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A review by agusyesbean
Amongst Women by John McGahern
5.0
"Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence."
———
'Amongst Women' is about family, home, tradition, regret, mistakes, loss, love, the passage of time, anger and bitter consequences. In each character I saw people from my own life, and I saw myself. In many ways nothing has changed between my childhood on an Irish farm, and the characters so many decades before. My own family experience and stories that were passed down to me, together, *was* 'Amongst Women'. Somehow it is both an incredibly niche and specific story, and a universal one all at once. Every word McGahern used was so carefully and expertly placed, the setting so vivid even while vague. There were moments to laugh at or be shocked by, moments of the most tender domesticity and moments that brought me to tears.
For some reason I cannot quite put into words expactky how I feel now that I've finished it, there is so much to say and yet so little that could really be added. So I offer a quote from the back of my edition which I find especially true;
"A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades." (Sunday Telegraph)
———
'Amongst Women' is about family, home, tradition, regret, mistakes, loss, love, the passage of time, anger and bitter consequences. In each character I saw people from my own life, and I saw myself. In many ways nothing has changed between my childhood on an Irish farm, and the characters so many decades before. My own family experience and stories that were passed down to me, together, *was* 'Amongst Women'. Somehow it is both an incredibly niche and specific story, and a universal one all at once. Every word McGahern used was so carefully and expertly placed, the setting so vivid even while vague. There were moments to laugh at or be shocked by, moments of the most tender domesticity and moments that brought me to tears.
For some reason I cannot quite put into words expactky how I feel now that I've finished it, there is so much to say and yet so little that could really be added. So I offer a quote from the back of my edition which I find especially true;
"A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades." (Sunday Telegraph)