false 5 0 false false Wed Jun 18 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 30 13:08:04 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 30 13:11:56 -0700 2008 By Jim Ruland

This summer, instead of slogging through all 250,000 words of Ulysses (as well as the shelf-cracking row of books you’ll need to decipher it), read Ireland’s other modernist prose stylist and genius storyteller: Edna O’Brien.

The author of more than 20 novels, short stories and plays for stage and screen, O’Brien has had a prolific career spanning nearly 50 years. She has been described as possessing “the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf,” and heralded as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English” by none other than Philip Roth. She has received countless accolades, yet remains one of Ireland’s most misunderstood writers. Shortly after the release of her critical study of James Joyce in 1999, one reviewer sniffed, “All Edna O’Brien’s effort proves is that lightweight novelists should stick to what they do best.”

O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland has always been a cantankerous one. Her first novel, The Country Girls, written in 1959 during a three-week frenzy, was condemned by the minister of culture as a “smear on Irish womanhood.” The book, which deals with the sexual awakening of a young woman from a small village in west Ireland, was promptly banned. As were her next eight novels.

Read the rest of Jim Ruland's article in the LA Weekly here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/...]]>