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Remembering Light and Stone
Remembering Light and Stone is a moving study of a young woman coming to terms with herself in a changing world.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Deirdre Madden
32Ìýbooks62ÌýfollowersDeirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, County Antrim in Northern Ireland. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at the University of East Anglia. In 1994 she was Writer-in-Residence at University College, Cork and in 1997 was Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She has travelled widely in Europe and has spent extended periods of time in both France and Italy.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 24, 2017
This is a relatively early book of Madden’s, and it shows. Written in the first person, it reads more like the memoir of a grumpy young Irish ex-pat living in a small town in Umbria, Italy than a novel. “I’m not a person who has much talent for happiness,� the protagonist observes, and that is abundantly evident. The gloom doesn’t really lift much until perhaps the final chapter, so this book can be rather hard-going at times.
Thirty-ish Aisling works as a translator and a teacher of ESL. (None of her students is serious. They attend lessons so they or their parents can brag about learning a foreign language and gain status in the community.) The plot, a fairly thin one, loosely follows Aisling’s daily life living above a small grocery run by Franca and her husband. It largely consists of Aisling’s observations about Italian culture (food and feast days) and her responses to the museums, art galleries and churches in her adopted country. (Oh, yes, and the snarky judgments she makes about many of the people she comes in contact with.)
Fairly early in the book, Aisling meets Ted, an American teaching in Florence, when the two find themselves in a shop scrabbling over the last copy of an English-language newspaper. Aisling is a great follower of current events, and this is 1989 when the Berlin Wall is coming down. She is an anxious, fragile, embittered—even vehement—woman. By night, she is plagued with nightmares and by day, she is haunted by a recurring image of a hanging woman—a sort of visual hallucination. We read to find out why Aisling is so unbalanced and angry, suspecting that some traumatic incident in her past will explain her depressive and violent tendencies. “I could kill someone, I really could! Myself or someone else, it makes no difference, just don’t think I couldn’t!� she screams defiantly (with no provocation) at Ted during one of his visits. ( Ted’s attraction to her is quite beyond me. If I were Ted, I would have beaten a hasty retreat long before this point.)
Aisling will make two trips with Ted—one to America to meet his parents and look around Washington, D.C. and New York City (museums mostly); the second, back to Ireland to see her brother and his family, from whom she has, not surprisingly, been quite estranged. While the reader will never gain full insight into what makes Aisling tick, the concluding chapters will explain the waking dream of the hanging woman.
Many of Deirdre Madden’s observations about culture, art, and even psychology are compelling. However, Aisling feels more like the author’s mouthpiece than a character in her own right. This novel is flawed in a number of ways, but the ideas presented are sometimes thought-provoking and kept me turning the pages. It is interesting to read an author’s early work well after reading her more recent productions. You tend to see more starkly what the author’s big questions are and how she has managed to refine their articulation over time.
Thirty-ish Aisling works as a translator and a teacher of ESL. (None of her students is serious. They attend lessons so they or their parents can brag about learning a foreign language and gain status in the community.) The plot, a fairly thin one, loosely follows Aisling’s daily life living above a small grocery run by Franca and her husband. It largely consists of Aisling’s observations about Italian culture (food and feast days) and her responses to the museums, art galleries and churches in her adopted country. (Oh, yes, and the snarky judgments she makes about many of the people she comes in contact with.)
Fairly early in the book, Aisling meets Ted, an American teaching in Florence, when the two find themselves in a shop scrabbling over the last copy of an English-language newspaper. Aisling is a great follower of current events, and this is 1989 when the Berlin Wall is coming down. She is an anxious, fragile, embittered—even vehement—woman. By night, she is plagued with nightmares and by day, she is haunted by a recurring image of a hanging woman—a sort of visual hallucination. We read to find out why Aisling is so unbalanced and angry, suspecting that some traumatic incident in her past will explain her depressive and violent tendencies. “I could kill someone, I really could! Myself or someone else, it makes no difference, just don’t think I couldn’t!� she screams defiantly (with no provocation) at Ted during one of his visits. ( Ted’s attraction to her is quite beyond me. If I were Ted, I would have beaten a hasty retreat long before this point.)
Aisling will make two trips with Ted—one to America to meet his parents and look around Washington, D.C. and New York City (museums mostly); the second, back to Ireland to see her brother and his family, from whom she has, not surprisingly, been quite estranged. While the reader will never gain full insight into what makes Aisling tick, the concluding chapters will explain the waking dream of the hanging woman.
Many of Deirdre Madden’s observations about culture, art, and even psychology are compelling. However, Aisling feels more like the author’s mouthpiece than a character in her own right. This novel is flawed in a number of ways, but the ideas presented are sometimes thought-provoking and kept me turning the pages. It is interesting to read an author’s early work well after reading her more recent productions. You tend to see more starkly what the author’s big questions are and how she has managed to refine their articulation over time.
August 15, 2016
I wish I had purchased Remembering Light and Stone two months ago, so that I could have taken it on holiday to Italy with me. Instead, I read it whilst relaxing during a week away in France - not perfect, but nevermind. The only other Madden which I have read is Molly Fox's Birthday, a great and thoughtful novella. I had hoped that Remembering Light and Stone would be similar in this respect.
Not so. If this had been my first Madden, I don't think I would have sought out any of her other work. The principal narrator of the piece, Aisling, was both annoying and two-dimensional - odd for a character in such a situation. It did not feel as though she had been at all well-developed, which surprised me rather. She was overridingly pretentious and self-pitying, and I feel that based on her character alone, I probably could have given the whole a two- rather than a three-star review. I remember being rather impressed by Madden's phrasing in Molly Fox's Birthday, but cannot say that the same applied here. Many of the details of Aisling's past were repeated rather unnecessarily, as were descriptions of the places she had lived in. The intriguing details put in place made me read on, but I do not feel as though these were satisfactorily resolved.
Not so. If this had been my first Madden, I don't think I would have sought out any of her other work. The principal narrator of the piece, Aisling, was both annoying and two-dimensional - odd for a character in such a situation. It did not feel as though she had been at all well-developed, which surprised me rather. She was overridingly pretentious and self-pitying, and I feel that based on her character alone, I probably could have given the whole a two- rather than a three-star review. I remember being rather impressed by Madden's phrasing in Molly Fox's Birthday, but cannot say that the same applied here. Many of the details of Aisling's past were repeated rather unnecessarily, as were descriptions of the places she had lived in. The intriguing details put in place made me read on, but I do not feel as though these were satisfactorily resolved.
January 16, 2019
That Deirdre Madden has been compared to Jean Rhys gives you some indication of what to expect from this novel: soul-searching and angst. As Rhys so often did, Madden focusses here on a young woman, in this case Aisling, who, having left her native Ireland some years before, finds herself working as an interpreter and translator in a small town in Umbria.
Madden draws you deeply into this world with her vivid, sensual writing; you'll learn more than perhaps you'd care to know about the sordid grubbiness underlying Umbria's picture-postcard surface, and the dichotomy between the Italy beloved of tourists and the real Italy. Ever the odd one out, Aisling veers between the outsider's inability to understand the peculiar world in which she finds herself, and the occasional flashes of insight that probably only a true outsider could ever have. There are a lot of disturbing reflections on life, love, sex and death, like this one: "The sun itself that made the fruit so ripe and big, that seemed to make the people bloom so early and so evidently, mercilessly pushed everything over into decay..." - and this is just the very first page!
As Aisling says elsewhere, "I'm not a person who has much talent for happiness." Well, you can say that again! This is actually one of the problems with this book: for a grown woman, Aisling spends an awful lot of time moaning like a teenager. Her sullen dislike of just about everyone and everything makes her trying company sometimes. After all, her life isn't so very bad: she lives in a beautiful place, and has a secure job and a kind-hearted, sweet-tempered, intelligent boyfriend, but none of these things seem to make her happy. There's a dearth of humour here, and a lack too of those little light-hearted moments and small consolations that help to make life bearable for most of us.
However, and having said that, this is actually a pretty compelling read. The plot's quite thin, but this is really a novel about a woman's inner life, and Madden is so lucid, so intelligent, and so astute that the narrative not only carries you along but also makes the journey well worth your while. Indeed, a week or more after finishing the novel, I find it lingering in my mind, which is surely one of the measures of an author's success.
Needless to say, if you want a light-hearted little read, this is not the book for you. But if you've a high tolerance threshold for weltschmerz, and want to read something a little more intelligent and challenging than your average blockbuster, why not try this? I can't promise that you'll enjoy it exactly, but I don't think you'll regret making the effort.
Madden draws you deeply into this world with her vivid, sensual writing; you'll learn more than perhaps you'd care to know about the sordid grubbiness underlying Umbria's picture-postcard surface, and the dichotomy between the Italy beloved of tourists and the real Italy. Ever the odd one out, Aisling veers between the outsider's inability to understand the peculiar world in which she finds herself, and the occasional flashes of insight that probably only a true outsider could ever have. There are a lot of disturbing reflections on life, love, sex and death, like this one: "The sun itself that made the fruit so ripe and big, that seemed to make the people bloom so early and so evidently, mercilessly pushed everything over into decay..." - and this is just the very first page!
As Aisling says elsewhere, "I'm not a person who has much talent for happiness." Well, you can say that again! This is actually one of the problems with this book: for a grown woman, Aisling spends an awful lot of time moaning like a teenager. Her sullen dislike of just about everyone and everything makes her trying company sometimes. After all, her life isn't so very bad: she lives in a beautiful place, and has a secure job and a kind-hearted, sweet-tempered, intelligent boyfriend, but none of these things seem to make her happy. There's a dearth of humour here, and a lack too of those little light-hearted moments and small consolations that help to make life bearable for most of us.
However, and having said that, this is actually a pretty compelling read. The plot's quite thin, but this is really a novel about a woman's inner life, and Madden is so lucid, so intelligent, and so astute that the narrative not only carries you along but also makes the journey well worth your while. Indeed, a week or more after finishing the novel, I find it lingering in my mind, which is surely one of the measures of an author's success.
Needless to say, if you want a light-hearted little read, this is not the book for you. But if you've a high tolerance threshold for weltschmerz, and want to read something a little more intelligent and challenging than your average blockbuster, why not try this? I can't promise that you'll enjoy it exactly, but I don't think you'll regret making the effort.
September 25, 2024
I love discovering an instant favorite book by accident, which was what happened when I picked up Deirdre Madden’s "Remembering Light and Stone". I admit that I initially picked it up because I loved the cover and was intrigued by the blurb. This follows Ainsling, a woman in her early 30s who has uprooted herself from her hometown in Ireland to settle in Paris and later in a village in Italy. Questions of roots, belonging, languages, solitude, and our need for community abound in this one, which is unsurprising given the theme of this character-driven work.
I devoured this novella in a day, and I thought this was beautifully written albeit a bit of a bleak read at times. It should worry me how much I see myself reflected in the pages of this book; Ainsling's observations and thoughts -- at times beautifully articulate and sometimes too dark and gloomy for comfort -- resonated with me a bit too much, which should be worrying given the depression-tinged sentiments expressed throughout.
This wasn't a perfect read, as the main character can seem like a mouthpiece for the author's thoughts (perhaps the book is a bit autobiographical in nature, given the author's background). Readers looking for lighter reads might find this a bit of a slog to get through. But it was a case of the right book at the right time for me. This was my first read from Madden, an author whom I've never heard of prior to this, but it definitely won't be the last.
I devoured this novella in a day, and I thought this was beautifully written albeit a bit of a bleak read at times. It should worry me how much I see myself reflected in the pages of this book; Ainsling's observations and thoughts -- at times beautifully articulate and sometimes too dark and gloomy for comfort -- resonated with me a bit too much, which should be worrying given the depression-tinged sentiments expressed throughout.
This wasn't a perfect read, as the main character can seem like a mouthpiece for the author's thoughts (perhaps the book is a bit autobiographical in nature, given the author's background). Readers looking for lighter reads might find this a bit of a slog to get through. But it was a case of the right book at the right time for me. This was my first read from Madden, an author whom I've never heard of prior to this, but it definitely won't be the last.
December 18, 2022
An extremely interesting read. I have mixed feelings about it but great books will make you feel like that. The main character does seem to be a mouthpiece for the author to express her own thoughts and emotions through Aisling which at times didn’t make for a super distinct character. The prose in this book is amazing. The way the author conveys mental illness, restlessness, and disquiet was so incredible and raw and too real that it almost makes you want to flinch. The Lana girlies would eat this book up if they found it. The book flits hazily between memory and reality, the internal and external world. The torment of the character and the author is extremely present. The character was relatable at times but also was quite hard to like most of the time. These types of books hinge off the main character being likeable or relatable and both of those were only in seperate. But I think the novel acknowledges and explores that. At some moments it did feel like a harsh mirror into how my own internal life affects others, and how wallowing in sadness/pain makes you an arsehole sometimes. Unpopular opinion but I reckon Ted was the most likeable, even if they were not a great couple together. They literally were ‘midnight rain� by Taylor Swift. I hope I move away from the Aisling more adolescent style of suffering because I am tiring of it now. It really can be so melodramatic.
September 27, 2020
Deidre Madden has been compared to Anita Brookner but I think, although she can be harrowing, she is not as bleak as AB can be. This is a story about life lived in Umbria in the late 80s. Having lived in Venice and Rome during that period, it is remarkable how much she has remembered; things I had forgotten like families having one doted-upon child, the breakfasts of cake and coffee (the amount of licking of sugar off fingers), the heat inland, the honeyed stone, winter with all the visitors gone, the 'new bit' of old towns that no one ever visits, the hills vs. the mountains. She deserves to be much better known but I'm happy to have her as my secret for now.
January 14, 2021
Enjoyed very much. Irish girl- Life in Italy.
December 9, 2014
Dark and sad but very very readable.
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