The Country Girls

By: Edna O'Brien

Narrated by: Edna O'Brien

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend, Baba, are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world - of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin – where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world.

©2010 AudioGO Ltd (P)1960 Edna Gebler

Author should not read her book

This book was part of a book club list, therefore I did not choose to read it. That said, I started off with the written version and decided that maybe I would progress faster with the recording. I was very excited to see that the author was reading her book, but, in this case I think that maybe she made a mistake.
I did not enjoy her reading, there was no characterization: usually a reader gives each character a different rhythm of speech or tone of voice... in this case it was monotonous, the story being a bit monotonous to start with.
And then there was the BREATHING, this was the most difficult part to handle as I really had to make an effort not to concentrate on the intake of air through the nostrils and listen to the words.
Personally I did not enjoy this book, there were too many unnecessary descriptions of nature, which I found had no positive use to the story, they just made it long drawn out. I think there are sufficient descriptions of the story and the characters, so I will not go into them in this review, except to say that the outcome was very abrupt.

Where have all the romantics gone?

Where does The Country Girls rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Right at the top.

What other book might you compare The Country Girls to and why?

Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Terribly Mitford-esque..

What about Edna O'Brien’s performance did you like?

Sound of her voice, incredible diction. marvelous irony.

If you could take any character from The Country Girls out to dinner, who would it be and why?

Mr. Gentleman. You have to ask why?

Any additional comments?

Where are the negative reviews coming from? Really ladies and gentlemen, have we forgotten the romance of courtship and are we too old to remember how hard our hearts ached when we first fell in love? Edna O'Brien has not forgotten, I am hard pressed to find more than a handful of writers who could write about this experience with as much beauty and haunting charm as she evokes This is the first audiobook that has pressed a review from me. Well, I'd put Jeremy Irons reading of Lolita as my all time no. 1, but it's pretty damn hard to knock Nabokov off the top..

Is an author always the best reader?

I plan to read the whole trilogy and part of me thinks I should wait until I've finished to pass judgement on part one but let's go with first impressions anyway. While I do plan to read the entire series, that has more to do with my own interest in the author's work, the time and place she's writing about, and a weird compulsion to complete things. Would this book, on its own, compel me to finish reading about frenemies Caithleen and Baba? Maybe, maybe not. Although the cast of characters from the home village is actually very richly drawn.

More to the point, I am not certain I want to continue listening to the book as read by the author. There's an odd sniffling quality to the reading that doesn't match up with the voice I'd associate with a young girl and I wonder if I'd have liked the story better if there had been a different reader.

Friendship of circumstance

Newly exploring Edna O'Brien as a wise woman writer. Her description of Ireland sets the stage, viscerally visual, against which the dialects of the main characters in conversation pulled me even further into the world a country girl in Ireland existed in.

interesting

This was slow (to me) at the start. I am glad I continued with it, though. Ms. O'Brien has a melodious Irish brogue that lends reality to the story.
A great coming of age story, with the thrills and heartaches of first love.

delightful and compelling

A humorous, mesmerizing and well-observed story of the difficulties and excitements of a young girl growing up poor in Ireland. Charmingly and movingly read by the author. I was hooked from the beginning and listened to many passages twice to enjoy them again.

Authors are not always the best readers

I can see why this book in its time and place made a splash, but from the present perspective I can't agree that Edna O'Brien is/was the "Faulkner" of female Irish writers. Still, it is an interesting slice of life in a small Irish village in the fifties from the viewpoint of a naive young girl.
I would have enjoyed it more had it been read by a good voice actor. Authors are not always the best readers of their work (in fact, rarely), and Ms. O'Brien lacks the training that would have made this more enjoyable. She has a pleasant voice, but she doesn't have her breathing under control, and her constant wheezing/gulping for air is more than a little distracting.

Marvelous.

Marvelous reading, old world tone, and sultry, captivating description. I'd listen to this again and again

Good story, dismal performance

I almost always appreciate authors reading their work, but in this case the narration is so bad. The audio quality is so low that I couldn’t listen to it loudly or via Bluetooth . You can hear the author breathing and swallowing throughout.

The novel is wonderful. I love a coming of age tale from a female point of view. Many points of beautiful prose within the writing.


All in all this is one I wish I had read with my eyes.

Spectacular Writing and Narrating

I was almost swayed by negative reviews of Edna O'Brien's narration. Wow, am I glad I downloaded it anyway. O'Brien is a spectacular writer whose sensitivity to small details and physical gestures rivals that of Proust. She brings the world of her youth to life in such vivid complexity and psychological honesty, I was completely transported.

As for the reading, it's true she is not a professional narrator and you can hear her taking breaths and pausing at odd moments. HOWEVER, she has a gorgeous voice that is so full of feeling--plus the lovely accent, and a hushed, expectant tone--that I was captivated and hanging on every sentence.

One of the best listens of the year for me. I was driving for much of this and at one point was so moved I had to pull over!