Irish Twilight (The Light of Evening)
Edna O'Brien
Translator: Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat
Sabine Wespieser - 09/10 - 445 pages - EUR 24
"Mother's Lament"
Edna O'Brien is an Irish author known for his novels that speak of his homeland with a resolutely modern and unconventional. In this book she reveals the secret so well guarded mothers of his country: the weight of tradition in their fight against past more vivid. Everything starts
with a prologue that evokes wonderful "night lonely mothers who say that this is not our fault that we mourn, it is the fault of nature, which we first make full and empty. Such is the wrath of mothers (...) that do not end until the last day (...) at dusk and the dust of death. "
This is therefore a book about love so complex, so strong and yet so stuffy: a mother's love.
It is even more complex in a country like Ireland where the fate of women has remained so long under the yoke combination of tradition and morality. Here all part of the field where Rusheen Dilly, aged 77 years, packs his business to go on home care to seek treatment for a disease that will probably be the last. Putting aside the objects to which it is she remembers her past life, her daughter Eleanora part so fast to write books that make her a pariah in his homeland, Cornelius and her husband if dependent on her.
Once confined to hospital his memories revolve primarily around this episode she loves more than anything: his stay of several months in New York when she was still a young woman. And above all she thinks about Gabriel, the first love that hurts so badly after months of frustration had finally broken into a thousand pieces of his American dream. The bitterness of too many who will return home for her to marry the first boy who invited him to dance, and she will make another link in the chain of traditions surrounding the Irish women.
But as she says "It was high in the Middle Ages," and resume his education to serve as the top model when it comes his turn to be a mother. Eleanora spend his adult life to escape the straitjacket sent by his mother. And even knowing Dilly hospitalized she will do her a short visit, she is pressed to find a lover, so in an emergency it will fall from his bag his diary. It will be a sort of deep and secret between mother and daughter away for so long.
A disturbing and beautifully written novel by the author so important to the Status of Women in Ireland, part of the intellectual movement of cultural revisionism that has helped the Irish take a critical view on nationalism in their countries. His books were long banned in Ireland but it has always been supported by his American readers who always liked his style so powerfully evocative that earned him the nickname Colette English.
PAGE article in No. 139, September 2010
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