All tagged maggie o'farrell
So many of our stories in modern Western European traditions revolve around humans. Be they grand or meek, great or villainous, sure-footed or uncertain, humans tend to dominate our narratives. This is not true for other culture’s stories, I should clarify. In many indigenous story traditions, the nonhuman—from flora and fauna to rivers, mountains, and minerals—play significant parts. Maggie O’Farrells’s newest novel plays into this tradition. Land (2026) is largely the story of an Irish family in the years after The Great Hunger (what some refer to, an oversimplification, as the Irish potato famine). This family — mother and father and their children — is upended when the father has an inexplicable experience on a peninsula in Western Ireland while working as a surveyor for the British. O’Farrell’s writing is powerful as she reveals the complex stories of a family, generation by generation; alongside Phina and Thómas’s family story, though, O’Farrell also develops the older stories of the land.
Maggie O’Farrell has done it again. She has rendered up a heroine of flesh and blood, whim and heartache, from the annals of European history. O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) fictionalizes the brief life of Lucrezia de’ Medici who married the Duke of Ferrara (Modeno, and Reggio as well) at age fifteen. As with O’Farrell’s last novel, Hamnet—also historical fiction—The Marriage Plot introduces readers to a vivacious young woman, bound in and restrained by her time, her class, and what everyone deems her destiny. This is novel rich in storytelling and moving prose. It is a masterpiece; one that transports readers to the regal rooms of sixteenth-century Florence and Ferrara.
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) includes some of the most moving fictional explorations of courtship and childbirth, maternity and pandemic, grief and loss, that I have read of late. Ultimately, this novel grapples with the ways that parents can move on after the unthinkable happens and they lose a child to illness; a part of that story, O’Farrell’s novel argues, as literary critics before her have, is William Shakespeare’s penning of his famous tragedy Hamlet, an act that may provide healing for both himself and his relationship with Agnes.
