A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

I am surprised that his book has not been reviewed yet. Edna O'brien is a gem of literature and her writing is timeless. This is a wonderful collection of her short stories. My favorites are the following. 1) The Love Object - "We had even searched in our dictionaries for words to convey the specialness of our regard for each other. He came up with 'cense', which meant to adore or cover with the perfume of love". (p.160) 2) Over - This is a haunting story about a relationship that is over, yet still exists in the woman's mind - what was, what could have been, why it was so, etc. It is shrouded in a mystic quality of pain and perseverance. 3) Ways 4) Mrs. Reinhardt - "She often thought that the real secret of their love was that she kept the inside of herself warm for him, like someone keeping an egg under a nest of straw." (p.144) 5) Chrismas Roses This is a wonderful collection for anyone who loves short stories.

It is a collection of short stories already published under different titles; they are summoned now with a common objective: to show a deep and complete analysis of women's world. The presence almost overwhelming of feminine figures (rural and urban women, young or elder, married or single, raw and sophisticated...) is the leading thread of this collection. Their decisions, vital choices, their problems, the situations they have to face due to the fact that they belong to the so-called "weak sex" (the girl deserted by her boyfriend after the engagement, the doubts before birth, the anguish of the eldest girl, who has disappointed deeply her mother's expectations over her...etc) are portrayed in a sympathetic and honest way; you can't avoid feeling sorry for some of them: the heroine that has made the wrong choice, the mother submitted to an inebriate husband, the woman that can't escape from an adulterous love.... In this sense the last sentence of the first story, The Connor Girls, is revealing: "By such choices we (women) gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone", because it introduces what is going to be one of the main points of most of the stories: loneliness, women's loneliness in the face of men, in the face of other women integrated in the system, in short, in the face of this world of men. What is the result of all this? I think that the feeling that pervades the whole book is that of sadness, an acute pain with which the writer could be exorcising her own.