The Visitor

Brennan, Maeve.. (2000). The visitor. Washington, DC : Counterpoint.
Read of Maeve Brennan's name for the first time in a recent book review*, which took me to her writing: mostly she wrote a column for The New Yorker,as "The Long-Winded Lady". This book was mentioned in her biography, and I went looking for it.

Dark and brooding, it is so typically Irish it is almost difficult to accept and say that. I found it difficult to read more than a couple of its small pages every day, yet would not stop reading. A daughter returns to her father's ancestral home, where her grandmother, her father's mother, makes it clear she is not welcome. The grandmother still holds a severe grudge against her son's mother, who left Ireland for Paris, many years back. She tells her granddaughter to go to Paris and make her life there. The latter, Anastasia, is bitterly disappointed in that.

*: review by Rob Nixon of “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” by Dinaw Mengestu.

The deeply felt pain in Mengestu’s novel is offset by the solace of friendship — whether it’s a friendship that hovers on the verge of romance, a friendship between an adult and a child or, above all, the friendships that steady the daily lives of fellow immigrants. Mengestu brilliantly summons up the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting.