Word: faolain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND OTHER STORIES by SEAN O'FAOLAIN 226 pages. Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown...
While he fails, Irish Author Sean O'Faolain succeeds-by making the doctor's story a haunting reminiscence. His title for this exercise, How to Write a Short Story, is both a gentle spoof of the rule-ridden writer manque and a bit of well-earned boasting. O'Faolain is one of the few remaining men of let ters; in his 75 years he has been novelist, playwright, travel writer, critic, translator, biographer and journalist. His earliest short story was published nearly 50 years ago and he has lost no affection for his first love...
Part of this remarkable endurance stems from a refusal to treat the short story as a wind sprint. Instead, O'Faolain saunters like a troubadour, chatting with artful casualness about the scenery and weather, the dwellings and garb of his people. Yet he is more than a local colorist. His art disguises artifice. He knows exactly how much to explain and when to remain silent. "Who was it," one of his characters wonders, "said the last missing bit of every...
...Cobbler's Hulk, a retired travel agent lives in fastidious loneliness near a remote village. A woman attacks his prim self-sufficiency. "No love. No drink. No friends. No wife. No children. Happy man! Nothing to betray you." She is proved wrong, for O'Faolain shows him capable of a drastic act of love...
...bungalow window. He insinuates his wares and himself into the woman's dwelling and finally marries her. Gradually the view through that window to the world outside comes to seem irresistibly attractive. This turnabout is slapstick, but the problem behind it is not belittled by O'Faolain. Both the dealer and his new wife learn something about the treachery of fulfilled desires before their struggle is over...