≫ Libro Gratis The Lonely Girl Edna O'Brien 9780452283756 Books

The Lonely Girl Edna O'Brien 9780452283756 Books

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The Lonely Girl Edna O'Brien 9780452283756 Books

After seeing the movie with Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, and Lynn Redgrave, I suggested this novel to my book group. We all enjoyed it. Very interesting time and place, engaging characters, and good story. This is part of a trilogy, and I hope to read the other two books.


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The Lonely Girl Edna O'Brien 9780452283756 Books Reviews

The cover of this edition is curious and belies the real subject of this book. It's hot pink background and depiction of lipstick, perfume bottle and a sealed letter, promise a sweet romantic story for girls on the go. I picked this book up because of the author's notoriety and because I am currently interested in literature about Ireland.
Perhaps this book is out of date and perhaps since the 60s it has been upstaged by current issues and stories. I am told that when it was published it was banned from Ireland. The subject matter remains serious and, although not shocking in the strictly moral sense, it is emotionally unnerving. The brutal loss of innocence is never easy to witness and this book proves this.
This is the story of Caithleen, a country girl of 22 who is working in Dublin in a grocery shop. She meets an older married-but-separated man and becomes smitten. She eventually moves in with him in his isolated house outside the city whereupon they are both menaced by her father and his peers for living in sin. Other constraints spell doom for this couple. Caithleen is neither sophisticated enough for Eugene's social milieu nor wily enough to compensate her lack of cleverness through other charms. Eventually she conspires to leave him in the naive belief that he will follow her. He doesn't follow and thus her broken heart is doubly battered. That pithy old saw, "marry in haste, repent at your leisure" seems to apply here, in a direct way for Eugene, and in bitter irony for Caithleen.
Edna O'Brien is an adept storyteller and this piece moves relentlessly towards its bitter end without a single sidetracked moment. She is clever enough to refrain from comment on Eugene's callous nature and his overriding irresponsibility and, through his actions, shows that he is his own unwitting victim. Caithleen's hope, bafflement, disillusion and raw pain are all at the fore of this tale. To my mind, given that loss of innocence is not yet out-of-date, this book is as current today as it was in the early 60s.
The story is embedded with details of Dublin Clery's department store, O'Connell Street, The Liffey, the Customs House, Molesworth Street, the Shelbourne Hotel and an ashtray with "Guinness is good for you" written on it in red are among the cited Dublin icons which surround these characters.
The Lonely Girl is the second novel in Edna O'Brien's trilogy The Country Girls. Like the first novel, this is the story of childhood friends Kate and Baba as told by Kate. The girls are still living together in a Dublin rooming house when the story opens -- Kate the serious dreamy one and Baba the wild party girl. In this novel rural-born Irish Catholic Kate again falls for an older man who is Protestant and gentry, and eventually she moves to his rural estate in the Wicklow Mountains where he undertakes a Pygmalion-style reinvention of his 21-year-old lover. One thread of the story concerns the efforts of her family to rescue her from the older man and "eternal damnation," and another depicts Kate's descent into sullenness because of her feelings of inadequacy and jealousy of more cultured and confident young women who cross her path. On one level, I found it hard to like Kate here because her tears and sulks were not only off-putting but also stupid That's no way to get or keep your man. On another level, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her Make something of yourself and have a life of your own rather than aspire only to be an appendage to a man. The Lonely Girls came out in 1962, just about the time Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique, and paints an accurate portrait of what 20-something girls were like before the revival of feminism in the 1960s. And, of course, it was much worse in patriarchal and repressed Ireland. How backward was Ireland compared to the US in 1962? In the course of the book, electricity and the telephone finally arrive at the home of a successful filmmaker living within 60 miles of Dublin, but the rooms are heated by fireplaces, not central heat; the upstairs bedrooms feature chamber pots; and water comes from a cistern on the mountainside and must be heated on the stove. O'Brien's prose is so spare that some readers may be turned off. Like the first novel, The Lonely Girl was banned and even burned in Ireland because of its sexual content. Today, however, it seems awfully tame, and one really wonders what all the fuss was about.
A used book, called "Girl with Green Eyes". All the books I have ordered (so far) have been exactly as advertised. I am pleased.
After seeing the movie with Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, and Lynn Redgrave, I suggested this novel to my book group. We all enjoyed it. Very interesting time and place, engaging characters, and good story. This is part of a trilogy, and I hope to read the other two books.