#Irish Novelists

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EDNA O'BRIEN (1930-Died July 27th 2024.at 93).Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the biennial David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.

O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole.Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following the Second World War. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit.Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012.Edna O'Brien - Wikipedia

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Nuala O'Faolain (1940 - 2008)

Undoubtedly one of the greatest Irish novelists and the way in which she pays homage to her country, its landscapes and its people command admiration. "My dream of you" is a novel within a novel. A narrator remembers her childhood in the 1950s while writing a novel about the Talbot affair during the Great Famine. A sum (almost 700 pages) but the construction of the novel remains interesting.

Nuala O'Faolain est une des plus grandes romancières irlandaises contemporaines. La façon dont elle rend hommage à son pays, à ses paysages et à ses habitants force l'admiration. "Chimères" est un roman dans le roman. La narratrice se souvient de son enfance dans les années 1950 alors qu'elle écrit un roman à propos de l'affaire Talbot qui s'est déroulée durant la Grande Famine (milieu du XIXe siècle en Irlande). Une somme (presque 700 pages) mais la construction de ce roman reste intéressante et on apprend beaucoup sur l'histoire de l'Irlande.

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Oscar Wilde was full of witticisms until the very end..

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"Christy Brown was an Irish writer and painter whose cerebral palsy allowed him to write or type only with the toes of one foot. His most recognized work is his autobiography, titled My Left Foot (1954). It was later made into a 1989 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Brown."

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#OTD in 1964 – Death of Brendan Behan, an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English.

He was also a committed Irish Republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army. He died in Meath hospital after reportedly telling a nun looking after him: ‘Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops’. Brendan Behan was born in Dublin into a republican family, and became a member of the IRA’s youth organisation Fianna Éireann at the age of fourteen. However, there was also a…

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my brain will just merge unrelated vaguely similar looking people into one. i genuinely get the faces of hozier and kitani tatsuya and matayoshi naoki mixed up

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“Life has no other goal but life, and art has no other end but to make life possible, to help us to live. As soon as one puts one's hopes in another world, life becomes dreary and ugly and art makes itself scarce.” - George Moore (1852-1933)

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People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

- Colm Tóibín

Born and bred in Wexford, ‘Ireland’s corner county’, author Colm Tóibín cannot escape his home place or his favourite pub - nor would he want to, as he reveals in the title essay in his new collection, A Guest at the Feast.

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When he saw friends being persecuted because of their race, their religion, he couldn't stand by and do nothing.

He was shocked at the injustice, the discrimination, the violence. He was even more shocked at other friends, who said nothing or actually conspired with the persecutors.

Many lovers of literature know Samuel Beckett and his play, "Waiting for Godot". Beckett, who was born on April 13, 1906, was an Irish novelist, playwright, theater director, poet, and literary translator, who was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.

What you may not know about him is that he had a secret - he had been a French Resistance spy, who received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française from the French government for his bravery during the war.

For three decades after the war, only a few of Beckett's closest friends knew of his secret - when he risked his life as a liaison agent (and translator of secret reports). Beckett also narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo in Paris in August 1942, after many of his cell were betrayed and deported to concentration camps, according to biographer James Knowlson.

Beckett, who lived in Paris most of his adult life, was in France during the German occupation. As an Irish citizen, he was publicly known to be neutral, but, secretly, he was horrified, disgusted at what he was witnessing, seeing the rise of Nazism and racial hatred. He saw Jewish friends abused, assaulted, then rounded up and arrested. He decided to stay in France as a symbol of sympathy for his French friends.

When one of his friends was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, Beckett helped his friend's wife, with complete disregard for his own personal safety, giving her his rations.

The wife would say, "In 1941, my husband Paul Léon was arrested and was being starved and tortured by the Germans (we were all in Paris at that time). I was trying to get food packages together and it was an almost impossible task. Sam Beckett used to bring me his bread ration and also his cigarette ration, so I could get them through to the camp. I will never forget this great kindness on his part. At that time he was probably in almost as much trouble as we were, and he certainly needed those rations himself."

Another friend would be killed by the Nazis, which would embolden Beckett to join the French Resistance and a Paris-based cell of British SOE (Special Operations Executive).

Beckett would say as he saw his friends being arrested, “you simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded."

“I was so outraged by the Nazis," he would explain, "particularly by their treatment of the Jews, that I could not remain inactive."

Beckett would later be known for writing "Waiting for Godot" which many view as a play on existentialism, of "doing nothing," but others have different interpretations.

Scholar Marjorie Perloff would actually see in Beckett's work "Waiting for Godot" as "the tension between passivity and action that characterizes this very particular form of waiting — a waiting on the part of human beings thrust into a very particular — and wholly unknown —situation.”

Reviewer Graham Hassell saw the play as "an allegory of the Cold War" or of French Resistance to the Germans.

Beckett actually wrote in "Waiting for Godot":

"Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not."

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

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Guess who this is! 😉😉

made in picrew

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"Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook."

Oliver Goldsmith - Anglo-Irish Novelist - 1728-1774

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Edna O'Brien novels

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Sometimes writing speaks. Sometimes writing unspeaks. Sometimes writing comes from truth. Sometimes writing comes from a symbolism of the nuanced truth. I do not care what you believe. I literally do not know that there is an audience. It feels like a very deep cold loneliness.

Rooney doesn't channel Sally Rooney. Good for her. She's awesome. What publishing needs is a few quick kicks by Irish writers.

Within the context of the relationships Rooney she writes about, what I am hearing is that as a person -- she's still a writer person -- who is a person, she's decidedly not too procedural. She is, indeed, focused on her characters. I admire her tremendously. Here's why.

Great writers never Gatekeep.

They do not become editors, publishers, teachers, and agents. Writers say no. Authenticity is an LA dive bar at four in the morning and it's dark inside because we have a darkness trapped internally in all our second selves.

Rooney seems mystified about readers. They're shadows. Editors are shadows. Agents are in a cattle call. I see no valid reason they exist.

Rooney gets tended to. She sells.

You swim with sharks or go home. By the time an editor is done, I have no idea what the thing is anymore. Editors have changed my endings for pablum. I say nothing. Paul lynch in Prophet Song hands the phone up on punctuation. I bow before him.

Rooney is true to herself. Yes! Characters and relationships and power are all she needs. If you build it, they will come.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAMUEL BECKETT !

Beckett brooding over nothingness…. Samuel Beckett, an Irish-born playwright, novelist, and poet, stands as a towering figure in 20th-century literature. Born on April 13, 1906, Beckett’s works delve into themes of existentialism, absurdism, and the human condition, earning him acclaim and a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Beckett’s most famous work, “Waiting for Godot,” epitomizes his…

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#OTD in 1964 – Death of novelist Maurice Walsh, author of the original story of The Quiet Man.

Maurice Walsh was born in Ballydonoghue, near Listowel, Co Kerry, and is best known for the short story The Quiet Man which was later made into an Oscar-winning movie directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. He was one of Ireland’s best-selling authors in the 1930s. John Walsh’s main interests were books and horses and he himself did little about the farm, preferring to…