Saints and Sinners

Suzanne Bertish's audio performance harmonizes superbly with O'Brien's melancholy short stories. Her British accent is made more weighty by her voice's depth and maturity. Though O'Brien is an Irish writer, not all of the stories take place in Ireland, so Bertish's narration universally captures the stories' essence, not just locale. O'Brien's lyrical prose imagines diverse characters and circumstances: laborers who are dealing with poverty and alcoholism, a freedom fighter who is taking painting lessons, a lover who is pining for the beloved, and a woman who is waiting in a hotel lobby for a reclusive poet. Loneliness, longing, vulnerability, despair, desolation--all are heard in this evenly paced and deeply profound performance. Neither author nor narrator flinches from harsh but beautiful detail, which blurs the dichotomy between saints and sinners. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

January 24, 2011
O'Brien (The Light of Evening) mixes her trademark lyricism with a brutal depiction of lives marred by violence, whether a pining lover whose life has been upended or a dreamer whose fate leads him to a cold death in the wild. "Sinners" depicts one night in the life of a fusty innkeeper whose prudish disgust at a trio of guests is slowly revealed to have roots in her own loneliness. In "Black Flower" a former prison art teacher drives to the countryside with a newly released veteran of Ireland's freedom fights—and a likely target for revenge. The narrator of "Plunder" is a young girl caught in a civil war who describes cowering in fear and her torments at the hands of the enemy. Another young girl narrates "Green Georgette" and endures the emotional hardship of class divisions, while in "Send My Roots Rain" a woman sits in a Dublin hotel lobby awaiting a reclusive poet and thinks back on love affairs and disappointments. And in "Manhattan Medley" a transplant to the big city begins an affair with a man and describes in rich prose how it has permeated her life. Throughout, tragedy mingles with beauty, yearning with survival, and destruction with moments of grace.