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Novel within a novel
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My Dream of You
by Nuala O'Faolain
Price: US$25.95
(February 2001)
Novel within a novel
Well-known Irish newspaper columnist Nuala O'Faolain made a splash in 1998 with the publication of her unsentimental yet poignant (深刻的，尖锐的) memoir Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.
Her greatly anticipated first novel is a novel within a novel, a love story within a love story, a historical story within a contemporary one.
The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an unmarried, middle-aged Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged (远离的) from her homeland and her family, she still lives in the same dreary basement flat that's been her home for two decades.
Love has been her traditional panacea (灵丹妙药): "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: Everything fell in place around it." But the love that comes her way these days grows harder to find.
Oddly enough, it's history -- her own, and Ireland's -- that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, Kathleen decides to quit her job and write the book she has been contemplating for years.
She leaves London and returns to Ireland, where she immerses herself in research into an 1856 divorce case involving an alleged (证据不足的，可疑的) affair between Mrs Talbot, the wife of an Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot, and William Mullan, their servant.
Kathleen is also discovering truths about herself, her family and her country as she (like Mrs Talbot) confronts the dilemma of whether to seize what may be her last chance for love and passion with a married man.
The suffering of Irish peasants might be a grander subject than a solitary woman's search for passion. Yet one is as real as the other. In the Irish experience, as in Kathleen de Burca's, the movements of history leave ghostly tracks across individual lives.
O'Faolain's novel-within-a-novel device effectively mirrors one of the author's themes, the ultimate unknowability of a past always viewed through the lens of the present.
The essential themes and many details of the novel will be familiar to readers of Faolain's bestselling memoir. My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as the memoir: a distant and loveless family life, the plight (困境) of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape.
It's a grand achievement of storytelling. A lovely heartbreaker of a novel that asks the hard questions.
USA Today
About the author
Nuala O'Faolain is the author of The New York Times bestseller Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. She is a columnist for The Irish Times.
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