Lantern Slides - Hardcover

O'Brien, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374183325 ISBN 13: 9780374183325

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990

Synopsis

Twelve stories deal with love, incest, passion, aging, death, and loneliness

About this title

About the Author:

Edna O'Brien is the internationally-acclaimed author of 18 books including Down by the River, The House of Splendid Isolation, Mother Ireland, The Country Girls Trilogy, and A Fanatic Heart (all available from Plume). Born and raised in Ireland, she lives in London.

Review:

Lantern Slides is an aptly titled book: each story has a translucent yet vividly colored quality. Whether telling of people on holiday, people in love, or children struggling to understand their surroundings, the stories are subtle in their motive, but rich in understanding, creating a world of memory and desire no less physical in color, texture, and taste as our own. The characters in Lantern Slides all seek love, that "bulwark between life and death." In "Oft in the Stilly Night," the reader is a traveller who is told numerous stories about the inhabitants of a small town - the mad woman, the cheating husband, the ambitious young beauty: "Perhaps your own village is much the same, perhaps everywhere is, perhaps pity is a luxury and deliverance a thing of the past." Set primarily in Ireland, these stories relate a kind of beautiful despair, the sadness of those able to mourn without self-pity, and to hope without self-delusion. Edna O'Brien's language is poetic yet not abstract; the dilemmas of her characters are universal yet deeply personal. She portrays loss without descending into bleakness or cynicism, and she never dismisses the possibility of hope, of life - "tender, spectacular, all-embracing life" - which each of the characters struggles to capture. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Sonja Larsen

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0374183325
• ISBN 13: 9780374183325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328