The Visitor - Hardcover

Brennan, Maeve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1903809762 ISBN 13: 9781903809761

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2001

Synopsis

'An astonishing miniature masterpiece, except there is nothing miniature about the forces at work in a story as violent underneath as it is demure on the surface... Maeve Brennan is not like anyone but herself. The ferocity of her vision of femininity is hers alone. The variations in The Visitor on revenges taken for love withheld or love perverted will stay with the reader forever. And the sadness of both needs - for love, and for revenge' Nuala O'Faolain The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty-two, returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin - the very house where she grew up - after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, who ran away from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, her grandmother's only son. It is a story of Dublin and the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temperament. Recently found in a university archive, The Visitor was written in the mid-1940s but was never published. This miraculous literary discovery deepens the oeuvre of Maeve Brennan and confirms her status as one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce. 'To mention her in the company of Chekhov and Flaubert is only proper' Edward Albee

About this title

Review

New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden. Now comes The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s. In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen, or both. In The Visitor, it seems to be both. Twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King returns to Dublin after living with her mother in Paris for the past six years. The two left behind Anastasia's father and his fierce old mother. It is to this scary granny that Anastasia returns, now that her mother and father have died. But she is met by an implacable rage: Mrs. King has determined not to forgive Anastasia for deserting the family. Brennan sketches in this woman's nastiness in just a few lines. Typically, she writes around her character, rather than tackling her head on: "Mrs. King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye." It is clear that while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, she is a mere visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.

Few writers so delicately and cruelly parse their countrymen; Brennan wickedly lays bare the malicious repression of the Irish. Even as she satirizes her sanctimonious people, she makes us know that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologizing is done with a minimum of characters and plot. The Visitor reads like an Elizabeth Bowen novel without all those words, or like Washington Square with jokes. Brennan even provides what might be called poetry, if that word weren't so cheap: a statue of the Virgin Mary has a "pale and averted face, sweet and moodless." The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer

About the Author

Maeve Brennan died in obscurity in 1993. She is the author of the acclaimed The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin; The Long-winded Lady: Notes from a New Yorker and The Rose Garden: Short Stories. Writing of Brennan's story, 'The Springs of Affection', Penelope Fitzgerald said that it carries 'an electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through'

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1903809762
• ISBN 13: 9781903809761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1