Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

Book Overview

Delmore Schwartz, the most influential critic in postwar America, wrote of Patrick O'Brian's first novel Testimonies: A triumph...drawn forward by lyric eloquence and the story's fascination, [the reader] discovers in the end that he has encountered in a new way the sphinx and the riddle of existence itself. Schwartz' imagination was fired by this sinister tale of love and death set in Wales, a timeless story with echoes of Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393313166
• ISBN13: 9780393313161
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

O'Brian's first novel is simply brilliant

Patrick O'Brian is more than a writer. He's a publishing phenomenon via his superb Aubrey-Maturin series.But TESTIMONIES was his first novel, originally published in 1952. It tells of an English professor of Welsh origins, Joseph Pugh, who abandons teaching at Oxford and moves to a cottage in Wales. There he explores the primal mountain back country and tries to understand the farming culture of his ancestral land. A lonely, middle-aged bachelor, Pugh can hardly keep house, even to basics--cooking, cleaning, maintaining his clothes. He has never known intimacy, let alone close friendship, but he falls fatally in love with the wife of his sheep-farmer neighbor Emyr Vaughan, a violent man . . . He pines for months, keeping his love sickness to himself, but when he becomes gravely ill he is taken into the Vaughan house, where he and Bronwen discover each others' feelings, with tender reserve. The denouement is poignant, inevitable, yet O'Brian handles this difficult material deftly, without over-writing. For a beginning writer in his 20s this is masterful work at the pinnacle of writing.An acute recorder of time and place, human behavior and motivation, action and reaction, O'Brian uses words persuasively, passionately, a craftsman to the core. He captures country, culture and character with Hardy's lyrical affection, idiosyncratic ethnicity, thoughtfully observed. His meticulous work is reminiscent of the great American writers Faulkner, Steinbeck and Capote, or O'Brian's fellow Brits John Fowles and William Golding.Back in 1952 O'Brian anticipated with TESTIMONIES the struggle for relationships, understanding and love in an era--the last half of the 20th century--in which men and women judge and choose first from ethnic or cultural biases or appearances or political/social correctness and only later, maybe, start to understand each other and become acquainted. Or is xenophobia genetic, eternal?Fast forward to Norton's republishing of TESTIMONIES in 1983. We see that beyond Aubrey-Maturin, O'Brian had the chops in 1952, though few knew and it took many years for many of us to find him. Doris Lessing in the '90s offered two books under assumed names to test the market for unknowns. Result: rejection (she couldn't even get the books read!). So how many others like O'Brian flower unknown, unappreciated? What is their 'testimony?'Napoleon allegedly remarked that ability is useless without opportunity. O'Brian won his opportunity, finally, and made the most of it. We are the beneficiaries and TESTIMONIES is the proof--res ipsa loquitur.This book is one of those few that is unforgettable and will remain in the mind and heart for the rest of the reader's life.

May I say Superlative?

Having been so affected by this book, it is so pleasing to see the unanimity of readers. I finished the book last evening and have been engrossed all of today without waning; it just won't go away. What a mavelous love story where passion is never enjoined except in the spirit. What a painful tragedy that leaves one stunned and wishing himself dead. What a range of humanity. What a blessing on us all that there are writers of the power and imagination of Patrick O'Brian.

Incredible, moving, passionate

I cannot describe how much I think of this book, even 4 years after reading it. How many books have that effect?! For me, it was one of the most vivid renderings of passion, loneliness, the relationship between men and women, and most importantly, the parallel of our emotional state to the land we occupy. The country of Wales was just as powerful as the relationship between the characters in the novel. What more can you ask for? Find a quiet spot and read this book!

"Testimonies" is an unforgettable story

I can only describe the book's effect on me. I was unable to put the book down until finished, and then unable to forget the story. Don't expect a happy ending story in the vein of OBrian's Seafaring historical novels. This novel is very different.

Ouch.

This book hit me hard. Both with the sheer power of its carefully choosen words and the awesome might of its collective stories. And there is more than one story here. There is the tale of the rugged, unforgiving land of Wales and the equally hard people it has produced; there is the parable of a tragic entanglement between two people who do everything to avoid it; and there is the epic hint of a final justice for the characters, and a final truth for us all. I read this novel four years ago this summer and I can still vividly recall the ecstasy of emotion that I felt when I finished it.