The High Road - Hardcover

O'Brien, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374292736 ISBN 13: 9780374292737

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988

Synopsis

This richly peopled, compellingly readable book explores woman in her many roles -- as mystic, mother, daughter and lover. There is Iris with her "winsome wonsome" ways, no longer young; there is Charlotte, the legendary and troubled debutante who has fled from society; and there is the narrator, Anna, who feels that her emotional life has folded until she meets the young Spanish girl, Catalina.

About this title

About the Author

EDNA O’BRIEN is the author of eighteen works of fiction, including the New York Times Notable Books and Book Sense picks Wild Decembers and In the Forest, and Lantern Slides, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2002 she won the National Medal for Fiction from the National Arts Club. An honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, O’Brien was born and grew up in Ireland and has lived in London for many years.

From Publishers Weekly

Opening on Easter Sunday, on a verdant island to which the narrator, Anna, has fled at the end of a love affair, O'Brien's new novel ( A Fanatic Heart , The Country Girls trilogy) at first gives promise of the writing of which she is capable: resonant with insights, lush with descriptive detail. But tiresome, disagreeable characters and a series of outrageous events tip the balance to produce a disappointing narrative. Middle-aged, mired in the past with its "pain and bungle," Anna is maudlin, self-obsessed and unbelievably undiscriminating. She takes up with other visitors to the islandvariously boorish, snobbish or drunkall representing effete civilization. At low ebb, contemplating suicide, Anna is drawn to Catalina, a peasant chambermaid. Variously described as a mermaid and a wood nymph, Catalina is a free spirit, possessing the primordial, animal nature that Anna needs for her own resurrection. But after an idyllic night on the mountainside, tragedy strikes, leaving Anna first with "stunned horror and a scalding shame," then with a realization that "to love one must learn to part with everything." Though there are some fine scenes here in which O'Brien skewers pretension with an acid pen, the novel is fatally mired in symbolism and improbable events.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0374292736
• ISBN 13: 9780374292737
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224