Edna O’Brien. Mrs Reinhardt (1978)

     Edna O’Brien. Mrs Reinhardt (1978) I see by the flyleaf note that I bought this book in 1980: I can’t recall reading it. Reading it now, it seems dated in its themes and above all its tone. The stories deal almost entirely with broken relationships, and usually with domestic violence, sometimes physical but always psychological. Gloomy and depressing for the most part. A few are milder, perhaps O’Brien wrote them for women’s magazines, which wouldn’t tolerate the franker and more brutal language of the stories she wrote for literary journals. Some are quite self-consciously Irish, which doesn’t help: their aim seems to be to epater les curés, and perhaps shocked the naiver sort of priest; but the religious that I’ve met are not as easily shocked as their parishioners.. She writes well, but I don’t have much sympathy for her characters. Either I’ve become callous, or the time for this sort of story is past, and I’m as much a creature of my time as anyone else. ** (2007)