Book Review: There's much to admire about Órfhlaith Foyle's Three Houses in Rome
This drawing by a prisoner shows Gurs (southern France) concentration camp. The drawing is shown at the exhibition on the French concentration camp taking place at the Resistance Museum in Toulouse until 24 December. More than 60000 people were imprisoned in the camp between 1939 and 1944. Pic: AFP/Getty.
- Three Houses in Rome
- Órfhlaith Foyle
- Doire Press, €12.99
There’s much to admire about this collection of short stories.
They are written in different styles, some are first-person narratives, others are partially dramatised.
They cover a range of themes and relationships, between siblings, married couples. Some are set in Ireland, others in Europe, Africa, Australia.
The first story, A Bit Bold but Nice Really, is about two sisters, narrated by one of them.
It’s probably the most gentle of the stories in the collection.
It captures life above a family shop in a town somewhere in Ireland, in just a few words: “We filed past the Tayto crisp boxes and the shelves of sweet boxes.”
It’s where the girls stay with their grandparents when their parents want to take a break.
The narrator loves reading while her sister Ruby “liked to be told the story of a book even more than she liked to read.”
The relationship between the sisters will be recognised by anyone with siblings; close, keeping secrets, from adults in particular, often united against everyone else, but sometimes arguing even physically.
Like the best short stories it hints at more than it tells. So does In Lorient, where a sister seeks closure with her estranged brother.
It’s been 20 years since they saw each other, and his wife has to persuade him to meet her. An air of mystery about their alienation is cleverly built up before we discover the reason. It’s a sad, memorable story.
Something is an unsettling account of a honeymoon and what it presages for the couple’s future. It Can be Good includes rape and sudden death.
Life and Theatre is inspired by the true story of an artist murdered in Auschwitz. It is among the most powerful stories in the collection.
Charlotte Salomon was interned in 1940 in the Gurs Camp by the French government, among thousands of German Jewish refugees who were called ‘enemy aliens.’ That was before the French armistice with Germany when Gurs fell under the Vichy regime. In 1942 she was among those transported to Auschwitz.
In the story Charlotte desperately tries to hold on to her sanity, surrounded by despair and horror. “Gurs is a place in hell…. There are rats here. Sweat, tears and filth. A few women have killed themselves, so tired of living in this world.”
Many of the women in Charlotte’s family have committed suicide; the opening paragraph of the story describes her grandmother’s death, in awful detail.
In Frau Hitler, the newlywed Eva Braun makes a mistake filling out her marriage certificate. The story is chilling, vividly imagining how the woman who spent so much time with a monster thought and behaved on her final day.
Three Houses in Rome which gives the collection its title is the least satisfying of the stories. That is perhaps because there isn’t space to delineate the different characters, which makes it confusing.
The collection is unsettling, full of dark tales, composed in beautiful prose. Most of her central characters and narrators are lonely, isolated.
The author is a poet and dramatist and has previously published a novel and two volumes of short stories. It will be interesting to see her future work.
