The Northern Irish Maggie O'Farrell is one of those authors who marks her work with the unmistakable imprint of her narrative uniqueness. Because in its plots sums up the exuberance of its characters and descriptions with hypnotic actions. From its usual formal appearance loaded with lyricism, to a captivating symbolism, but always posing that dynamism necessary for the reader to feel immersed in an adventure.
In the end, no adventure better than the discovery of the deepest motivations of the characters. Because where the passions that move them are born, we find our own most intimate conditions.
In symbols we always find mirrors so that our dreams, our subconscious, connect with each action. And the result is the fascination from the estrangement, the enjoyment from the literature made vitalism, adventure and existentialism. An almost perfect balance.
Top 3 recommended novels by Maggie O'Farrell
It has to be here
The characters of Daniel and Claudette point to that disruptive stereotype of anyone who seeks to rebuild their lives. It is not about great traumatic events, apparently, which has led them to their new bucolic existence in which both share that attempt at a new life.
And everything is going reasonably well. But once again the past time, what has been lived, insists on withdrawing on its own life, like a black hole bent on claiming existence with its irresistible inertia. That black hole is yesterday. And it is that while you are alive there are still threads that drag, turned into ropes that you tug and tug at times. The question is how the author manages to turn this approach to the impossible balances of yesterday and today as scripts written for the greatest existential suspense.
What becomes of Daniel and Claudette will depend on the clash between scenarios, that intense claim of the past and its secondary characters that were essential at the time. A fascinating story that, from its plot simplicity, becomes a tangle between lives that would need thousands of novels to be told. Life at the end is that kind of subjective synthesis that each character presents at the time, like a soliloquy thrown before an empty audience.
Instructions for a heat wave
A novel brimming with imagination at the service of magical symbolism. A current tragicomedy about a Riordan family faced with their secrets never addressed. The heat wave in question occurs in 1976 in London. The strangeness of such an approach in the city of fog opens up to this new focus of light that, by extension, also illuminates the family's unfinished business.
Since the disappearance of the patriarch, Robert Riordan, in whose search his wife Gretta and their children strive. But the heat seems to weaken them, exposing them to the crudeness of their existence beyond tinsel and pretenses. The children: Michael, Monica and Aoife join forces to find their father's whereabouts. Only not everything they know about his disappearance is the whole truth of the matter.
Nothing better than a family environment to discover those secrets locked up for the most loved ones, precisely so as not to damage them or to put family ties before any other notion that could muddy everything. But we are in a strange London, assaulted by the heat. And the reunion does not occur for the best of reasons either, so everything that happens in this family will point to an essential transformation of that environment miraculously sustained around the concept of family.
The first hand that held mine
Undoubtedly Maggie O'Farrel has the strange virtue of narrating with complete singularity, from her enormous imagination, to present any argument of dyes between manners and existentialists in an exciting adventure.
The trick is to get that harmony between the reader and the characters. And for this Maggie knows how to describe characters and propose scenarios with great human potential towards that empathy as the best of the hooks. Between Lexie Sinclair and Elina, inhabitants of the same city, London, in distant temporal spaces in decades, a particular connection is created. A link that is being composed like a strange symphony between the streets of an alternative London between art circles. The moments of both women are very different.
And yet in Elina's recent motherhood compared to Lexie's "escape," parallels are drawn that are just as moving. Elina's motherhood becomes a turning point that seems to keep her out of place, as if away from herself. Neither does his partner Ted seem very focused on the matter of being a father ... But the two-stroke story, with its bitter connotations in both cases, finally points to the overcoming of all kinds of incidents (sometimes disconcerting but very possible in any daily existence ), from the most intense and emotional life drives.
Other recommended books by Maggie O'Farrell
The married portrait
Fate did not understand fascinating coincidences. Golden cages for women from another era delivered to uses and customs, pacts and imperial needs. A story about unhappiness at the foot of the throne, a novel story that shakes.
Florence, mid-XNUMXth century. Lucrezia, third daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici, is a quiet and perceptive girl, with a singular talent for drawing, who she enjoys in her discreet and quiet place in the palazzo. But when her sister Maria de ella dies, just before marrying Alfonso d'Este, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara, Lucrezia unexpectedly becomes the center of attention: the duke rushes to ask for her hand, and she her father to accept her.
Shortly after, at only fifteen years old, she moved to the court of Ferrara, where she was received with suspicion. Her husband, twelve years her senior, is an enigma: is he really the sensitive and understanding man he first seemed to her, or a ruthless despot everyone fears? The only thing that is clear is what is expected of her: that he provide an heir as soon as possible to ensure the continuity of the title.
With the same beauty and emotion with which she captivated us in Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell once again demonstrates her unparalleled talent for delving into the recesses of the past in The Married Portrait, a novel that reinterprets from fiction a chapter of Renaissance Italy and narrates the fight against the destiny of an amazing young woman.
Hamnet
The rare birds and their synergies to implode the world. Because in the eccentricities there is that naked truth, without restrictions or trompe l'oeils. A vision of Shakespeare as taken from the main focus to trace the impossible line of anecdotes, of the experiences that masterpieces or wars can cause, according to the soul of the protagonists of each historical scene. The quintessential tragicomedy seen from the disturbing feeling that everything can still happen despite having already been written.
A great novel by Maggie O'Farrell which comes to mark this Irish author as a surprising heir to that misty and fascinating literature of her island. Of course, the particular circumstances of the author are those that to a greater extent set a rapturous capacity to always tell from new angles. Privileged points of the observer writer where the course of events are always dilemmas loaded with intense aromas of farewells, great changes, abandonments or resignations.
Agnes, a peculiar girl who seems to be accountable to no one and who is capable of creating mysterious remedies with simple combinations of plants, is the talk of Stratford, a small town in England. When she meets a young Latin tutor just as extraordinary as she is, she quickly realizes that they are called to form a family. But his marriage will be put to the test, first by his relatives and then by an unexpected misfortune.
Starting from the family history of Shakespeare, Maggie O'Farrell travels between fiction and reality to trace a hypnotic recreation of the event that inspired one of the most famous literary works of all time. The author, far from focusing solely on known events, tenderly vindicates the unforgettable figures that inhabit the margins of history and delves into the small great questions of any existence: family life, affection, pain and loss. The result is a prodigious novel that has garnered enormous international success and confirms O'Farrell as one of the brightest voices in English literature today.
beautiful novel by Maggie, THE FIRST HAND THAT HELD MINE, my daughter gave it to me and now I am going to read Hamnet. beautiful narrator