Kirjahaku

Kate O'Brien's work is now widely considered canonical in the English language, and the author herself an icon for Ireland seeking to reinvent itself. O'Brien's novel Mary Lavelle, banned upon publication in 1936, is a key work of the twentieth century that has suffered from critical neglect despite its wider popularity with readers. This book reexamines Mary Lavelle, exploring its role in the modernist canon and its importance to political and queer activism. The novel's biographical and autobiographical experimentation is of particular note. Through the lens of this crucial novel, the oeuvre of Kate O'Brien is recontextualized and reassessed.

This is a singular piece of literary research and criticism by a scholar fluent in English, Spanish, Irish and Basque who has utilized all the sources available to write a thorough study of Kate O'Brien (called by Dr. Declan Kilberd one of the top 20 Irish authors of the 20th century). O'Brien (1897-1974) was not only a playwright and a splendid writer of prose but a close student of the Basques at a time when the very survival of their society was at terrible risk. As a feminist O'Brien was fascinated by the role of women and the identity politics of Republican Spain as well as the Francoist regime that took control in 1939.Kate O'Brien's best known work is the 1936 novel Mary Lavelle; it was banned in both Spain and Ireland for many years. This work is discussed at length and placed in the context of her other fiction, reportage and polemics. Very popular in the 1940s she fell into obscurity until revived in the 1990s in part because of her championing of gay and lesbian characters in her novels and plays and in part because of the brilliant writing than ran uninterruptedly from 1931 when she won the James Tait Black memorial prize till her last novel in 1958.

This is a dramatic retelling of true events in the life of Francisco Boix, a Spanish press photographer and communist who fled to France at the beginning of World War II. But there, he found himself handed over by the French to the Nazis, who sent him to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp, where he spent the war among thousands of other Spaniards and other prisoners. More than half of them would lose their lives there. Through an odd turn of events, Boix finds himself the confidant of an SS officer who is documenting prisoner deaths at the camp. Boix realizes that he has a chance to prove Nazi war crimes by stealing the negatives of these perverse photos--but only at the risk of his own life, that of a young Spanish boy he has sworn to protect, and, indeed, that of every prisoner in the camp.