I've got a couple of reviews today. These are part of my course, so they probably are going to get changed eventually...

Maeve Brennan: The Visitor

Maeve Brennan was born in 1917 and was arguably one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century. She worked for the New Yorker for most of her life and is presumed to have written ‘The Visitor’ in the 1940s. However, only in the last ten years has this book been discovered and published.

The main character, Anastasia has been living in Paris up until the death of her mother. She decides to leave Paris for Dublin where she wants to live indefinitely with her grandmother. Unfortunately her grandmother, Mrs King, is the epitome of the cold and passive aggressive matriarch that was so common in the Irish catholic society at the time of the setting. The plot revolves around this clash between these two characters; Anastasia’s unwillingness to leave and Mrs King’s “wish to God…that [Anastasia] would go away and leave [her] alone”.

‘The Visitor’ draws to attention questions about who we are, and what characters we associate and interact with on a daily basis. This made for an interesting look into myself, as I started asking questions like “what would I do here?” In one particular instance, I was left in shock at Anastasia’s reaction to the aged Mrs Killbride’s dying wish to be buried with a lover’s ring on her ring finger: “poor little Other Self she thought…[she] contemplated the coldness of the water, which shook a little in the wind.” This cold edge is built upon more and more until the point where the reader is doused with a very dark sense of self awareness.

This challenging novel is a very self reflective and compelling piece of literature. It teases with the idea of the inevitable clash of Anastasia and her grandmother while constantly boxing the reader into a state of claustrophobia and suspense.

Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast

Written in the 1920s and drafted together between the years of 1957-1960, Hemingway presents his memoirs of himself as a young writer living in Paris. The first edition of the book edited by his fourth wife is possibly work of fiction: fore grounded in the introductory letter by Hemingway himself.

The book starts with an opening to Hemingway’s younger years while he was living in Paris. In these first few chapters Hemingway is still with his first wife he talks about his early influences as a writer and also about writing itself. He coins the idea of writing a “one true sentence”: “So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” Understandably, this book can be read as an introduction manual to young budding writers and indeed contains many other tips on writing.

Hemingway wrote this book in his own style of modernism. All the sentences are kept very simple and are directly to the point which manages to defer the reader, at first, away from the context within a chapter as a whole or sometimes even in just single words. I respect this book as a very clever piece of literature; however, this style heavily relies on the participation of the reader, more than conventional writing and I found my self bored halfway through the book and unmotivated to move forward.