August is a Wicked Month

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If O’Brien sounds weary it is because she has been here before, many, many times. Her first novel, The Country Girls, written in just three weeks in 1958 and published in 1960, saw her widely condemned in her native Ireland and, worse, damaged her relationship with her mother. “She was very ashamed of my books and made more ashamed by people in the village, and that barrier was always there.” If you are looking for a book with a lot of plot, then you best skip this book. It is an homage to internal thought and introspection, reminding me in many ways of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. The language has a slow, langurious quality to it, in which everything seems to be happening in the half-realized manner of a dream, interspersed with the frenetic quality of extreme loneliness. This book filled me with an incredible sense of sadness, as in some ways I found myself in complete undersranding of ellen's emotions. I felt a keen sympathy with her. The author's characterization was incredibly well-done. It was as if I was living Ellen's story myself. When she falls in with a crowd attached to an American movie star, things look more promising. There are parties in big houses and plenty of attention from rich, powerful men. (Think The Great Gatsby but set in the sun of the French Riviera.) This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August—the summer’s last stand.” – Sara Baume The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose – there’s no one like Edna O’Brien … Beautiful.’ Anne Enright

Ellen in the story is separated from her husband who is an ex-army. One afternoon, the husband takes away his son to spend days with him. When she is alreadddy alone in the house, the milk boy comes and she takes fancy on him. Not contented, she decides to go to Paris with the idea of having sex from anonymous men. There, she meets all sorts of people including lesbians and gay men but she realizes that she is not really looking for sex because she does not get interested even on a good-looking actor. Also she oftentimes remembers her son and whenever she does, she loses interest on the man who is raring to go to bed with her. This is a terrific novel; it arouses sympathy and compassion like nobody's business. Miss O'Brien is an expert on girls and their feelings... No writer in English is so good at putting the reader inside the skin of a woman".The Eliot speech was “great and gruelling”, she says. “I’m not used to giving lectures and I did worry about it. I wanted to give a sense of the poetry, the person, the mystic and the sometimes quite cruel man without making it into a gossip piece. It was supposed to be 15 minutes but it came in at 150 minutes. I’m glad I did it but it took an awful lot out of me.” In the mute August afternoon, they trembled to some undertune of music in the silver air.” – Algernon Charles Swinburne Funny August Quotes to Make You Laugh

Search Reading Matters Search for: Archives Archives Categories Categories Tags #TBR21 1001 Books to read before you die American literature ANZ lit Australian crime Australian literature Australian women writers AWW2016 AWW2019 AWW2021 BAME writer Book lists British literature Canadian literature CanLit Charlotte Wood cold crime crime crime fiction Dublin French literature Giller Prize Irish literature Italian literature Japanese literature journalism London marriage memoir narrative non-fiction New York non-fiction novella OzLit psychological thriller Reading Australia 2016 religion satire Shadow Giller short stories Six degrees of separation Southern Cross crime TBR40 translated fiction travel Triple Choice Tuesday true crime William Trevor women in translation World War Two Follow Reading Matters on WordPress.com Follow on Facebook August is the eighth and the last summer month of the year. The start of these days gives us sunshine with a cooling breeze. Hence, it is a perfect reminder of the upcoming winter while basking under the warmth of the remaining summer days. The dialogue is awful, character development is non-existent, and there is not one worthy sex scene in the book. When summer opens, I see how fast it matures and fears it will be short, but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing to the cool of autumn.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson We used to play football on the levee with no shirts on in the summer August in New Orleans, and my skin would turn red.” – Aaron Nevillepoor, pink cheeks, came to be a nurse in London, loved by all the patients, loved being loved, ran from the operating theatre because one of those patients had a cancer was just opened and closed again, met a man who liked the nursemaid August is a gentle reminder for not doing a single thing from your new year resolution for seven months and not doing it for next five.” – Crestless Wave When you enter August, you want some beach days, some relaxing days, and some wife-out-of-town days.” – Anonymous What follows is a painful comedy of errors. Almost from her arrival she is pursued by a bellhop who interprets her every rebuff as a coy invitation. She steels herself at last for a midnight meeting with the hotel violinist, only to discover he is more