- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (17 Jan 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140288139
- ISBN-13: 978-0140288131
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.9 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 450,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes the old feminist adage one step further: the personal is invariably political in this exquisite first novel, while its politics feel very personal indeed. The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that's been her home for two decades, Kathleen's is a life gone "even and dry." Love has been her traditional panacea: "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell in place around it." But the only love that comes her way these days takes the form of grim, anonymous sex--and even that grows harder to find.
Oddly enough, it is history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life.
My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life and the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the Famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness. The suffering of Irish peasants during the Famine might be a grander subject than a solitary woman's search for passion. Yet one is as real as the other. In the Irish experience, as in Kathleen de Burca's, the movements of history leave ghostly tracks across individual lives. --Mary Park, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Forty-nine-year old Kathleen is an Irish travel writer based in London who has not been back to Ireland since she was 20. Her home is her office and she has not experienced passion for many years. But when the props of Kathleen's life fall away one after the other she turns to a passion not in her own life but in a scandalous affair in 19th century rural Ireland to where she returns and discovers how powerful the human heart is.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Kathleen de Burca, a single, middle-aged travel writer living alone for twenty years in the same basement flat in London, finds her whole life changing when her closest friend and confidante dies very suddenly. Her loneliness is overpowering, her desire to leave her job and try a new kind of writing is growing, and as she faces the age of fifty without a family or any lover, she remarks soulfully, "I...watch the [passion] in me dying....This is the hardest thing; and no one warned me."
Possessing the court transcript for an adultery trial from the 1850's, Kathleen decides to return to Ireland for the first time since she left home, thirty years before, to look for more information about the case and perhaps to write about it. She is puzzled by the irony that the apparently unrestrained passion of the "affair" took place during the depths of the Potato Famine, and she is open to a passion of her own.
Kathleen de Burca is an unusual protagonist for a love story by virtue of her age alone, and few women will be able to resist her attempts to find direction for her life, with or without a lover. O'Faolain creates a flawed and realistic main character trying to find connections within the mess of her life--the Irish roots she has abandoned, friends and lovers she has thoughtlessly hurt, and ill-considered choices she has made. Romantic in its descriptions of the Irish countryside, this is a big, enjoyable story of love and passion as seen by a woman in her 50's and by the young wife in the court documents, leading to new perspectives and new considerations of passion in our lives. Mary Whipple
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Middle-aged travel writer returns to Ireland, her place of birth, to confront her childhood and try to make sense of her life so far. For women of a certain age, every word she breathes will ring true. Every concern, every question she has, we have had. But this is more than ruminations on a mid-life crisis. The author weaves in a literary detective story, meditations on the many facets of bereavement, thoughts about what it means to be an Irish woman living in England, and some deeply striking and stunningly evocative images of Ireland as it is now and as it may have been in the past. Beautiful and moving.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
My poor husband thought I had lost it when I cried my eyes out twenty pages from the end of this book. I felt like I had been right beside Kathleen for her cathartic journey back to Ireland. Nualo O'Faolain in her writing has captured the essence of what it was to grow up in Ireland, move away under less than supportive circumstances and live a life wishing you weren't Irish but unable to be anything else. No more to say only enjoy the book and travel well with Kathleen.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Absolutely wonderful
This a an amazing book! I have just re-read it, and I still find myself completely absorbed by it. It is incredibly moving and one of the best love stories ever. Please read it!
Published on 25 Jan 2006
Yet an other great book about Ireland
My Dream of You is yet an other great book about Ireland. 49-year-old travel writer Kathleen de Burca returns to her native Ireland to make up with her past. Read more
Published on 21 Aug 2005 by Faith
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