To celebrate National Short Story Week, Aileen reviews Lantern Slides by Edna O’Brien
Short story collections are perhaps somewhat undervalued, but this is one of my favourites, and one I enjoy returning to again and again. Irish writer Edna O’Brien beautifully captures the essence of rural village life, the many strange encounters and goings on that happen behind closed doors. She has a way of seeing the extraordinary in the mundane, vividly describing those pivotal moments in ordinary people’s lives, the heartaches, the longings, the betrayals that happen unseen and unacknowledged.
A nun leaves her convent and competes for the affections of her sister’s husband. A widow invites scandal when a priest is killed in her lodging house. The villagers can only speculate about the strange events that happen at the house, as a succession of young women and inebriated men come and go at all hours of the night.
A woman meets her ex-lover for a final encounter. The raw hurts, the old wounds come to the surface, even as they banter lightly with each other. O’Brien writes poetically about the human condition, about those things that affect all of our lives, seeing what is kept hidden, below the masks and the composure we wear everyday.
This is a great book to dip in and out of, ideal for reading on trains or in coffee shops, and a perfect introduction to Edna O’Brien’s beautiful writing.
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