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Loading... My Dream of Youby Nuala O'Faolain
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Lust mit Liebe verwechselt: Die Erwartungen sind hoch, wenn Elke Heidenreich ein Buch empfiehlt. Was dem Leser hier jedoch geboten wird, ist enttäuschenderweise eher ein Geschichtchen als eine Geschichte, nach dem Motto "Irland zieht immer". Kathleen, Irin, 50 Jahre alte Reisejournalistin bricht in ihre verhasste Heimat auf, um das Schicksal von Marianne zu recherchieren, einer englischen Lady des 19. Jhdts., die wegen umtriebigen Sexlebens von ihrem Gatten verstoßen wurde. Die Ergebnisse der Recherche (schuldig oder unschuldig) bleiben ebenso merkwürdig hinter Schleiern verborgen, wie z.B. Kathleens Eltern, die neben dem schrecklichen Irland (?) selbstredend an den verkorksten Lebenswegen ihrer drei bis xx? Kinder schuldig sind. Dafür wird dem Leser aber eine ausgiebige Schilderung von Kathleens äußerst üppigem und wahllosem Sexleben geboten incl. Details, z.B.: Welche Frau hat nicht schonmal davon geträumt, dass ihr Lover beim Sex die Zähne rausnimmt und auf die Bettdecke legt, um mit den blanken Kiefern an ihren Nippeln zu nagen?! (Das ist ja fast so schön wie der Tampon-Spruch von Prinz Charles!) Wer's mag... Kathleen treibt die Angst vor Einsamkeit um, hierunter versteht sie allerdings in erster Linie die Sorge, dass niemand mehr mit ihr das Laken teilt. Nanu? Diese Verwechselung kennen wir doch eigentlich nur von Männern?!  r1hard | Nov 22, 2009 |  This was an interesting book about an Irish transplant travel writer in London. The story flip flops between her present life and her reflection on her past. It also flips way back to a story she's researching about an affair between an Irish groom and an English lady during the potato famine years (think mid-eighteen hundreds). I liked this book because it described a reality in Ireland that we sometime as tourists and travelers don't see about a place. It was also amazing to realize the shear amount of people who suffered, died, and immigrated. The book did tend to ramble and I think she could have cut the story down in half but it did really make you get to know the main character. (  ) nycbookgirl | Jul 9, 2009 | Kathleen De Burca, an Irish travel writer living in London, trows over her life there to return to Ireland and write a book. What she is chasing down is an old scandal - an affair in mid century Ireland between the wife of an English landlord and her Irish servant during the time of the Irish potato famine. Also woven into the narrative is Kathleen's own story - tragically disfunctional families, sharp-eyed feminist critiques of contemporary society, aging,, sex and friendship. A beautifully written book about longing, regret, choices and change. (  ) lucymaesmom | Jan 1, 2009 | Fictional retelling of Ireland's "troubles"; loses steam at the end; adult (not YA) perspective ( ) mjspear | Nov 8, 2008 | Lyrical, poignant story of a woman searching for her own history ( ) ksmac | Jun 21, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0743518462, Audio CD)Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes the old feminist adage one step further: the personal is invariably political in this exquisite first novel, while its politics feel very personal indeed. The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that's been her home for two decades, Kathleen's is a life gone "even and dry." Love has been her traditional panacea: "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell in place around it." But the only love that comes her way these days takes the form of grim, anonymous sex--and even that grows harder to find.Oddly enough, it's history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life. My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life, the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness: It was never real excitement that got you into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the way you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast, that the roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was just coming into view.The suffering of Irish peasants during the famine might be a grander subject than a solitary woman's search for passion. Yet one is as real as the other. In the Irish experience, as in Kathleen de Burca's, the movements of history leave ghostly tracks across individual lives. --Mary Park (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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