The Visitor

by Maeve Brennan

The tale of Anastasia King who returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin after six long years away. She has been in Paris comforting her dying mother, who ran away from Anastasia's late father, her grandmother's only son. It is a story of Dublin and the unreachable side of the Irish temperament.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Novella, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Maeve Brennan (January 6, 1917-1993) was an Irish short story writer and journalist. She moved to the United States in 1934 when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington. She was an important figure in both Irish diaspora writing and in Irish writing itself. Collections of her articles, short stories, and a novella have been published.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those Hard-Faced Queens of Misadventure

Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. Then what resentful wonder, and what half-aimless seeking. It is a silly state of affairs. It is a silly creature that tries to get a smile from even the most familiar and loving shadow. Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward.

Last year I read a collection of connected short stories by the Irish author Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) - a selection from her The Springs of Affection) which was a delightfully elegant, melancholic and subtly written depiction of the wretched domestic life of a couple and their two children living in an Irish suburb. The visitor is her earliest work of fiction known, a novella which she wrote around 1944, but was only first published in 2000, after her death, when it was found in the archives of the Notre Dame University. Indiana.

And what a bleak and painful story this was - an unsettling portrayal of devastating loneliness, glacial, daunting cruelty and unforgiving wrath and resentment.



A young woman, Anastasia King, returns to Dublin after having lived six years in exile in Paris with her mother. Having lost both father and mother, she intends to take up residence with her parental grandmother, hoping to find a new home in the old family dwelling where she and her parents used to live together with the grandmother and the maid. While she tries to connect to the grandmother – a cold, embittered woman who never forgave her daughter-in-law nor her granddaughter for fleeing the house and so leaving her beloved son behind – she is welcomed with grim contempt and utter indifference to her sorry plight and to her grieving.

However ostensibly fragile, dolefully needy and craving for affection, Anastasia on her turn is too self-obsessed, frightened and petrified to have much consideration for the needs of others, lacking empathy for her grandmother and renouncing an old friend of her mother who confides a secret to her – miss Kilbride, the only sympathetic character in this grim tale.

When her grandmother’s indomitability intransigency finally starts to dawn to the bereaved, beaten and desperate Anastasia, she teaches her grandmother (what to me came across as) a wry lesson on hypocrisy.



Brennan captures these troubled, isolated lives which seem trapped in their own cruelty in a prose that is of great lyrical beauty, vivid, scorchingly precise, with a flavour resembling the mild scent of almonds which you expect to be sweet and firm but surprise with their soft and bitter taste. As quite some scenes are set within the confinement of the old house, Brennan skilfully conveys a claustrophobic atmosphere in which the flickering fire burning brightly cannot chase the coldness from the bones of its occupants, nor from their hearts. Both the inside and outside world are malevolent, life is harsh and uncompassionate.

It is unknown why Maeve Brennan never published this novella. Wasn’t she satisfied with the quality of it? Was it turned down? Or did it hit too close to home, finding Anastasia King a too thinly disguised version of herself or of a relative? With this tale of ice-cold cruelty and rejection – even the church ditches Anastasia in her agony - I wonder, bearing in mind what I read about Brennan’s life, if she is sending Anastasia vicariously back to Dublin to defuse her own fears what she would find there when imagining a possible return of herself to Dublin – as a anxious woman, did she fear how she would be welcomed by her family in case she would join them in Ireland again? Maeve Brennan left Ireland for America in 1934 when she was seventeen and while her parents and sisters did return to Ireland in 1947, she stayed in New York, only to return to Ireland for a short period.

In the preface, editor Christopher Carduff (who uncovered The Visitor from the archives) captures Brennan’s writing brilliantly: 'In the music of Maeve Brennan, three notes repeatedly sound together – a ravenous grudge, a ravenous nostalgia, and a ravenous need for love.'

Who needs enemies when you have family?

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tra donne sole

Certi autori hanno la capacità di incantare raccontando. Maeve Brennan è una di questi.

Come un ritrattista che con pochi tratti di matita riesce a cogliere l'espressione di un volto, così la Brennan ci introduce nella breve storia della giovane Anastasia che alla morte della madre ritorna nella casa di origine a Dublino, che aveva lasciato dopo il divorzio dei genitori. Ad attenderla c’è la nonna paterna, che non ha mai perdonato a lei e alla madre di avere abbandonato il figlio.

La nonna e la nipote sono rimaste sole al mondo; nonostante questo, il ritorno di Anastasia a casa è gelido, tanto da farla sentire ospite non gradita in casa sua. Nel cuore di questa anziana signora la speranza e l’amore se ne sono andati e non c’è più posto per la nipote, che si sente a tutti gli effetti una visitatrice. Ci sono persone che non vogliono o non possono superare le delusioni inflitte da chi hanno amato tanto.

“La casa è un luogo della mente. Quand’è vuota, diventa irrequieta. Si anima di ricordi, visi e luoghi e momenti passati. Immagini amate riemergono, disobbedienti, a rispecchiare quel vuoto”.

Un breve libro che si basa quindi solo sulla tensione tra due donne; la freddezza dell’una e il tentativo dell’altra di fare breccia tra i ricordi spiacevoli della prima. L’orgoglio dell’una e l’amore dell’altra. Due solitudini che non riescono a incontrarsi.

Sensazioni fredde, intensificate dal luogo, una Dublino umida e piovosa. Una trama evanescente, ma resa interessante dalla impeccabile ed evocativa scrittura della Brennan; peccato che questo sia stato il suo unico romanzo, tra l’altro pubblicato postumo.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robert Frost famously wrote: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

Not so here, when Anastasia returns to Dublin from Paris after her mother dies. Her father's mother, the only family she has left, wants her gone.

Here, Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets.

Other reviewers have called this quirky, curious, a queer book. That means there's something clever enough within, but actual meaning may be missing. Like this:

Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people around it. . . . One is bound to be sent scurrying back to the place one came from, which is the other world, the first world, the one with walls around it.

Yes, true. But they don't have to take you in.

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5*

#theirishreadathon

“Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness."

Maeve Brennan (1916-1993) é uma autora irlandesa praticamente caída em esquecimento, que em Manhattan trabalhou para a “The New Yorker” sob a direcção de William Maxwell. Escrita nos anos 40, esta novela esteve durante décadas nos arquivos de uma faculdade e poderia nunca ter visto a luz do dia, o que seria uma tremenda perda, já que se trata de uma obra de uma enorme graciosidade, em que perturba o desespero causado pela falta de afecto e clemência. Anastasia volta a casa da avó na Irlanda após a morte da mãe em Paris, para onde esta fugira largando o marido. Tal como a mãe, Anastasia sente-se uma visita na casa de Mrs. King, uma mulher rancorosa e implacável, e relaciona-se com Miss Killbride, amiga da família e protagonista de uma infeliz história de amor devido também à presença omnipotente e prepotente da matriarca inválida da sua família.

“It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s one of those things you keep locked away in your mind, or in your heart, and go over and over it again, and when it comes out it’s difficult and awkward, and the words sound foolish. Nothing sounds the way it is at all.

[piperitapitta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bellissima storia quella de "La Visitatrice", una storia di incomunicabilità allo stato puro.
Anastasia, poco più che ventenne, che torna a Dublino dopo sei anni alla morte della madre, con la quale è vissuta sei anni a Parigi, è l'unica che tenti in qualche modo di farlo; cerca in tutti i modi di conquistare l'affetto della nonna paterna che invece l'ha già condannata, quando fuggendo insieme alla madre ha abbandonato il padre.
L'atmosfera che dipinge la Brennan è cupa, fioca, piovosa.
Sembra quasi che tutta la pioggia che cade durante le poche pagine di questo romanzo breve sia un tutt'uno con le parole che si scambiano Anastasia e la nonna: a volte sono un'inondazione di parole che non riescono a trattenere, altre frasi sibilline, gocce isolate che hanno il solo scopo di colpire e di ferire.
Eppure, in questo clima che opprime e respinge, Maeve Brennan riesce a dipingere scorci di giardini verde brillante, strade in cui il riflesso dell'acqua bagnata si scompone in prismi dai colori dell'arcobaleno e a rievocare atmosfere che rimandano emotivamente ai racconti di Joyce.
È ancora acerba Maeve Brennan, questo suo romanzo breve, pubblicato alla sua morte dopo essere stato scovato tra i suoi scritti, non ha la forza della raccolta di racconti "Il principio dell'amore", e forse anche la sua enigmatica fine ne è un simbolo, ma è già comunque un bellissimo esempio di quanto potenziale avesse celato in sé.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you review a small masterpiece? Well, it’s not easy but straight away the author struck me as an Irish Hemingway - the pared down prose and the hypnotic quality of the writing.
Here is the opening sentence of the novel. “The mail train rushed along toward Dublin, and all the passengers swayed and nodded with the uneven rhythm of it and kept their eyes fixed firmly in front of them as though the least movement would bring them to the end of their patience.” And here is our main character Anastasia King thinking about the clatter of the train: “The din automatically raised a barrier of hostile irritation to daunt the chummy souls. She was glad of this.” Already we have a sense of Anastasia, who is about to receive a very chilly welcome from her paternal grandmother. She is returning after the death of both her mother (abroad) and her father. (Her father’s death is barely mentioned).
There is so much power in simple words. Here is Anastasia thinking back on her childhood in the same house she has now come to live in.
“That was a time of uncertain mood, that time when she used to walk in the garden. Then the family the sparse little family, was together, the grandmother, the father, the mother, the child. They were together and it was no satisfaction to them.”
And then the understated depiction of the grandmother.
“She turned the spectacles thoughtfully in her hands.
‘Didn’t you know what state he was in, when he left you in Paris, after trying to get you to come back here, and had to come alone?’
‘Oh, Grandmother,’ cried Anastasia, ‘how could I leave her?’
‘We won’t go into that. I am going to be very matter-of-fact with you, Anastasia.’
Her voice was very matter-of-fact.
‘You know that your mother disgraced us all, running off the way she did, like some kind of madwoman.’”
I don’t think I stumbled once on a single word and the narrative flow is strong even though this is a deceptively simple tale. One can only read this novella and wonder what happened to it, because you see, like the author who was a proud, restless and elusive soul, the book lay in a collection of papers for decades and was only published seven years after her death. As Christopher Carduff, the editor, writes, asking the dead author:
“Why did you never publish this? Was it too short for a first book? Too long for a magazine story? Did you misplace your only carbon of the original? Did you even make a carbon? Or did you just move on, having so many stories yet to tell?” We are left to ponder on so much.

[Malacorda · Rating 5 out of 5]

La gente la passa sempre liscia

Una fiaba amarissima, o forse nemmeno una fiaba visto che non c'è evoluzione o formazione vera e propria. Allora, un racconto: una foto amarissima, in bianco e nero oppure in seppia sbiadita, in cui il sorriso non trova forza per emergere.

Nelle fiabe e nei romanzi del XIX sec si incontrano spesso personaggi dotati di particolari perfidia e freddezza. Di solito la matrigna o il patrigno; ma perché no, anche la nonna o il nonno. Sono funzionali all'economia della storia, sono i progenitori del moderno villain dei film e dei romanzi; ma qualche volta in passato mi era capitato di chiedermi se non fossero figure un po' troppo forzate nella loro cattiveria così innata e profonda da apparire proprio innaturale, specialmente quando in seno alla famiglia. Poi, i casi della vita mi hanno portato ad osservare in maniera più obiettiva e distaccata proprio la mia, di famiglia, e mi sono obiettivamente resa conto che certi livelli di perfidia e acidità nella vita reale esistono eccome. E allora ben vengano tutti quegli autori e autrici che li mettono in scena, questi soggetti velenosi, che li spiattellano sul tavolo operatorio e li vivisezionano proprio come fossero scorfani, per tentare di capire o almeno ipotizzare dove si localizza la ghiandola contenente il veleno.

È tremendo sentirsi non-accettati, sentirsi sempre esaminati e soppesati. La faticata di dover dimostrare qualcosa ogni giorno, ogni momento. Esser squadrati dal basso verso l'alto. O meglio, non è poi così tremendo, si può sopravvivere a questo (sopravvive persino una persona a cui viene amputato un arto o asportato un organo, figurarsi) però è così brutto. Ecco, è semplicemente e tremendamente brutto.
Un altro bel guaio è il non riuscire a sentirsi a casa da nessuna parte.
Ma non c'è santo che tenga, è un circolo vizioso da cui difficilmente si esce: la mancanza di affetto da parte delle persone che dovrebbero esserti vicine ti porta a fare piazzate e colpi di testa, e le piazzate e i colpi di testa inducono quelle persone a respingerti ancora di più. Le voci aspre e irritate, mai davvero felici, tutt'al più leggermente isteriche. La gelosia fuori controllo che induce ad atteggiamenti violenti (una violenza fatta anche solo di parole) non è necessariamente quella di un uomo che si sfoga nei confronti di una moglie o compagna, qui si dimostra che può anche essere quella di una madre nei confronti di una figlia o figlio.

Tutti questi ingredienti e tanti altri si possono trovare nel racconto di Brennan, un dosaggio che se non è perfetto è comunque ammirevole.
Una parola in più rischiava di essere fuori posto, una parola in meno e il racconto sarebbe rimasto vacillante.
Doveroso notare, in ultimo, la grande affinità con i Dubliners di Joyce: non soltanto per la comunanza di ambientazione ma anche e soprattutto per comunanza di sentimenti e situazioni.

Anche il futuro è faticoso. Non riesco nemmeno a pensarci.

La casa è un luogo della mente. Quand'è vuota, diventa irrequieta. Si anima di ricordi, visi e luoghi e momenti passati. Immagini amate riemergono disobbedienti, a rispecchiare quel vuoto.

Le giornate arrivavano e se ne andavano, e non portavano niente.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Home is...

Anastasia King left her father's home when she was 16 to live with her mother in Paris. Now, when she is 22, both her parents are dead and she has returned to Dublin expecting to live in her old home with her paternal grandmother. But old Mrs King is quite content to live alone with her memories of her beloved son and has never forgiven her daughter-in-law for bringing shame on the family by leaving him. And she's no more willing to forgive Anastasia for choosing her mother over her father.

This novella is an early unpublished work of Maeve Brennan's, discovered after her death in a University archive. The editor tells us that he has done some minor tidying up of the text, but that it is substantially as she wrote it. This begs the question why she never sought to, or perhaps failed to, have it published in her lifetime. It is a wonderful study of loneliness, self-absorption and selfishness, of thwarted love, both romantic and familial, and of a longing for that nebulous thing we call 'home'.

She kissed her grandmother hastily, avoiding her eyes. The grandmother did not move from the door of the sitting room. She stood in the doorway, having just got up from the fireside and her reading, and contemplated Anastasia and Anastasia's luggage crowding the hall. She was still the same, with her delicate and ruminative and ladylike face, and her hands clasped formally in front of her. Anastasia thought, she is waiting for me to make some mistake.

The writing is excellent – the story mournful and entirely absorbing. There's a claustrophobic feel to it, with these two brilliantly created characters inhabiting the same space but never sharing it. Mrs King is cold and selfish even in her love for her son, perhaps having been the cause of the flight of his wife. She sees Anastasia as her mother's daughter and shows no grandmotherly love for her, and no sympathy for her recent bereavement.

Where it would have been easy, and perhaps facile, for Brennan to show Anastasia solely as a victim of Mrs King's cruelty, in fact she does something much more subtle and effective. As the story unfolds, we begin to see that this coldness and emotional detachment may be a family trait, that perhaps the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. While Mrs King makes no effort to ease Anastasia's return to Dublin, Anastasia equally shows no concern over how her return may disrupt the settled patterns of this elderly lady's life. Each selfish action is reflected back from the opposite angle, often reversing the reader's initial perceptions. When Mrs King refuses to allow Anastasia to have her mother's body brought home and buried with her father, is it Mrs King who is being selfish in refusing a reasonable request, or is it Anastasia failing to understand the shame her mother brought on her father when she ran away? Why, anyway, would Anastasia assume her mother would want to be buried with the man she left? Both characters see the world through narrow viewpoints, their own wishes always at the forefront.

As the story continues, both characters commit some acts that are chilling in their level of selfishness, made more so by the quiet, almost matter-of-fact way in which Brennan relates them. There is a third character, Miss Kilbride, an old friend of Mrs King's, who serves as a contrast and catalyst. Having been dominated by her invalid mother, another selfish monster, Miss Kilbride still lives in her mother's house, psychologically unable to think of it as her own and leaving everything as it was while her mother was alive. Unlike the two main characters, Miss Kilbride knows what it means to love someone unselfishly, making her the most sympathetic and likeable character in the book, whose story injects some much needed emotional warmth. The request she makes of Anastasia provides the climax of the story – a disturbing, shocking climax that forces the reader to reassess all that has gone before.

She walked out along the shallow path. At the gate she turned to look up at Miss Kilbride's window. It was blind and closed, like a person sleeping. Like Miss Kilbride, lying on her back in difficult slumber. And later, waking to dream of a doubtful deathly union with her long-lost hero, with whom she had once struggled in valiant, well-dressed immodesty on a small settee, for love's sake.

I was quite blown away by this novella. The amount of insight and depth of characterisation that Brennan packs into such a small space is amazing, and I became so engrossed in it that I read it in one sitting. Along the way, it made me gasp more than once, and I admit to a little sob too at one point. All three of these women became real to me in a way that many characters in much longer books have failed to do, and I doubt I'll forget their story. I shall promptly be seeking out more of Brennan's work – if she thought this one wasn't good enough for publication, then I can't wait to read the stuff she thought was good.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this novella in one sitting. I was totally absorbed in the story of a young woman who returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin(her childhood home) after her mothers death in Paris. Her mother had fled there after leaving her much older husband. The marriage appears to have been cold, and the overbearing mother-in-law has never forgiven her son’s wife, and is still taking out her anger on her granddaughter. She is so cold and cruel! No warmth for this orphaned young woman. She is still so possessive of her son that she wants to be buried in his grave and refuses to bring the daughter-in-law’s body from Paris. Wonderful writing.

[Fionnuala]

A curious little book by the Irish author and journalist Maeve Brennan who wrote for the New Yorker under the pseudonym 'The Long-Winded Lady' in the 1950s and 1960s. This is neither a short story nor a novella, but lies somewhere in between the two just as the world depicted in it lies somewhere between past and present, between reality and dream. I chose it because it is thought to be Brennan's first piece of fiction and I'm about to read a collection of her short stories called The Rose Garden.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a little melodramatic in plot (for me), this was a beautifully written novella, with sharp observation into how people behave. It uses teacups, spectacles and the spitting of fire to convey mood and thought. (eg 'She paid attention to everything; even a sudden spurt from the fire drew a little smile from her.'). A young woman returns home to Ireland after her mother dies in Paris, but finds herself not welcome by the paternal grandmother (the father also dead). Her friend lies in bed smoking furiously, also dying. ('She was smoking, holding the cigarette delicately as though it might explode..'). A little treat.

[Trin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maeve Brennan is so sharp -- sympathetic and yet somehow unforgiving, observational and unflinching. She's a clear literary ancestor of writers like Colm Tóibín, but also of Gillian Flynn and all her imitators. The Visitor is a novella about a young woman, after the death of her essentially exiled mother, returning to the house of her grandmother -- her father's mother. It's a novel about vengeance, worked in a number of subtle, essentially feminine ways, and it's delightfully brutal without containing a single act of actual violence.

[miledi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prosa gelida, essenziale, disadorna, priva di sbavature. Le protagoniste (nonna e nipote) sono due donne sole che, nonostante vivano lo stesso spazio (la stessa casa) e lo stesso tempo, non si toccano mai, non si incontrano mai veramente.
Romanzo breve o racconto lungo che dir si voglia (non ho mai capito come differenziare le due cose), il libro ha ottenuto valutazioni egregie da parte dei lettori e probabilmente le merita, ma io ci ho messo quasi una settimana a leggere queste 112 pagine e qualcosa vorrà pur dire, no? Riproverò con i suoi racconti.

Soltanto ciò che non insegna,
ciò che non chiede a gran voce,
ciò che non convince,
ciò che non accondiscende,
ciò che non spiega
è irresistibile.
(William Butler Yeats)

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This recently reissued edition of Brennan's spare and restrained novella is very good. Precise prose, a story playing out between the lines and under the oppressive weight of Dublin in, I guess, the inter-war period. There's more than a little of Claire Keegan about The Visitor. I'll definitely be checking out more of Brennan's work.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Visitor is a novella by Maeve Brennan, an accomplished writer from Dublin. She worked for years at the New Yorker. She passed away in 1993; I wish I had known about her earlier. The book is set in Dublin. The protagonist Anastasia King returns to her family home in Dublin. Her parents' marriage had ended with her father returning to live with his mother and the servant Katherine in Ireland. Anastacia remains with her mother in Paris until her mother's death. When she returns "home" to Dublin, her grandmother confronts her with coldness, still holding a grudge that Anastacia (only 22 years old) opted to remain with her mother in Paris. The prose is beautiful, the characters will stay with me forever.

[Karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deceptively simple, this is a perfect jewel of a book.

[Laila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark but totally mesmerizing portrait of what's left of a dysfunctional family. (Read for Reading Ireland Month 2017.)

[Andria Potter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me.

[Emer O'Toole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, melancholy novella about how little forgiveness or kindness Ireland had for women who transgressed. The scene where Anastasia runs to find succour in a Church will stay with me, as will many of the profound reflections on grief and memory threaded through this lonely, haunting story.

[Caitlín Ní Dochartaigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The characters behaved in ways I didn't really understand and the third person narration was so impersonal I felt I got no insight on their motivations at all

[Laura King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsettling and brilliant. Im desparate to make up for lost time with Brennan.
This is the most perfect novella, and a great introduction to Maeve Brennan. Brennan was an Irish writer, originally from Ranelagh, who moved to New York with her family when she was a teenager. She was a celebrated writer for a time, though fell on hard times later and became an odd, lonely figure. In recent years writers like Anne Enright and Sinead Gleeson have championed her work and with new editions of some of her stories and essays she is gaining new readership. The Visitor is a beautifully written, and very sad little story, about many of the themes that would become prevalent in her work: that of home, belonging, heartbreak and lonliness. Maeve Brennan is one of Ireland's greatest writers, and deserves to be celebrated as such.

[Martha.O.S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was saving this novella to read as I knew it was something I would enjoy, having previously read some of Maeve Brennan's short stories and I wasn't disappointed. It was beautifully written and the time and place of Dublin was very subtly but sharply rendered. The characters were interesting though I wasn't quite sure how I felt about Anastasia, the main character. She was vulnerable and pitiful at times but had a sharp edge to her also. The grandmother was very cold, bitter and judgmental-she appeared to have very few redeeming qualities; yet Anastasia wanted so desperately to stay with her. I found this interesting. Maybe it says something of the strong need for family and belonging we all have...

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only found out after reading it that The Vistor was published after Maeve Brennan’s death, from a manuscript that she had never, apparently, intended to be published. This explains a lot. It reads as an unfinished novel, essentially the outline of a deeper story that hasn’t been fleshed out yet. It is too short and truncated to have much dramatic power, the lead character frequently bursts into tears or hysteria when there is even the slightest conflict, and the events are rushed and clumsily constructed. I’m sure Brennan must have felt similarly, and I think it is an insult to her legacy that the publishers chose to release it without her consent just to make money for themselves.

[Jaqueline Franco · Rating 5 out of 5]

De visita es la historia de tres soledades, la de su protagonista, su abuela, y la señorita Kilbride. También nos habla sobre viejos rencores familiares e ilusiones truncadas. Y todo ello bajo una atmósfera neblinosa y fría, como la propia Dublín.
Me dejó muchos recovecos en penumbra, pero me gusto mucho.

Cierra los ojos para volver a verla, figura solitaria en la luz dispersa, vagando arriba y abajo por el jardín, sin prisas, entre los negros arriates. Recordar es insoportable.

Maeve Brennan, De Visita

[Marisolera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Qué abuela más odiosa, por dios. Desde luego nada que ver con las abuelitas amorosas que te dan besos apretados y te ponen cinco euros en la mano como si trapicheara contigo. La muy católica señora King no merece un sitio en el cielo, no.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of years ago I read The Springs of Affection, a beautifully affecting collection of stories by the Irish writer and journalist Maeve Brennan. What struck me most about those stories was the strong sense of emotional dislocation they conveyed, particularly though their focus on lonely, unhappy individuals, often trapped in loveless marriages. The characters seemed caught in a form of stasis, unable to reach out to one another while unspoken bitterness and resentment festered away and remained unchecked.

There is a similar air of bitterness and resentment in The Visitor, a novella that was published posthumously in 2000 following its discovery in publishing archives that had been acquired by the University of Notre Dame in the 1980s. It is not known when Brennan first started work on The Visitor, but she is thought to have finished it in the mid-1940s. As such, it is one of her earliest works of fiction, all the more astonishing considering its power and precision – it’s remarkably accomplished for such an early piece.

As the novella opens, twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King is returning to her childhood home in Dublin, a house owned by her paternal grandmother, Mrs King. When Anastasia was sixteen, her mother and father split up, the mother fleeing to Paris and subsequently sending for Anastasia to join her there. As a consequence, Anastasia has been living in Paris for six years. Now both of Anastasia’s parents are dead, leaving the girl with no remaining family other than Mrs King – hence Anastasia’s belief that she will be able to live with her grandmother (and the latter’s elderly housekeeper, Katherine) going forward.

Mrs King, however, has a different view of the situation. She still blames Anastasia’s mother for the break-up of her son’s marriage, thereby bringing shame and disgrace on her son and the King family as a whole. Anastasia is also guilty of desertion in her grandmother’s eyes, having followed her mother to Paris to take up residence away from her father. As such, Mrs King is cold and remote in her receipt of Anastasia in the family home, making it clear that she considers the visit a temporary one, not a permanent arrangement.

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[Clare de la lune · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty it frets.'

Twenty two year old Anastasia an only child, the product of a failed marriage. She has taken sides with her mother and they have lived in Paris, far from their native Dublin, and far from her now deceased father, another only child. Anastasia's mother has died and young Anastasia, now alone, is coming home to Dublin, to the house she grew up in. Her grandmother's house. Her father's mother's house. Mrs. King's house. Mrs. King is not happy about Anastasia's arrival and makes it clear that she cannot stay indefinately.

This is a very short story - 100 pages long but it sure packs an emotional punch. The grieving Anastasia is longing to stay in her childhood bedroom and take some comfort there but what she hasn't really grasped is that this house, this big beautiful georgian town house will never be a welcome place to her. It belongs to her grandma and her precious only son. Mother and son only.

The coldness, bitterness, resentment and jealousy that permeates the pages, handed out by the grandmother, is almost to be expected from this pious catholic family. The personal destruction. What I felt the author captured so well was the lack of empathy that the catholic church congregation showed to the distraught Anastsia as she fled to the safety of the church only to be faced with the same unchristian brutality from the sinners waiting to be absolved at the confessional.

Anastasia is not all innocent. She refuses to uphold a promise she made to a dying family friend.

The last page is wild and incomplete.

This book reminded me of the stories about family and community disharmony that Shirley Jackson wrote about.

An excellent read.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat sad novella about an orphaned young woman returning to her childhood home to a paternal grandmother whose anger at her for having chosen to live with her mom instead of her now-deceased dad makes her reluctant to allow the girl to live long with her. Selfishness and pride, seemingly in both women. A story of how stronger personalities can control the younger and often rob them of lives of their own. One part struck me wrong, when Anastacia decides not to honir a promise made. I thought the wriying was very elegant and direct, but the story melancholy and unhappy. Apparently Brennan's life was a bit sad too, and this story, one of the first she wrote, was not published until after her passing.

[Maddy Bryson · Rating 4 out of 5]

the characters felt familiar to me, especially the matriarch- her idioms reminding me of relatives (catholic guilt ftw) I imagined the exterior walls of the house in which the book is mostly set as made out of flimsy white paper, as if it was a set in a play. Maybe because the main characters yearning for ‘home’ in the absence of one made it feel fragile or impermanent (???idk) The fragile ‘set’ was cut between really beautiful, unusual descriptions of landscapes and scenes.
One that I particularly loved was:
“In the late-evening light the garden seemed unreal, a careless impression of a garden with all the colours running into each other”

[leni swagger · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Ireland is my dwelling place, Dublin is my station."

Quick read and interestingly written as it explores many characters in such a short time frame.
Yet, I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’m to blame because I finished it in 20 minutes, but I felt like the plot was solely swimming on the surface and I just couldn’t get myself to care. It really makes me feel like I was “knockin’ on heaven’s door…”

Anyway, I’m not in a reading slump,btw, 1e and life are just real party poopers… Just two more months and I’ll be back to reclaim my territory 😈