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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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THE MAIL TRAIN rushed along toward Dublin, and all the passengers swayed and nodded with the uneven rhythm of it and kept their eyes fixed firmly in front of them as though the least movement would bring them to the end of their patience. Read the first page
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As the story unfolds we see snippets of Anastasia's childhood, the fraught relationships between her mother and father and mother and grandmother, and soon learn as family secrets start to emerge from under the carpet just what grudges Anastasia has unwittingly had thrown upon her from her parents behaviour and how coming back brings everything to the fore. There is also a very sad tale of love lost that Brennan brings in with the only other visitor at the house Miss Kilbride, but I shall leave that one for you to discover.
Maeve Brennan weaves a heartbreaking tale (which is set around Christmas so if you haven't read it that might be the perfect time) written in a completely melodrama free style. It could have been very easy to have scenes of high drama running throughout instead there are scenes where its what is not being said, or what is quietly being spoken, which give the book its emotional weight and that is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off I think. There is one outburst scene actually but it's all the more powerful for the demure quietness of the book, despite all that's going on, up to that point and the silence that follows is even more felt.
A quietly devastating novella that comes highly recommended, though the ending did flummox me... even after three re-readings of it!
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?
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.
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