• About
  • Listening
    • Baroque
    • Bluegrass and Country
    • Classical Fusion
    • Classical Period
    • Early Music
    • Film soundtracks
    • Folk Music
    • Jazz
    • Modern Classical
    • Modern Pop Fusion
    • Musicals
    • Romantic Classical
    • Spoken word
    • World Music
  • Reading
    • Fiction
      • Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
      • Classic writers and their works
      • Contemporary Fiction
      • Crime and Detective Fiction
      • Fictionalised Biography
      • Historical Fiction
      • Horror
      • Lighter-hearted reads
      • Literary Fiction
      • Plays and Poetry
      • Romance
      • SF
      • Short stories
      • Western
      • Whimsy and Fantastical
    • Non-Fiction
      • Arts
      • Biography and Autobiography
      • Ethics, reflection, a meditative space
      • Food and Drink
      • Geography and Travel
      • Health and wellbeing
      • History and Social History
      • Philosophy of Mind
      • Science and nature
      • Society; Politics; Economics
  • Reading the 20th Century
  • Watching
    • Documentary
    • Film
    • Staged Production
    • TV
  • Shouting From The Soapbox
    • Arts Soapbox
    • Chitchat
    • Philosophical Soapbox
    • Science and Health Soapbox
  • Interviews / Q + A
  • Indexes
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
    • Sound Index
      • Composers Index
      • Performers Index
    • Filmed Index

Lady Fancifull

~ adventures in a mainly literary obsession

Lady Fancifull

Tag Archives: Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell – I Am, I Am, I Am : Seventeen Brushes with Death

08 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Biography and Autobiography, Ethics, reflection, a meditative space, Non-Fiction, Reading

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Book Review, I Am I Am I Am, Maggie O'Farrell

Seize the Day

Maggie O’ Farrell is a wonderful writer of fiction. Here, she shows herself to be an equally wonderful writer of something more obviously personal – recounting various times in her life where she came close to realising her mortality, through the potential of dying. Near misses, one might say.

O’Farrell has divided each potential encounter with not being, by time, and by the part of the body or psyche where vulnerability struck.

Perhaps it is the large number of close shaves, of different kinds, which have made her fiercely embrace her ‘I Am’

The first near brush is a horrible encounter, as a young woman on a holiday job, with someone later convicted of murdering young women. Some kind of instinct took Farrell to take exactly the right kind of evasive action which kept her safe:

I could have said that I have an instinct for the onset of violence. That, for a long time, I seemed to incite it in others for reasons I never quite understood. If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody

O’ Farrell has that ability a writer must have, to be within a situation and able, simultaneously to reflect on it, to see wider contexts

                      Photo via Good Free Photos

Making a plane journey which turned somewhat hazardous, and which had only happened because her journey through academia had failed to deliver the expected results, and so led to a changed career path, made her aware, later

That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way

Brushes with mortality have been her own, and also, more heart-breakingly for any parent, anguish over a child’s health. Maggie O’ Farrell, by virtue of surviving her various own ‘near death’ encounters, had almost  felt a kind of invulnerability

The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it could so easily have been otherwise, skewed my thinking. I viewed my continuing life as a bonus, a boon: I could do with it what I wanted

That sense of having control over your own destiny, if one has it, crumbles in the face of a child’s fragility:

Holding my child, I realised my vulnerability to death; I was frightened of it, for the first time. I knew too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated.

Maggie O’Farrell has a daughter born with an immunology disorder. She is both more prone to weakened immunity from common pathogens, and extreme over-reactivity to various foodstuffs to the point where she will go into anaphylactic shock – nuts, sesame, eggs, bee or wasp stings – even to the extent that if she comes into contact for example with crumbs from a nut cookie on an improperly cleaned café table. She, and her family, have to live in constant vigilance

It might sound as if this is a dreadfully depressing book, a catalogue of woes – of course, it isn’t.

In its strange way, this is celebratory, a reminder to cherish the wonder of our fragile, strong, livingness

I Am, I Am, I Am UK
I Am, I Am, I Am UK

Advertisement

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Maggie O’Farrell – This Must Be The Place

18 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reading

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Book Review, Costa Shortlist, Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be The Place

Walking a sure tightly woven rope of many voices crossing times and continents

this-must-be-the-placeI had to stop, many times, in my reading of Maggie O’ Farrell’s stunning “This Must Be The Place”, because it ached my heart too much, and took me to the places, which we all have, where life and living seems so fragile, so caught on a pin-point of bliss or desolation, where the realisation of the wonder and despair of who we are, have been, might be, overwhelms.

Sorry for the purpling prose, but that is the overview of how the book spoke to me, particularly as I neared the ending, realising that whichever way that fell out, it would be hugely intense. I hoped so much that she would manage the balance point and not tip into something disappointing. She did, and walked that fine rope brilliantly, all through

So, to the more dispassionate, cooler ‘what is it about’ stuff

The overall theme is the trajectory of a relationship (aren’t most books, somewhere?)

There are many central characters in this book, and O’Farrell gives most of them narrative rights: the story is told over a long period of time, cutting backwards and forwards in different voices, at different times within a lifetime, and from different countries. Don’t expect linear narrative, but surrender to the cutting from voice to voice. This is not confusing, a link back to who the new voice is, how they might connect to a previous voice, will come quickly. What the structure gives us is a spider web of connection, fine, fragile and also with tensile strength.

I find myself unwilling, in this review, to name the most central characters even, because when they meet, they are not without history and the snarled tangles that come from their before. We are all shadowed by our prior selves, imprinting on the present. I feel lucky enough to have come to read this without really knowing much about it – except that I did know it was the story of a failing relationship, that it was a Costa shortlist, and that the author was O’Farrell, As I have read earlier books by her, I was willing to jump into the unknown. It was a real pleasure to read without the map of pre-conception, hence – no names, no pack-drill!!

Bolivian Salt Flats, a profound location at one point

 Bolivian Salt Flats, a profound location at one point

Some of the narrators are first met as children, at their own early stages in the story. I have a particular fondness for writers who can get inside child mind, and engage with the truth of those voices. The fact that O’Farrell does was the sure hook to keep me reading – particularly as it is not just the child voice she manages – but individual children, finely differentiated.

A thousand teenagers are pouring out of the school. Once through the bottleneck of the doors, they break, regroup, and bond as groups of three of four. They call to each other in their particular argot: pure Home Counties cut with Teen American. A lot of yips, heys, elongated vowels. They swing bags through the air. Hair is flicked, stroked, tossed. Trousers are worn tight but low; shoes unlaced. The females link arms with their chosen peers; the males perform mock-violence upon those they recognise as their tribe. Most, if not all, display what I think of as ‘the screen hunch’: head bent, eyes down, one hand engaged in fondling, stroking, manipulating a phone

She took me inside the mind of every narrating character, the why of them, the who of them. And it is to her credit that with each voice and chapter change I was loath to leave the chapter I was leaving, wanting to stay with that story, but, instantly was inside fascination with the next voice.

And all the while they continue a conversation above her head:
– He was like, whoah, and I was like, yeah
– Totally, totally out of it. And I mean. Out. Of. It.
– Because she gave me this look and I was just, you know, hey

Lest this all sound not just ridiculously woolly, but also far too intense for words, she is well attuned, as a writer, to the needs of variation, light, shade, humour. Here is a lovely excerpt, inside the mind of a minor character, a counsellor for ‘problem children’ because of their behaviour in school. He is waiting to meet a new, referred pupil for the first time, and skim reading their background notes. The assured blasé professional’s assumptions are, the reader knows, in for a wonderful puncture, and I was giggling all the way. This is no spoiler, as, by the time you get to this point, you, reader, will be in on the joke, waiting for the banana skin (No names, no pack drill, remember!)

He grabbed the file from his in-tray, swallowing an unchewed hunk of hummus-clogged bread, and flipped open the cover…..He let his eye travel down the page as he took a swig from his water bottle. Lives in Ireland….attended this school for a year…..the counsellor’s ey was caught by one particular detail: Previous schools attended – none. He sighed and his head gave a single shake. He took a dim view of home-schooling. He turned his swivel chair and stood up. A child – he opined, to an audience comprising his bookshelf, a watercolour of a Scandinavian lake, a Newton’s cradle, his effigy of a Yoruba deity picked up a long time ago on a gap-year placement – is a social being….The counsellor crossed the room, pausing only to light a candle on the mantelpiece. He had a handle on the session to come now. He felt inspiration, confidence, assurance surge through him. He loved this job, he loved it……He pictured the child who would be waiting beyond the door, in all probability, nervously, fearfully, perhaps covering these emotions with the rough façade of teenage bravura. Ireland the file had said, so the counsellor imagined the offspring of some Celtic hippie types. Auburn dreadlocks, a whispery Irish inflection, dressed in hand-felt and hemp, that particular brand of drivelly, directionless, formless home-schooling written all over him. Couldn’t read until he was eleven, could barely count, even now. He, the counsellor, would bring him out of himself, give him that direction, inspire him to exert himself in more mainstream educational channels, show him that there are other ways to live, besides weaving one’s own clothes, straining one’s own cheese, splitting one’s own logs.

The counsellor flung open the door to welcome this waif, this refugee, this victim of over-parenting…….

I hope this excerpt shows how O’Farrell can construct and build and shape – and clearly has a fine sense of the narrative, the dramatic voice. As well as all the wonderful psychology, dialogue, fine writing, playing with time, place, voice, she remains that wondrous thing – a storytellermaggie-ofarrell

I received this as a digital review copy from the publisher, via NetGalley. And how I enjoyed carefully unwrapping it to follow its treasure journey!

As I hope is obvious, unreserved recommendation

This Must Be The Place Amazon UK
This Must Be The Place Amazon USA

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Page Indexes

  • About
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
  • Sound Index
    • Composers Index
    • Performers Index
  • Filmed Index

Genres

Archives

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Posts Getting Perused

  • William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
    William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
  • Mick Herron - Dead Lions
    Mick Herron - Dead Lions
  • David Bez - Salad Love
    David Bez - Salad Love
  • Mick Herron - Real Tigers
    Mick Herron - Real Tigers
  • Ossian Ward - Ways Of Looking (How to Experience Contemporary Art)
    Ossian Ward - Ways Of Looking (How to Experience Contemporary Art)
  • Arthur Schnitzler - La Ronde
    Arthur Schnitzler - La Ronde
  • Ghazal - As Night Falls On The Silk Road
    Ghazal - As Night Falls On The Silk Road
  • Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
    Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Recent Posts

  • Bart Van Es – The Cut Out Girl
  • Joan Baez – Vol 1
  • J.S.Bach – Goldberg Variations – Zhu Xiao-Mei
  • Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano
  • Jane Harper – The Lost Man

NetGalley Badges

Fancifull Stats

  • 162,831 hits
Follow Lady Fancifull on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow on Bloglovin

Tags

1930s setting Adult Faerie Tale Andrew Greig Arvo Pärt Autobiography baroque Beryl Bainbridge Biography Biography as Fiction Bits and Bobs Bits and Pieces Book Review Books about Books Cats Children's Book Review Classical music Classical music review Classic Crime Fiction Colm Toibin Cookery Book Crime Fiction David Mitchell Dystopia Espionage Ethics Fantasy Fiction Feminism Film review First World War Folk Music Food Industry France Gay and Lesbian Literature Ghost story Golden-Age Crime Fiction Graham Greene Health and wellbeing Historical Fiction History Humour Humour and Wit Ireland Irish writer Irvin D. Yalom Janice Galloway Japan Literary Fiction Literary pastiche Lynn Shepherd Marcus Sedgwick Meditation Mick Herron Minimalism Music review Myths and Legends Neil Gaiman Ngaio Marsh Novels about America Other Stuff Patrick Flanery Patrick Hamilton Perfumery Philip Glass Philosophy Police Procedural Post-Apocalypse Psychiatry Psychological Thriller Psychology Psychotherapy Publication Day Reading Rebecca Mascull Reflection Robert Harris Rose Tremain Russian Revolution sacred music Sadie Jones Sci-Fi Science and nature Scottish writer Second World War SF Shakespeare Short stories Simon Mawer Soapbox Spy thriller Susan Hill Tana French The Cold War The Natural World TV Drama Victorian set fiction Whimsy and Fantasy Fiction William Boyd World music review Writing Young Adult Fiction

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Join 771 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.

    %d bloggers like this: