Simple Folk, Bird Alone, Come Back to Erin
and And
Again.He wrote several critical studies and
travel books. He was a member of Aosdána, and was elected Saoi, Aosdána’s highest accolade, in 1986.
He died in 1991.
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"As far as Mel Meldrum was concerned l'affair Anna,
as he was to call it, began one wet and windy April morning in 1944
when his chief clerk, Mooney, knocked at the door of his sanctum,
handed him my letter, marked Personal and By Hand, and said that the bearer was an old lady in a black bonnet sitting outside in the main office 'shaking her blooming umbrella all over your new Turkish carpet'."
Reviewed by Tania Hershman
I
spend so much of my time reading contemporary short stories, those
published in the past year or two, so it was an absolute delight to
read a book that is over 30 years old. And more than that, to
become acquainted with Seán Ó Faoláin's stories. At first, I was
reading them as research for my role as this year's judge of Munster
Lit's Seán Ó Faoláin short story competition, and then I was reading them just because I couldn't stop.
These stories were first published between 1947 and 1976, in various of Ó
Faoláin's collections, and what struck me first is this wonderful
combination of humour and the most serious of topics, be it love, death
or religion - or often all three. The second thing that struck me is Ó Faoláin's gorgeous use of language and rhythm. For example, from The Faithless Wife:
"Adding
it all up (he was a persistent adder-upper" only one problem had so far
defeated him: that he was a foreigner and did not know what sort of
woman Irish women are. It was not as if he had not done his systematic
best to find out, beginning with a course of reading through the novels
of her country. A vain exercise. With the exception of the Molly Bloom
of James Joyce the Irish Novel had not only failed to present him with
any fascinating woman but it had presented him with, in his sense of
the word, no woman at all.
Here,
it seems to me Ó Faoláin takes a large and amusing swipe at Irish
writers but also at the Irish and perhaps the non-Irish, in one fell
swoop - who would presume to learn about Irish women from novels! This
story is a love story but it far more complex than that, as most of the
stories in this book are. Loveless marriages where one party remained
out of a sense of duty while carrying on an affair crop up quite often,
but the characters are not black and white, they are not so easily
condemned either for their unfaithfulness nor for their adherence to a
failing marriage.
There is a great deal of loneliness running
through these stories, a sort of angst to do not just with
love and the lack of it but with misunderstandings that occur between
people simply because we can never know what another person really
thinks, feels, wants. Religion plays its part here, as in the
astonishingly moving Lovers of the Lake, where the wife asks her lover to drive her so that she can go on a pilgrimage. Her lover is shocked by the request:
"'Do you mean that place with the island where they go
around on their bare feet on sharp stones, and starve for days, and sit
up all night ologroaning and ologoaning?' He got out of the chair, went
over to the cigarette box on the bookshelves, and, with his back to
her, said coldly, 'Are you going religious on me?'"
The story, which is told mostly from her point of view, begins lightly,
but becomes more and more intense and surprising, and after I'd
finished, I had to put the book down. It contained worlds, it dealt
with issues that appeared on the surface to be particularly Irish but
are far from it.
An Inside Out Complex is another story that begins with apparent lightness but evolves into something far deeper. As ever, Ó
Faoláin throws you straight in with the most intriguing - and
long, as is also common in these stories - opening line which is in
fact the whole opening paragraph:
"So then, a dusky
Sunday afternoon in Bray at a quarter to five o'clock, lighting up time
at five fifteen, November 1st, All Souls' Eve, dedicated to the
suffering of souls in Purgatory, Bertie Bolger, bachelor, aged
forty-one or so, tubby, ruddy, greying, well know as a deal in
antiques, less well-known as a conflator thereof, walking briskly along
the seafront, head up to the damp breezes, turns smartly into the
lounge of the Imperial Hotel for a hot toddy, singing in a
soldierly basso, 'my breast expanding to a ball'." This
purports to be assailing you with enormous amounts of information but
in fact it is far more entertaining than informative and I defy any
reader not to continue on! The story slowly reveals Bertie's "inside
out complex" which has to do with envying those inside while he is
outside, and how he goes about attempting to remedy it. Of course,
nothing that can be predicted happens here. And the comedy which lulls
you in gives way to a troubling and poignant tale about getting what we
wish for.
This book is an excellent way to get a first taste of Seán
Ó Faoláin's stories. It has taught me a lesson about reading only the
newest books: there is nothing old-fashioned about these stories, which
are no less fresh, original and experimental now than they must have
been 60 years ago. I'm only sorry it took me so long to find them.
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