The Love Object: Selected Stories

Edna O'Brien writes stories filled with pain, disappointment, loneliness and despair - shot through with incandescent beauty, natural humour and all too rare moments of joy. They have the ring of undeniable truth. The eight stories in this collection focus intensely on the experiences and feelings of women. We see events through their perspectives and participate in their emotional ups and downs. The characters range widely in age, occupations and lifestyles. In The Love Object, Martha, a television announcer, narrates the course of a love affair with an elderly, married lawyer. When the inevitable end comes, she enters, in her words 'a black patch and on the third day I lost control'. An Outing tells of a forty-six year old, unhappily married house-cleaner, Mrs Farley, who has found 'another man'. She buys a second-hand, 'quite a good three-piece suite' in order to impress her lover on his first visit, but is so disappointed when it is delivered by its poor appearance her courage fails her. The Rug mixes humour and pathos expertly. When a black hearth-rug, 'real sheep-skin, thick and soft and luxurious' is sent to a 'grey cut-stone farmhouse' in the west of Ireland, the whole family is caught up in the mother's need to know who sent it, suspicious even in her delight - 'one of her happiest days'. Letters are posted to all likely senders of the present - all deny knowledge of it. Weeks pass, she accepts she will never know. When the mystery is resolved, she is left weeping 'for her own foolishness in thinking that someone had wanted to do her a kindness at last'. The Mouth Of The Cave is a story easily read but virtually impossible to describe. It is nearly surreal in its beautiful descriptions of nature and compelling undercurrents of repressed lesbian sexuality. How To Grow A Wisteria is fable-like in its overall structure. Newly married to 'a man who insisted on exile', a woman spends her days with her husband 'in their wooden house, high up, on a mountain'. She is lonely at night-time. Seasons come and go. They move back into town. One days she leaves him. Rejoins society. Finally, these entanglements as well become too much for her to bear. She isolates herself in her apartment. 'She had nothing to say, nothing to hear'. This is a story that gives the reader a great deal to reflect upon. The remaining stories, Irish Revel, Cords, and Paradise are equally poignant and devastating. To read Edna O'Brien's fiction - the literary quality of which is second to none - is to have your heart squeezed painfully, inoculating you against the day you face your own black patch and loss of control.