Word: connore
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...COMMON CHORD, STORIES AND TALES OF IRELAND (278 pp.) - Frank O'Connor-Knopf...
Frank O'Connor of County Cork is blessed with a rare, enviable talent: he can express serious ideas in blandly humorous, seemingly inconsequential stories. The twelve tart tales in this book create an imaginary world as real, and certainly as relevant, as daily experience itself...
...Connor's stories are set in small Irish towns where good-natured, bumbling provincials doze through their days in even rhythms, scarcely touched by the frenetic spleen of cosmopolitan existence, and only occasionally shaken into surprised awareness of life's complexities. While these neat tales unfold, Author O'Connor remains in the background, rarely moralizing...
...contemporary life and the yearnings in every man for something better. When mocking the plight of a shopkeeper sentimentalist whose notions of marriage have been shaped by Romeo and Juliet but whose experience of it has been soured by a frigid, all too high-minded wife, O'Connor redeems the character from mere ridiculousness by noting that "he knew he could never be like any other sensible man, but would keep on to the day he died, pining for something a bit larger than life." This rarely stated but always sustaining compassion guides all the stories...
Brightest bit of fantasy was the work of an expatriated Englishman named O'Connor Barrett, who had to outgrow a strait-laced start. Barrett's strict parents had talked Latin at dinner, limiting their conversation almost entirely to religion. In 1923, when he was 15, Barrett went to work in a furniture factory and subsequently carved hundreds of Chippendale chair legs. Says he: "Oh, how I hate Chippendale!" There was no Chippendale influence in his squatly intense Stalemate, which looked like a couple of ancients so intent on a game of chess that their bodies knottily reflected...