The celebrated Irish author and London resident Edna O'Brien turned 85 on Tuesday December 15. O'Brien's new novel, The Little Red Chairs has been deemed her masterpiece by the American writer, Philip Roth.
O'Brien came to fame with her first novel, The Country Girls, which was published in 1960 and subsequently banned in Ireland. Over 20 works of fiction, and a much-lauded memoir, have since been published. The County Clare native has won numerous awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal and the Frank O'Connor Prize.
Her latest novel, The Little Red Chairs, features as its principal character a wanted war criminal who has found a new guise as “healer and sex therapist” and takes his trade to Ireland while patently fleeing his prosecutors at the Hague.
The man - loosely based on the Serbian nationalist Radovan Karadzic - arrives in a small village in the West of Ireland where a local woman, Fidelma McBride, falls for his peculiar charisma. The relationship leads to a tragic denouement. The celebrated American novelist, Philip Roth claims that The Little Red Chairs is O'Brien's masterpiece.
O'Brien is fascinated by the ability of war criminals to blank out things, as she recently told the New Statesman. “They blanket out question, conscience, tenderness, recall and intelligence, " she observed.
"Think of the Nazis in South America, mowing their lawns and washing their cars. I find it unbelievable that a man (and they usually are men) could live with the thousands of deaths and not go mad. That I cannot understand, ” she declares.
The author also revealed that the only play permitted at the school she attended in County Clare was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, because it had no sex in it.
The Little Red Chairs is published by Faber & Faber.
