O'Brien, in her 80s, may look like an icon and talk like an icon, but she writes like the thing itself, with prose that is scrupulous and lyrical, beautiful and exact ... The childhood section of Country Girl is littered with objects that were lost, or stolen, or given away, all of them remembered with great particularity ... O'Brien knows the precise emotional weight of objects, their seeming hopefulness and their actual indifference to those who seek to be consoled. She is in thrall to artifice, the way it holds desire.
O’Brien has had to be forgiven for being seductive both on and off the page; there is a price to be paid for being a beautiful woman who produces beautiful prose ... No one does yearning like Edna O’Brien, who here occasionally reminds us that the fulfilled life is not worth examining. Artifice thrills her, including physical artifice ... But the objects threaten to bury the inner life, as happens in O’Brien’s later chapters. Neither as crystalline nor as lyrical as the early ones, they bog down in bold names ... Any memoir that is any good must be better-proportioned than real life. This one is shapely in the curvaceous ways of longing and regret ...
The first couple of hundred pages of Country Girl are wonderful, the second 150 rather less so, but anyone who knows and loves her work, as I do, will want to read it from start to finish ... During the Swinging ’60s she knew just about everyone who was anyone, and though she protests that 'it baffles me how I came to know all these people,' much of her memoir from this point on is a chronicle of names and faces who need no introduction, though they certainly will a couple of decades down the road ... In the end, though, O’Brien returns to her true self and her indelible Irishness, the elements that have drawn readers to her work for more than half a century and will continue to do so for many years hence.
Country Girl offers a far more detailed and intimate picture of O'Brien's life than her elegiac 1976 memoir, Mother Ireland, yet she remains circumspect on her love affairs. For readers of her fiction, scenes from her straitened, rural, County Clare childhood will be familiar ... ...a generous gift to readers, conveying the enormous challenge — and inspiration — of such intense engagement and spirited independence.
[O'Brien] has led, she thinks, a divided life, and the division of her life into successive places is distinctly mirrored in the instalments of this memoir. Her life is palpable in her fiction, and her fiction is palpable in the memoir, as the titling of her first and latest books starkly indicates. It proceeds, dartingly and elliptically, by episodes and anecdotes, and those stories told to her by others about themselves are almost as frequent as those in which she remains centre-stage ... The Country Girls is beautifully and plainly written, while the new book has a more figurative bent, together with raids on the purple and the stylish ... ...an enjoyable book – stardust, idiosyncrasies and all. She is, as she confesses, over-excitable; she is also self-examining.
Country Girl is bulwarked by a certain amount of reluctance. You can see that most closely in the form of the book. Its artfulness suggests that O'Brien is still reserving judgment on the propriety of disclosing her personal life. That said, the narrator does not come across as coy or evasive. It's more a matter of structure. Everything is related in brief vignettes and anecdotes, the author preferring lyricism and metaphor to exhaustive detail. And while O'Brien moves her story through time in a broadly linear fashion, the chronology forks with regularity enough that an inattentive reader might get lost. It is a bit like being guided through a forest by someone who does not want you to remember the way out yourself.
As she cherry-picks among the overgrown branches of her full life, the reader must guess when certain events took place, or lift clues from the occasional accompanying photo — many of them flattering images of the author ... Country Girl is a curious effort, one that sometimes seems to prompt more questions than it answers ... Laced with O’ Brien’s characteristic lyricism, the first two parts of the book paint an almost magical picture of a fanciful girl given to creating dramas out of her mundane surroundings...But the latter half is both flatter and flightier, as if she is less interested in recalling her days as a renowned thrower of groovy soirees during London’s swinging ’60s and ’70s.
Country Girl is the memoir that Edna O’Brien swore she would never write, but because her stories have tended to mine the seam between fact and fiction, much of what she tells here...will be familiar to readers of her novels. For those expecting further revelations from the Goddess of Love, her reticence as an autobiographer will disappoint: O’Brien has done a good deal of kissing but does very little telling. While passion is one of her themes, the people she has felt passionate about are kept to the margins of the tale and not even the name of the 'powerful' politician who broke her heart is revealed ... O’Brien’s memory is marinated in literature, and the seductive power of words and writing have shaped her life.
She doesn’t write much about the writing process — her life seems filled with parties and pleasantries; a few love affairs ... A galaxy of the era’s biggest stars and thinkers are smattered through the pages: Judy Garland, Sean Connery, Gore Vidal, Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda, enough of them to satisfy our need for glamour ... This, though, is her style. She’ll be recounting a party, then verge into a small anecdote that somehow manages to arrive at a deeper truth. Her prose doesn’t get bogged down in the dross of everyday life but manages to convey the poetry in ordinariness.
O'Brien paints a fascinating picture of each era of her life. Her mother sounds idiosyncratic, smelling seat cushions for farts after visitors had called. The Archbishop McQuaid's moral proselytising provided a backdrop to her work and study in Dublin ... There are plenty of amusing anecdotes, such as the one in which the actor Patrick Magee came to lunch and wouldn't leave ... This hyper-acuity to feelings is also evident in the number of people she castigates in her memoir. Sometimes there are valid reasons...At other times, O'Brien's pointed digs seem petty.
Demure reflections on her celebrated literary life well lived comprise this lovely memoir ... The book also includes lively depictions of her Saturday-night parties in her house in Putney, England, during the Swinging Sixties. From Chelsea to New York to Donegal, O’Brien always returns to the enduring heart of her writing.
The best sections of this episodic memoir are the first and final quarters of the text ... Emotion and reflection contend for prominence with superficiality; the former win, but barely.
