num_pages: 461
description: It is a collection of short stories already published under different titles; they are summoned now with a common to show a deep and complete analysis of women's world. The presence almost overwhelming of feminine figures (rural and urban women, young or elder, married or single, raw and sophisticated...) is the leading thread of this collection. Their decisions, vital choices, their problems, the situations they have to face due to the fact that they belong to the so-called weak sex (the girl deserted by her boyfriend after the engagement, the doubts before birth, the anguish of the eldest girl, who has disappointed deeply her mother's expectations over her...etc) are portrayed in a sympathetic and honest way; you can't avoid feeling sorry for some of the heroine that has made the wrong choice, the mother submitted to an inebriate husband, the woman that can't escape from an adulterous love.... In this sense the last sentence of the first story, The Connor Girls, is By such choices we (women) gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone, because it introduces what is going to be one of the main points of most of the loneliness, women's loneliness in the face of men, in the face of other women integrated in the system, in short, in the face of this world of men. What is the result of all this? I think that the feeling that pervades the whole book is that of sadness, an acute pain with which the writer could be exorcising her own.
language: English
title: Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien
titlecomplete: Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien
genres: Fiction, Ireland, Short Stories, Literature, Short Story Collection, Irish Literature, 20th Century
ratings_count: 246
publisher: Plume (New American Library)