To keep me from palpitating....

We know, it's an odd name for a post, but what the hey - it's a fine Irish idiom. We've been reading The Country Girls, a novel by one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers, Edna O'Brien. Her narrator is a rural schoolgirl whose observations on the world around her are keenly compelling. (Witness her good-natured mockery of a shopkeeper-cum-writer who's forever going on about the "...kings and queens walking the roads of ireland, riding bicycles, imbibing tea, plowing the humble earth, totally unaware of their great heredity" and suchlike.)

This short passage grabbed us and wouldn't let go:

"I had looked at primrose leaves for seventeen years, and I had never noticed before that their leaves were hairy and old and wrinkled. Always on the brink of trouble I look at something, like a tree or a flower or an old shoe, to keep me from palpitating."

Yet another passage, this time a portrait of a neighbor in a brief but memorable take:

"Mr. Gentleman was a beautiful man who lived in the white house on the hill. It had turret windows and an oak door that was like a church door, and Mr. Gentleman played chess in the evenings. He worked as a solicitor in Dublin, but he came home at the weekends, and in the summertime he sailed a boat on the Shannon. Mr. Gentleman was not his real name, of course, but everyone called him that. He was French, and his real name was Mr. de Maurier, but no one could pronounce it properly, and anyhow, he was such a distinguished man with his gray hair and his satin waistcoats that the local people christened him Mr. Gentleman. He seemed to like the name very well, and signed his letters J. W. Gentleman. J. W. were the initials of his Christian names and they stood for Jacques and something else."

Are we ready for more of O'Brien's work? You bet your boots!