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Wild Decembers begins lushly with a prologue that's as much a prose poem as a map, full of cautionary demarcations. "Cloontha it is called--a locality within the bending of an arm," Edna O'Brien writes of her setting in western Ireland. With its "relics of battles of the long ago" and memories of the potato famine still in the soil, it's clear that "the enemy can come at any hour." This time, the enemy appears in the form of Mick Bugler--described variously as a "dark horse," a "caveman," and "the Shepherd"--who has returned from Australia to claim his late uncle's farm. To Joseph Brennan, as native to tiny Cloontha as its relics, the stranger who has taken possession of the farm next to his is briefly a novelty, less briefly a friend, and finally excites in him a fear and a love of boundaries that proves murderous.
O'Brien's Irish hero recites biblical, Greek, and Irish history, mingling them until the world's story, as he sees it, is a tribute to immovable men such as Moses, who he swears settled Cloontha for the likes of him. Unmarried and devoted to the sister with whom he lives, Joseph is so blind with love for the life and land he and his forebears have earned--and with the will to preserve them against the barest change--that his own inability to give way is his undoing. Inevitably, his sister Breege and Bugler fall in love, but, in a landscape where everything is a contest of ownership and men measure their stature against a woman's fidelity, this love thrives exuberantly, though not lastingly, like "flowers that are hatched in the snows." In her 11th novel, O'Brien gives as good as Shakespeare: there's a little of Iago in the town fool, a deliciously nasty cripple named Crock, and a little of Ophelia in pretty Breege. The author means to break your heart, and her startling and redemptive prose leaves you as nostalgic as Joseph Brennan for what might have been, as eager for the next chapter as you are disquieted by its implications. --Amy Grace Loyd
Book Description
"With a mood akin to WUTHERING HEIGHTS--and indeed the spirit of Emily Bronte" (Irish Times), Edna O'Brien's critically acclaimed novel WILD DECEMBERS charts the quick but sure demise of relations between "the warring sons of warring sons." Here in the countryside of western Ireland, "ancient feuds, romantic passions, and misguided ideas of fidelity blend together in . . . [a] heartbreaking story" (Wall Street Journal) leavened by the human comedy of which O'Brien rarely loses sight. A sister, a brother, and a stranger converge in a classic triangle, proceeding inevitably "toward a climax that is Irish to the quick, violent and sad and, in a strange way, beautiful. Just like the novel itself" (Washington Post). WILD DECEMBERS is a triumphant work from a writer who wears well the mantle of her Irish forebears and yet who, with each new novel, breaks new ground all her own. In this, her latest, "readers could not ask for a more profoundly satisfying book" (Boston Herald).
Customer Reviews:
O'Brien at her best.......2007-05-12
This is a great book! If you like Edna O'Brien, you'll love this, especially the complex characters, the tight plot, and the inevitable climax.
Been There, Read That.......2003-09-11
They say that all love stories are tragedies, and that's certainly true of this story of two men feuding over land and a woman. Set in a small village in western Ireland, the tale tackles the flaws in human nature: jealousy, envy, pride, madness, etc-without saying anything new or interesting. O'Brien sets everything up early: the reader is told this is a place where men have fought over land for centuries, and is introduced to the bachelor farmer Joseph, his pretty younger sister Breen, and their new wealthier neighbor Mick. Within the first ten pages it's pretty clear where everything is going to lead, and it grows wearisome plowing through the florid prose and many diversions to arrive at the heavily foreshadowed dark conclusion.
All the characters drift reflexively through the motions assigned to them, apparently locked into their vicious circles. None of the three main protagonists are particularly compelling or engaging, indeed the best that can be said is that one feels a deep for Breen, who is stuck in her situation. The setting itself is a kind of unreal "village-that-time-forgot" creation, where a new tractor is a big thing, the local gossip knows all, and two saucy sisters act as succubi. Ultimately, everyone in the book is a type, there are numbingly obvious metaphors (for example, Mick's cutting into a peat bed Joseph claims ownership of is symbolic of the rape Jospeh fears Mick will visit on Breen), and there's nothing here that Shakespeare and others haven't already done better.
On pride and vanity.......2002-04-28
Edna O'Brien has chosen the Irish countryside as a source of inspiration, although for decades she has been away from the land, only visiting from time to time. In her memoir, "Mother Ireland", there is a statement many expats can identify with:
"Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds with other nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death." p. 129
It's not that some traumatic events have left an irremovable scar on one's personality. We can't forget the culture we were born into, because we are defined by our heritage, and our thinking, our identity is shaped by our Vaterland. For years the writer has suffered bitter comments coming from the natives of the Emerald Island, her own ilk - comments that denied her the right to write, as if there was an obligation to be chained to the land to be able to write about its inhabitants. Indeed, sometimes to see things in a proper perspective, you have to leave your environment. In the age of global information and easy transport, there is no external obstacle that would hamper the ability to relate to the land left behind. Some of the greatest works of the world literature were conceived on emigration. It's thus obvious that the value of the book depends only on the individual talent of the author. In the case of Edna O'Brien, there is no lack of the latter.
"Wild Decembers" is yet another novel set in the provincial world of Irish villagers. As usual, O'Brien purveys the darker side of humanity. In small communities of the countryside, any newcomer is under suspicion on the basis that newcomers are not to be trusted, for there is no complete information about him on the part of the villagers. That fact alone leaves them uneasy, and even if pure good-naturedness makes them treat him with respect, he is always to be blamed should anything happen. Obviously, sooner or later something is bound to happen, and guided by pure instinct, the community turns against the intruder, much like in any community, whether human, or that of animals. Such are the laws of nature, and the smaller the community, the more likely it is to conform to these laws. The urbane world of metropolies compared th the countryside seems like another planet, where one is allowed the simple comfort of anonymity. There is no anonymity to be enjoyed in a village; its inhabitants live under an umbrella of the extended family, and the black sheep, the dissenters, are not to be tolerated. The drama begins when the feelings enter the stage, as is the case with young Breege, whose brother has about a hundred bones to pick with Michael Bugler, the newcomer. The former two live in an almost incestuous relationship, where the brother assumed the position of a husband, whose divine right, as understood by generations of villagers, is to control every move of the wife, and to accept or decline every decision she is trying to make. The point is, that small misunderstandings, which might be resolved on the spot, were there a minimal willingness to cooperate - those petty events and quarrels take the form of a conflict of immense dimensions, where the village as a whole are sometimes more or less active participants, yet always willing to play the role of spectators, the mental descendants of the Roman mob filling the circus to the brink. In "Wild Decembers", Edna O'Brien analyzes the sources of this everlasting newcomer problem, tries to identify its causality, and does so with success. One of the most interesting aspects of this particular novel is the emphasis put on pride and vanity. Prejudice against newcomers can easily evaporate, if the latter are agreeable enough, but what can't be done away with is the human pride, an overblown "sense of honor", so to speak.
Books by this author may not be uplifting, but if you are able to reconcile yourself with this fact, there is a wealth of cultural information to be learned from her works, not to mention the sheer pleasure of reading the unique language of Edna O'Brien.
Where is the "No Stars" rating?.......2002-02-28
I struggled through this book because it was the month's choice for the book club I have joined. One of the great things about a book club is finding new types of reading, and reading a book that would not normaly be one's choice. Still, some "Best Seller" books leave me mystified.
"Wild Decembers" by Edna O'Brien is such a book. Before you buy this book, ask yourself, "Do I read Joyce and Falkner? Do I enjoy predictably depressing flowery stories that avoid telling
normal expicit facts such as time, place, relationship, etc? Do I enjoy reading Kafka?"
If your answer is yes, then try this book, you may love it. Probably reviews are not supposed to tell the answers to some of the story's twists and turns, but O'Brien starts right from the first page to let you know that things are bad and going to get worse. Don't hope for any mitigating circumstances from "Wild Decembers."
Wild December.......2001-07-30
I read this book, my first contact with O'Brien, its author, after hearing a glowing review on NPR. It is full of poetic, ominously foreboding, beautifully descriptive invocations of the mountain where the action is set, at Cloontha in the West of Ireland. The protagonists are the young sister and brother, Brige and Joseph Brennan, who have lived together since their childhood when they were early orphaned and Mick Bugler, who has just returned from Australia to claim his inheritance of the land on the mountain adjacent to Joe and Brige's dairy. What follows is the inevitably tragic denoument following a Romeo and Juliet attraction between the young woman and the "Shepherd", Bugler. The struggle over old land feuds recalls today's news from former Yugoslavia, from the Middle East and yes, from Ireland. By the time I reached the inevitable tragedy at the end I could hardly breathe. The supporting characters are wonderfully drawn. This is the best new book I've read.
Average customer rating:
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Silver Sable & the Wild Pack #31 December 1994
Gregory Wright
Manufacturer: Marvel Comics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Comic
 General
| Comic Strips
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Graphic Novels
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
Marvel
| Publishers
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: B000UZY2HC |
Average customer rating:
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Silver Sable & the Wild Pack #7 December 1992
Gregory Wright
Manufacturer: Marvel Comics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Comic
General
| Comic Strips
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Graphic Novels
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
Marvel
| Publishers
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: B000UZYE5M |
Book Description
The delightful legend of the Ong's Hat travel cult has been posted in the form of the Incunabula Papers since the earliest days of BBS and Internet communications. The mythos is an historical and cultural curiosity for that reason alone.
Has the great world-mind of the telecommunication infrastructure begun to breed its own myths? The elusiveness of the Incunabula's original proponents, Emory Cranston (a pseudonym) and Joseph Matheny (his real name), has spawned wild speculation that the Ong's Hat legend is nothing but a media hoax. However there is a dark side to this story that has never been fully told, which may help explain their circumspection.
What began as an heretical Islamic sect founded in the early 1900s by Black circus magician, Noble Drew Ali, evolved over the century into a techno-tantric commune whose members managed to escape this befouled world into a pristine, Edenic parallel universe, a New Jersey Pine Barrens devoid of inhabitants. This latter rag-tag group built the "Egg" - a glistening Faberge-like device that enabled trans-dimensional travel into unpopulated mirror worlds (per the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model). A special quantum-tantric feature allowed passage for two occupants while they made love, irrespective of their race, age or gender.
But wait, there's more! Add to this mix a benevolent race of humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs on a parallel Earth, capable of dimensional shift without machinery, who have been world tripping for thousands of years. You've got your chaos; sex magick; applied quantum physics; shadow conspiracy; crypto-palaeontology and enlightenment hopes all wrapped up in one neat package. What the Hell more do you want?
Customer Reviews:
Good reading.....for sci fi.......2006-01-06
For the past few years, I've had a great interest in the Ong's Hat/Incunabula mystery. I was very excited when I saw the book was released.
The book is ok written. Don't expect a pulitzer. Its an interesting story. It has a few mystery and intrigue elements. But I highly recommend that you check your sense of realism and disbelief at the door.
The book has some incredible outrageous moments and expect the reader to believe it.
Overall its a fun book, definitely a keeper for conspiracy buffs, but don't expect too much out of it. I've yet to meet anyone who can convince me that a fraction of this is real (with the exception of the town being in NJ).
It's nice to have a dead-tree edition, but it's nothing new........2004-06-16
Some of the editorial text of this book is new, but most of the content you'll be able to find all across the Net (in the form of the original Incunabula papers) for free. The text of those documents makes up most of this particular book. There's nothing that says that you can't print those out if you've a mind to, if only to save some money. Unless you're a hardcore researcher of the Ong's Hat mystery or a collector of unusual books, you're probably better off printing them out to make your own edition. You won't be missing too much.
Ong's Hat, New Jersey: Revisiting the Mystery.......2003-03-20
Since before the continents assumed their present shape, countless ages before intelligent proto-hominids walked erect and began using sticks to scratch signs in the mud, immeasurable aeons before alphabets and settled agriculture were new-fangled, Ong's Hat - a now deserted (?) village in southernmost New Jersey - was fated to become the most important locale in humankind's history, a critical juncture in time and space, and the nexus of a vast, uncountable quanta of probability matrices joining at the confluence of those temporal streams called past, present and future.
Since the event referred to as the "Opening of the Gate" occurred at Ong's Hat some thirty-three years ago on a spring equinox, much of the paltry amount of writing on that cosmic shifting of gears has been of an intendedly "disinformational" character for reasons apparent to all serious students of alternative history in general and OH in particular. The time has arrived when the truth can be told, neat and naked, complete and uncensored. And that story is, to put it mildly, a circuitous one.
In brief, a black Sufi cult founded in Newark, New Jersey in the 1920s by a circus magician has (with the help of a small group of Columbia University students, jazz musicians, beatniks, homosexuals and LSD experimenters) evolved by the late 1960's into a techno-tantric Moorish Orthodox commune and physics research institute centered in Ong's Hat, New Jersey, whose members managed to escape from this addled dirt-ball into a parallel universe through the intermediary of the "Egg" - a mechanism that enabled trans-dimensional travel into other worlds in other dimensions.
Add to the story a benevolent race of red-necked humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs on a parallel Earth, chaos magick, alternative sexualities, applied quantum physics, conspiracies galore, and heretical Eastern Orthodox bishops and you have an epistemological smorgasbord fit for a king.
This is a delightful piece of writing that leaves its reader hungry for more (and we are assured there will be more), that deserves to be read and read again, believed or disbelieved, shared with someone you love, and maybe even memorized!
And off we go on a rollercoaster ride........2002-10-13
The delightful legend of the Ong's Hat travel cult has been posted in the form of the Incunabula Papers since the earliest days of BBS and Internet communications. The mythos is an historical and cultural curiosity for that reason alone.
Has the great world-mind of the telecommunication infrastructure begun to breed its own myths? The elusiveness of the Incunabula's original proponents, Emory Cranston (a pseudonym) and Joseph Matheny (his real name), has spawned wild speculation that the Ong's Hat legend is nothing but a media hoax. However there is a dark side to this story that has never been fully told, which may help explain their circumspection.
What began as an heretical Islamic sect founded in the early 1900s by Black circus magician, Noble Drew Ali, evolved over the century into a techno-tantric commune whose members managed to escape this befouled world into a pristine, Edenic parallel universe, a New Jersey Pine Barrens devoid of inhabitants. This latter rag-tag group built the "Egg" - a glistening Faberge-like device that enabled trans-dimensional travel into unpopulated mirror worlds (per the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model). A special quantum-tantric feature allowed passage for two occupants while they made love, irrespective of their race, age or gender.
But wait, there's more! Add to this mix a benevolent race of humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs on a parallel Earth, capable of dimensional shift without machinery, who have been world tripping for thousands of years. You've got your chaos; sex magick; applied quantum physics; shadow conspiracy; crypto-palaeontology and enlightenment hopes all wrapped up in one neat package. What the [heck] more do you want
Book Description
Major religious traditions of the world contain perspectives of perennial importance on the topic of death and afterlife. Such concepts and beliefs are not only reflected directly in mortuary and funerary practices, but also inform patterns of beliefs and rituals that shape human lifestyles. Though evidenced in sacred texts, they cannot be fully understood in isolation by textual study alone. Rather, they must be explored in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the given religious system as rooted in an overall culture. Here thirteen scholars, each a specialist in a particular religious tradition, outline the beliefs, myths, and practices relating to death and afterlife. The volume introduction provides a framework for understanding the evolutionary relationships among world religions and the unity as well as the diversity of their quest for overcoming death. Part I comprises chapters on African religions representing the nonliterate religious experience and on ancient religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. Studies of these religions serve as background for comprehending concepts relating to death and afterlife in the major world religions, which are dealt with in Part II, on Western religions, and Part III, on Eastern religions. The particular method of approach to each tradition is determined by the nature of the material. With death and afterlife as the common focus, this group of scholars has brought to bear its diverse expertise in anthropology, classics, archaeology, biblical studies, history, and theology. The result is a text important for comparative religion courses and, beyond that, a book extending our understanding of human thoughts and aspirations. It offers a global perspective from which an individual can ponder his or her own personal issues concerning death and afterlife.
Customer Reviews:
Saved over 50%!!!.......2007-01-19
The cost of this textbook was over 50% lower than at my university bookstore. It was new and arrived in 3 days. I will definitely continue purchasing my college textbooks on Amazon.
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