Word: dubliner
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...writer, mellowed into middle-age, urbane, but weary of loving women who think themselves sophisticated, secludes himself in a country house outside of Dublin with an old woman who cooks him cabbage and bacon. He meets a gawky shopgirl, hungry for romance and poetry...
Farrell himself, like his hero, lived through that period as a young man, and in a sense was ruined by it. Though he was a recognized figure on the fringes of the Dublin literary world for more than 30 years, he poured his time and best efforts into this one novel. But he was so entangled with the book that he could never bring himself to stop revising, adding, "perfecting." He refused to let it out of his hands. Only with his death, in 1962, could the manuscript be prepared for the printer. The process required drastic editorial surgery...
...result is not quite a masterpiece, being a shade too sentimental for that, but it is certainly a wonderfully engaging book. From the wrenching yet joyful nostalgia of the village Christmas described in the opening pages to the streets of Dublin that could be swept by love and laughter or in the next moment by machine-gun bullets, Farrell captures the bittersweet agony of that time. Most of all he captures the strength of the Irish spirit and the lilt of Irish speech, not in rank dialect but in the kiss of the brogue. Farrell's lifework may well...
...Faolain's autobiography is the presumably unfinished story ("Thus far: Dublin, February 1964" reads the final notation in the book) of how one Irishman slowly took in the world "in nuclear bits and pieces," and became a writer in the process...
...cast here, however, as an Irish colleen, still in her teens and fresh off the farm, who falls in love with a man (Peter Finch) more than twice her age, a writer of sorts who lives on Dublin Mountain alone and seems to like it. But he likes Kate too, and he meets her for tea. "Young girls fill me with sadness," he tells her with a little sigh. "They want so much." Kate wants everything life and love have to offer, and one night she decides she has waited long enough. "Kate, you soft wild girl," he murmurs, shaking...