AN IRISH writer has finally won Ireland’s major international short story competition. It took no less than the magisterial talent of Edna O’Brien, the most literary of Irish writers, to become the first Irish winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story award.
Her collection Saints and Sinnersheld off the challenge of Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. It is an interesting result. Yiyun Li's first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,had not only won the inaugural Frank O'Connor award in 2005, it immediately established the Beijing-born, US-based writer as a major voice who wrote an outstanding first novel The Vagrants.
The two books could not be more different. Yijun Li’s stories of life in China are cool, immaculately crafted and have echoes not only of Chekhov, but of her literary mentor, William Trevor.
O’Brien’s visceral power and relentless candour infuse her heightened, lyrical prose with passion and honourable fury.
Insightful use is made by the publisher of a cover quote from Seamus Heaney. When presenting O’Brien with a Lifetime Achievement, the poet described her work as having come from “a sensibility that has known the costs as well as the rewards of being alive”. It is a telling comment and very true of the winning stories.
Throughout the book, relations are examined; between lovers, mothers and daughters, warring families contesting the right to a burial place. The narrator is placed in situations that test and torment.
In Manhattan Medley, a woman recalls the first few steps that led her into a painful affair. Elsewhere in the same story the narrator admits to never having "felt so alive, so ravenously alive". There is an unsettling hunger about the stories; O'Brien's sense of drama and instinctive feel for the human impulse remains startling.
O'Brien the novelist has been celebrated for more than 50 years. But O'Brien the short story writer has often been neglected when the Irish short story, as mastered by Trevor, is celebrated. In 1993 Dermot Bolger addressed this most perceptively in his Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fictionin which he included O'Brien's superb What A Sky, in which a woman goes to visit her father in a rest home, her face folded "into a false obedient smile". The old man, straight from McGahern's Ireland, snaps: "I was expecting you two hours ago," to a daughter who owes him nothing.
Saints and Sinnersis about emotional pain, the brutal blows dealt, about women expecting fair treatment. Above all, it is about Ireland.
That one of the world’s most emotionally persuasive and pervasive writers could withhold the very strong challenge of Yiyun Li is an immense endorsement of the force that is O’Brien.
Last year's winning book, Burning Bright, by US writer Ron Rash, consolidated the award internationally. Edna O'Brien by winning from a field that also included Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family, asserts the enduring appeal of the short story, but also the part Irish writers have in sustaining it as a form.