August is a Wicked Month

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A new voice, not the same Kate of The Country Girls trilogy, a slightly older but much more mature woman. Ellen is bored at home in London, bored with her straight-laced sexual encounters and bored with life in general. Edna O’Brien is an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories, has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. Not all men look like Daniel Craig, you're not always the prettiest one in the room and then even harsher news from home breaks the last threads of the spell and before you know it, you've tried to shag half the men in the resort to no avail, suffered a massive personal tragedy, financially ruined yourself and the only souvenir you're taking home is a massive overdraft and suspected syphilis.

The good-looking Romeo finally towards the end of her trip, pays some attention to her at the beach and much to her excitement beds her. For a while, I thought maybe O'Brien was showing the emptiness of a life based on liquor, sex, and celebrity. I’m going to have to hunt through my London TBR (now safely arrived) to see what other O’Brien gems I squirrelled away. She languishes on in France where flirting now becomes a compulsive distraction as well as a physical need.The first storytellers on the land on which I live are the Traditional Custodians, the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, and I wish to acknowledge their continuing connection to the land, waters and communities of this beautiful part of the world.

Along with the characters she meets, Ellen throws themselves into a hedonistic situation where nobody appears at all happy and are only able to show any sense of enthusiasm for the trappings of wealth and a series of sexual encounters in which none appears to invest any emotion. The copyright page states first published 1965 indicating the first edition, with copyright Edna O¿Brien 1965. It was like a kick to the stomach and suddenly the whole story took on a different purpose and became so much more than I had imagined at the start. She escapes to the French Riviera and meets a new range of people, all the time realising that she is yearning for something that cannot be experienced through meaningless sex. For example, on page 7, Ellen tells the milk boy that she has never opened wide (maybe her heart or her thighs or her vagina) to a man before.There, she meets all sorts of people including lesbians and gay men but she realizes that she is not really looking for sex because she does not get interested even on a good-looking actor. I don't regret reading this slim volume, but I can't say that I will be recommending it to very many people either. Broke and shocked, Ellen makes her way back home only to discover that the actor she wanted so badly may have given her an STD. As needs must with novels of this type it was quite short, only 138 pages long, so if you are unsure of it at least it will not be a lot of time spent. The character of Ellen is so unformed, her hair color keeps changing, and I don't mean because she dyes it.