The Portable Virgin

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Even though the author of this collection has almost the same name as my my mother, she's not related to me, at least not that I know of. I'd love if she was, because it's great to have a genius in the family, and she shows signs of being one with these beatifully weighted stories. There's a purity about them that sets them apart from the experimentalism and Ultra-naturalism that seem to dominate the form these days, a characteristically Irish love of language, and a simultaneous feeling for and detatchment from her characters that is really endearing.

She reminds me more than anything else of Vermeer's portrait of a young girl, which seems to capture a fleeting moment that reveals so much about both the artist and their subject.

A Dublin bookshop offered this gem up to me when I was visiting Ireland in the early 90's, and probably a year has not gone by since when I haven't reread The Portable Virgin. It's smart, edgy, and hysterically funny.

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It's also an entirely original take on what contemporary Irish consciousness is like. Every friend to whom I've lent my dog-eared copy threatens to steal the book from me. Sadly, it's out of print, but an American publisher would be wise to print up another 50, copies. See all 4 reviews. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime.

Anne Enright Sesh Part 1: The Portable Virgin | Chris Beausang

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The Portable Virgin

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AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. As Diarmaid Ferriter writes in his book, Ambiguous Republic: There is in this quotation, a nuanced and useful reading of these two different Irelands in tandem with one another, rather than as divergent.

The time warp is a conceptual tool that tries to account for the ways in which Ireland as a state can simultaneously manage to be the beneficiary of an economic boom powered by the development of information technologies on the West coast of the United States while being complicit in the captivity and enslavement of women, to give just one example.

As we well know, the capitalist nation state, both historically and in our present moment, is not a static enough concept to abhor contradictions of this kind. It might even be said to thrive on them. In order for particular ideologies to function, pockets of our society in which the most vulnerable reside must have their existences subject to relegation or dismissal as time warps, as if artefacts of the nineteenth century have the habit of peskily colonising the twenty-first.

This gesture allows us to dispense with aspects of our national identities which might otherwise bring us to a point of contradiction. To take one example, Ireland can simultaneously believe itself to be a nation that is charitable, and LGBT-friendly, while placing many of those fleeing persecution sometimes for their sexual orientation in detention centres for an indefinite span of time. Stumbling into Motherhood , about a particularly divisive time in Irish public life, the eighties, and its role in her attempted suicide, which I will now quote from at length:.

by Ashley Thomson

I fell out of the world, temporarily, on Easter Monday …Maybe I had Seasonal Affective Disorder, maybe it is genetic, maybe it was me being in my twenties, maybe it was Ireland being in the s. Ireland broke apart in the eighties, and I sometimes think that the crack happened in my own head.

The country was screaming at itself about contraception, abortion, and divorce. It was a hideously misogynistic time. Not the best environment for a young woman establishing a sexual identity, you might say, especially one with adolescent morbidity and tendencies towards ecstatic suffusions of light, one who was over-achieving, but somehow in all the wrong ways, one who was both maverick and clever.

I mean, what do we need here, a diagram? They were fragmented books, because this is what I knew best, but also, I fancied, because I lived in an incoherent country. They were slightly surreal, because Ireland was unreal. They dealt with ideas of purity, because the chastity of Irish women was one of the founding myths of the Nation State well that was my excuse.

But they were also full of corpses. Beautiful ones, speaking ones, sexual ones, bitter ones; corpses who did not forgive, or rot.

Who was the corpse? It was myself, of course, but also Christ, the dead body on a stick. And it is the past that lies down but will not shut up, the elephant in the national living-room. This apparent lack of a domestic audience, or the unwillingness of the tastemakers to cultivate one, required that Irish authors sell themselves abroad, and only then, by commodius vicus of recirculation, return to the domestic market. Donal Donovan and Antoin C. No Irish citizen who remembers the eighties will be unaware of the effect that this union has had on our general standards of living.

But I am interested in what this change from peripheral backwater to post-modern globalised economy has on our self-perception. So too do many governing metaphors of the literary landscape become de-legitimised. The matter of literary influence in particular, becomes increasingly knotty in a global marketplace.

Brian Dillon writes in the London Review of Books that if there is a modernist resurgence in Irish literature today, it is less a return, than a demonstration of the extent to which authors today can draw from any number of traditions, even experimental ones. The Irish free State made clear its suspicion regarding modernism and modern art in general, by introducing film censorship in The first Irish review of Ulysses was also blocked by the printer of The Dublin Magazine , forcing its author, Con Levanthal, to set up a one-off journal, Klaxon.

Those of the literary world reacted to this with outrage, as these bans generally effected avant-garde works rather than pornographic ones, but their objections never translated into popular political support. David Dickson, in Dublin: The Making of a Capital City ,points out that this emphasis on censorship can ignore the extent to which musical and theatrical forms often thrived, but for the most part, Dublin was a place to leave in favour of other urban capitals, where one was more likely to obtain a patron, public or private.

The Arts Council existed, in name only, up until its role was formalised in the late seventies. Up until then, it provided cheques to artists on a hand to mouth basis, had no women on its board and had no particular remit or code of behaviour. We shall negotiate our entry as a sovereign state…the voice of Ireland will be heard in Europe in the decades ahead.

But for the sacrifices of those who won our freedom, none of this could have been. We have the right to believe that they will feel as they view this prospect that their sacrifices were not all in vain. In a cultural sense however, it can be seen an inducing another form of peripherality, relative to the wider continent, rather than to England.

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Ireland is, after all, a relatively small state in a union driven by larger nations. Joe Lee has argued that joining the union has had the effect of encouraging our leaders to continue to apportion blame for their failures to external factors, rather than scrutinising and reforming our own industries and regulatory frameworks.

My revenge looks back at me, out of the mirror. The new fake me looks twice as real as the old. Underneath my clothes my breasts have become blind, my iliac crests mottle and bruise. Strung out between my legs is a triangle of air that pulls away from sex, while my hands clutch. It used to be the other way around. I root through the bag, looking for a past. She is made of transparent plastic, except for her cloak, which is coloured blue.

Book Review — The Portable Virgin (1991) by Anne Enright

Mary is full of surprises. Her little blue crown is a screw-off top, and her body is filled with holy water, which I drink.

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But while tracing over the wrecked and bloodied sockets of a fragmented subjectivity, it also aims to revivify the cornerstones of the institutionalised modernisms as practiced by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Then lay you down. They cut you round.

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