The Springs of Affection

Maeve Brennan / Holly Golightly?

The Springs of Affection - Maeve Brennan

This selection from the short stories of Maeve Brennan contains three suites of stories, each suite having the same characters. They almost work as episodic novellas, particularly the final suite of stories about the Bagots. I have already posted on the first two stories The Morning after the Big Fire and The Old Man and the Sea. 

Most of the stories take place on a road in Ranelagh identical to the one where Brennan spent her formative years. The houses are grey and the geography described within almost all the stories is very limited. Indeed the colour gray and the phrase dead end could be considered the watchwords of this collection.

The Old Man of the Sea - Maeve Brennan

The issue of The New Yorker
in which the story was published.
Click through to read abstract.

The Old Man of the Sea - Maeve Brennan

As I outlined in a previous post, I intend to contribute  few posts on Irish Short Story for The Reading Life's Irish Short Story Week.

This is only the second short story that I have read by Maeve Brennan and like the first , The Morning after the Big Fire, it is brief, at 8 pages. It was originally published in The New Yorker in 1955.

The story, which may well be partly autobiographical, is a low key  slice of suburban life which is given mythical overtones when the narrator, who is nine and called Maeve, compares it to the legend of the Old Man of the Sea, who "had attached himself to Sindbad the Sailor" and when "Sindbad began to hate him" dug his "cruel, talon like hands" "into Sindbad's shoulders."

Short Stories

My Short Story Shelves

 Short Stories

I have been thinking quite a bit about short stories recently. In part this may be because of reading Proust, which is pretty certainly not a short story. I thought that rather than reading other novels in parallel it might be interesting to read and post on short stories. I have gone as far as separating my books of short stories onto their own shelves in order to make the selection of short stories easier and to keep them in mind. One difficulty is that it is often very hard to write about a short story without giving away the plot. I've put warnings below where this is about to happen. However, I think that both stories thus compromised would be just as enjoyable after reading this post. The pleasure is in the writing rather than suspense.

One of the gatekeepers
of my reading life.