Product Description

This previously unpublished novella by the late Maeve Brennan is "an astonishing miniature masterpiece. [It] will stay with the reader forever."-Nuala O'Faolain.

Maeve Brennan has been called one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce, and with The Visitor her oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened. Written in the mid-1940s, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally distant side of the Irish temper. This haunting novella stands with her greatest short stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1486582 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

From Amazon.com
New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden. Now comes The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s. In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen, or both. In The Visitor, it seems to be both. Twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King returns to Dublin after living with her mother in Paris for the past six years. The two left behind Anastasia's father and his fierce old mother. It is to this scary granny that Anastasia returns, now that her mother and father have died. But she is met by an implacable rage: Mrs. King has determined not to forgive Anastasia for deserting the family. Brennan sketches in this woman's nastiness in just a few lines. Typically, she writes around her character, rather than tackling her head on: "Mrs. King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye." It is clear that while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, she is a mere visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.

Few writers so delicately and cruelly parse their countrymen; Brennan wickedly lays bare the malicious repression of the Irish. Even as she satirizes her sanctimonious people, she makes us know that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologizing is done with a minimum of characters and plot. The Visitor reads like an Elizabeth Bowen novel without all those words, or like Washington Square with jokes. Brennan even provides what might be called poetry, if that word weren't so cheap: a statue of the Virgin Mary has a "pale and averted face, sweet and moodless." The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
This previously unpublished novella by the late Brennan (The Rose Garden), a staff writer for the New Yorker for over 30 years, was recently discovered in a university archive. Written in the 1940s, it concerns 22-year-old Anastasia King's return to her paternal grandmother's home in Dublin, where she spent the first 16 quiet years of her life. Anastasia's motherAfragile, emotionally troubled MaryAdisgraced herself by running away from her husband, John, and especially his judgmental, domineering mother, and escaping to Paris, "looking for someone she remembered from when she was at school there.... It was just an idea she had." Anastasia followed her mother to France, and, when her father came to bring them back, the teenager refused to leave Mary and return to Dublin. Six years later, Mary has died and Anastasia, now alone, returns to her grandmother's house, expecting to be embraced. Grandmother King's reaction is cold; she soon informs Anastasia that she is welcome for a visit, but that she forfeited her birthright when she chose her unstable mother over her father, who died shortly after he returned from Paris by herself. Housekeeper Katherine attempts to soften Grandmother's steely reserve, and an old family friend, Norah Kilbride, elicits Anastasia's help in a deathbed promise. This early work by the respected writer never flinches from its exploration of the destructive power of family pride and anger. Brennan's restrained but touching evocation of a young woman whose heart has been wrung dry and who thereafter is condemned to permanent exile is permeated with outrage and sorrow. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After the death of her mother in Paris, Anastasia King returns to the place she spent her childhood, her grandmother's home in Dublin. She does not receive the welcome she had hoped for: her grandmother has never forgiven Anastasia's mother for leaving Anastasia's father (her son), nor has she forgiven Anastasia for going with her. Instead of welcoming her, she insists that she may stay only for a few months, and makes her feel like a barely tolerated visitor in the place she once called home. Desperate to stay, Anastasia tries to break through the wall of loneliness and isolation that surrounds her grandmother, and the house itself, but, as her efforts fail, the same loneliness threatens to envelop her and make her as cruel and bitter as her grandmother. Although it was just recently unearthed from the musty vaults of a university archive, this novella was written in the 1940s. The Visitor is sophisticated early work from Brennan, who is best known for her short stories and contributions to the New Yorker. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

a sad little gem
As a reader of all Maeve Brennan's books, I found this novella to be a beautiful and sad story. Brennan writes almost like no other author I've read, and this did not disappoint. I agree with my fellow reviewer, that all of the characters are almost living in, and never let go of, the past, nor do they want to let go of it. I found it hard to sympathize with the Grandmother, a pitiful subject who visits her son's grave daily as she is so hard and bitter. For the old neighbour who wanted to marry when she was young, happiness is a memory and her long-dead Mother controls her still. You can't see any future for young Anastasia in this house. A small, beautiful read.

The Visitor
Twenty-two year old Anastasia's mother has just died and now, six years after leaving, she returns to Dublin to live with her grandmother, the years apart not dulling the bitterness and regret of an old woman obsessed with her dead son.

After a messy divorce, Anastasia's mother left her father, breaking his heart and sealing away any sense of sympathy or pity from her grandmother forever. With nowhere else to go, she is accepted into the purposely old-fashioned, stagnating household where time is whiled away drinking tea and remembering times when everything was better. Every character exudes a sense of existing only to remember the past; nobody has a future, nor do they have a desire for one. Not even Anastasia, the youngest character by fifty years, is interested in moving her life forward, she wants to regress to a time when she could be looked after and protected, unwilling to seek a future that involves taking care of herself.

The novella is very sad. One character loved a man in secret forty years ago, and, on her death-bed, requests that she be buried with a wedding ring he gave to her but that she could never wear. Another exists only to aid Anastasia's grandmother, helping here and there and making sure that everything is the same as it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Change itself is the enemy here, the grandmother's only desire is to be buried with her son, no more, no less.

There is a sense of completeness with the character's that is odd to find in a story. There are no great quests - physically, mentally or otherwise - nor are the characters given a chance to grow. In their minds, they have grown as much as they wish to - but not as much as they could - and that is enough for them. For now, they are dead without knowing it, waiting patiently for the time when God will call them up to Heaven.

The writing is grey and cold - at least, that is how I felt while reading it. Sentences are short, crisp, and wonderfully indicative of the mentalities of the characters. Very rarely are there any excursions into contemplation, everything stays very much in the moment, analysing in great detail the all-too-easy stagnation of a life where the reasons for living are gone, forever.

This novella is very short - 81 pages - but worth the read. It is unhappy, but not in a sense that the reader will become unhappy. Rather, we are able to examine the fruitless lives of four different people happy to wait and wait and wait. In them we can see a reality we do not want, and thus avoid.