The Visitor: Short Story - Book Review

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The Visitor written masterfully by Maeve Brennan exudes a hidden wealth of feeling and emotion albeit feelings of a negative light such as loneliness, in which is described and expounded with such passion and fortitude of strength, that a sweet lull is often felt when Brennan describes Anastasia King and her surroundings.
"Around her in the garish yellow train light faces were shadowed and withdrawn, indifference heightened by the deafening clatter of rain."

Maeve Brannan is successful in her conveyance of what emotion is felt ain a chapter or scene, and highly so, since she often gives descriptions of Anastasia's surroundings as if they credit her mood, suggest or cause it.
"Anastasia King rubbed a clear spot in her window and stared out, but in the rushing darkness only a few stray lights were discernable, blurred by the rain"

Brennan's prose is terse and exquisitely precise throughout. The Visitor is the work of a very meticulous hand. The dark gradient mood never wavers, and the pace of the novella is also perfect, creating a demure surface beneath which epic forces are played out.

The scope of the vision of womanhood that is at the heart of The Visitor is powerful and only intermittently evident in her character and style as a writer, and never as completely realised as it is here. Maeve Brennan seems to be well acquainted with the abyss of life, and with how tenuous our efforts at staying away from the edge can be.

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