‘I was wearing my peasant blouse, and jeans, and my hair in two braids, and the pink cotton scarf … I had chosen my airplane reading after careful consideration of what might impress my future kibbutz husband most.’
In the winter issue of the Dublin Review, Karen O’Reilly writes about the summer of 1994, which she spent working on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. Largely naïve about the Israel/Palestine conflict, she and her fellow Europeans on the kibbutz worked hard and partied hard but had little idea of ‘the whole bigger project in which we played our small part’. The summer then took a very dark turn. With a heartbreaking artfulness and intensity, O’Reilly describes the way hedonism and idealism were overwhelmed by trauma.
Also in the winter issue, Brian Davey writes about a visit to the site of a Marian apparition in Co. Sligo in 1985, a year of many ‘strange visions’. Weaving personal, familial and societal stories together, ‘Field of Vision’ is a magnificent exploration of the various legacies of that year – the year of Davey’s own birth – and of the mysteries of faith and perception.
Juliana Adelman’s ‘Weights and Measures’ is a sharply observed, painfully honest and often sparklingly witty account of her experiences in a weight-loss programme – and of her long history of worrying about her body. ‘I understand that I am being conned,’ she writes of diet culture; but as her essay shows, it’s easier to understand it than to escape it.
As a young boy, Arnold Thomas Fanning walked everywhere with his mother. In his searching essay ‘mother, walking’, he anatomizes these walks and their destinations (the shops, the park, the hairdresser’s, the dentist). And he explores the haunting mystery of one long walk that had no apparent destination.
The winter Dublin Review also features three superb pieces of fiction: Susannah Dickey’s ‘Fish, Flesh, or Fowl’, about a couple who spend an evening in the presence of a great older writer and what happens to all of them next; Aisling Flynn’s ‘Mrs Anders’, a dark fable of a family living in a once-grand house with an anachronistic garden hermit; and Eimear Ryan’s ‘The Night Watch’, which follows a grief-haunted woman through the days of a holiday in Paris with her partner.
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The Dublin Review Podcast
The best Irish and International writers of fiction and non-fiction discuss and read from their work that has been published in The Dublin Review.