A million years ago I read Lust by Edna O’Brien and really liked it. I picked it randomly off of a mezzanine shelf at the main library in Philadelphia because of her first name and the one-word title. Twas quite romantic, but I used to be that kind of gal.
At a bookswap last year I picked up House of Splendid Isolation and stuck it on a shelf for later. When I finally got around to it boy was I disappointed. Whatever feeling of luscious language and tension I associated with O’Brien has disappeared with reading House of Splendid Isolation. It’s not that the book was horrible or anything, it just didn’t add anything to the elements it presented: growing older, being a woman in old age, the IRA, betrayal by politics and revolution.
Flat.
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