Word: faolain
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VIVE MOI! by Sean O'Faolain. 374 pages. Little, Brown...
When Irish Novelist Sean O'Faolain (pronounced O'Faytawn) was 20 and a student at the University College in Cork, he wrote a poem containing the phrase "Mother Ireland's teeming navel"; he was subsequently astounded, he recalls, to learn from a medical student that in the history of medicine "no mother had yet been known to eject a baby through her belly-button...
That anecdote suggests the innocence in the Irish character that is both appealing and maddening, and Novelist O'Faolain knows as much about it as any Irishman now working: "Ireland is learning, as Americans say, the hard way. Ireland has clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe...
...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...
...gods whistle in the air," wrote Sean O'Faolain. "The Otherworld is always at one's shoulder." The Otherworld and the real past are inseparably bound together in the Irish imagination and in the runic place names, from the pagan landmark called Two Breasts of Dana to ancient Waterford, where in 1170 Strongbow, the Norman Earl of Pembroke, clamped 71 centuries of English rule on Ireland. What the mists of legend cannot obscure is that for ages of religious persecution and economic exploitation, through countless risings and reprisals, the Irish slaved, starved and battled for their land...