Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #804327 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s, was written by New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan who has already delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden.

In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen. 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 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 satirises her sanctimonious people, she makes the reader aware that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologising 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 humour. Consequently, The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer

Synopsis
This previously unpublished novella by the late Maeve Brennan is "an astonishing miniature masterpiece. [It] will stay with the reader forever."-Nuala O'Faolain.. Maeve Brennan has been called one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce, and with The Visitor her oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened. Written in the mid-1940s, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally distant side of the Irish temper. This haunting novella stands with her greatest short stories.

Customer Reviews

Eggs are plentiful this year
The Visitor is a diamond, a self-contained brilliance that offers no explanations or excuses but its truths are refracted from its sharp-cut facets : the house, garden, street, park, church, people. The two main characters, grandmother and granddaughter, are themselves facets of the same personality, doing polite, deadly battle for the same ground. This battleground is "home"... Nevertheless it is specifically situated in the severe, joyless architecture which haunts all Dublin writers..., a home where the old woman's son and the young woman's mother suffered the failure of their love, their disintegrating lives reflected in the mirror over the mantle. The dead have no peace however as this failure is carried on to the bitter inconclusive end as the old woman and the equally stubborn young one fail to reconcile their obsessive love for the dead with the charity needed for the living.
Though in an obvious way Maeve Brennan adds her voice to those of Joyce and Beckett in her depiction of a certain Dublin in time, the story has resonance with the Latino gothic of Carlos Fuentes's Aura in its sense of haunting which could as easily flip over into the madness of a ghost story. It also shows she had a troubling prescience of her own end. Did she already foresee herself as the mad woman in the park, shouting abuse, for ever looking through the window at a lost childhood?

A Haunting Glimpse of the Irish Temper
James Joyce has a rival in Maeve Brennan. In her first work, "The Visitor," Brennan creates a chilling portrait of a young woman, Anastasia King. But Anastasia is no Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, she is uneducated and has limited opportunities. Crossing the channel in opposite directions, for opposite reasons, Anastasia and Stephen have visions of different destinies.

For Anastasia,

"Somewhere in her mind a voice was saying clearly, 'Ireland is my dwelling place, Dublin is my station. . . .Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. . . . Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward."

For Stephen,

"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race" ("A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man").

For Joyce and Brennan, Dublin proved to be a cold inhospitable place from which they chose to escape--Joyce to Paris and Brennan to New York. Here, in her new "station," Brennan created a perfect novella, "The Visitor." This undiscovered masterpiece will now take its place besides Joyce's perfect novella, "The Dead."

To say a novella is perfect is to say that one has no words to add nor subtract, for the work is rare, beautiful, and truth-telling. "The Visitor" speaks volumes about the Irish temper; the icy chill that greets Anastasia shivers through one's soul.

Christopher Carduff adds an insightful Editor's Note to the novella: "In the music of Maeve Brennan, three notes repeatedly sound together--a ravenous grudge, a ravenous nostalgia, and a ravenous need for love. In 'The Visitor' she plays this chord for the first time, announcing the key of all the songs to follow." What follows are: "The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin," "The Rose Garden: Short Stories," and "The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker." Read "The Visitor" first: an entrée into the mind of a mistress of manners, Maeve Brennan.

A Haunting Glimpse of the Irish Temper
James Joyce has a rival in Maeve Brennan. In her first work, "The Visitor," Brennan creates a chilling portrait of a young woman, Anastasia King. But Anastasia is no Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, she is uneducated and has limited opportunities. Crossing the channel in opposite directions, for opposite reasons, Anastasia and Stephen have visions of different destinies.

For Anastasia,

"Somewhere in her mind a voice was saying clearly, 'Ireland is my dwelling place, Dublin is my station. . . .Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. . . . Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward."

For Stephen,

"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race" ("A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man").

For Joyce and Brennan, Dublin proved to be a cold inhospitable place from which they chose to escape--Joyce to Paris and Brennan to New York. Here, in her new "station," Brennan created a perfect novella, "The Visitor." This undiscovered masterpiece will now take its place besides Joyce's perfect novella, "The Dead."

To say a novella is perfect is to say that one has no words to add nor subtract, for the work is rare, beautiful, and truth-telling. "The Visitor" speaks volumes about the Irish temper; the icy chill that greets Anastasia shivers through one's soul.

Christopher Carduff adds an insightful Editor's Note to the novella: "In the music of Maeve Brennan, three notes repeatedly sound together--a ravenous grudge, a ravenous nostalgia, and a ravenous need for love. In 'The Visitor' she plays this chord for the first time, announcing the key of all the songs to follow." What follows are: "The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin," "The Rose Garden: Short Stories," and "The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker." Read "The Visitor" first: an entrée into the mind of a mistress of manners, Maeve Brennan.