Status
Available
Description
Nicholas Coughlan is twelve years old when his father, an Irish civil servant, announces that God has commanded him to become a painter. He abandons the family and a wife who is driven to despair. Years later, Nicholas's own civil-service career is disrupted by tragic news: his father has burned down the house, with all his paintings and himself in it. Isabel Gore is the daughter of a poet. She's a passionate girl, but her brother is the real prodigy, a musician. And yet this family, too, is struck by tragedy: a seizure leaves the boy mute and unable to play. Years later, Isabel will continue to somehow blame herself, casting off her own chances for happiness. And then, the day after Isabel's wedding to man she doesn't love, Nicholas arrives on her western isle, seeking his father's last surviving painting. Suddenly the winds of fortune begin to shift, sweeping both these souls up with them. Nicholas and Isabel, it seems, were always meant to meet. But it will take a series of chance events--and perhaps, a proper miracle--to convince both to follow their hearts to where they're meant to be.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Ruby_Barnes
Fellas, discover your inner romantic.
A first novel but he had written four non-fiction books before with his wife about local life. A romantic story with fantastic twists that are quite believable. The descriptive turn of phrase is often breathtaking and compensates for the rather slow pace of the
A first novel but he had written four non-fiction books before with his wife about local life. A romantic story with fantastic twists that are quite believable. The descriptive turn of phrase is often breathtaking and compensates for the rather slow pace of the
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plot, which doesn't really get going until the final quarter of the book. This book is about the style of its telling rather than the story itself. Show Less
LibraryThing member c_why
All Irish fiction has that same tiresome gloom about it. The characters, although sketchy were for the most part interesting - despite doom wrapped in their very DNA. Beautiful bursts of writing from Williams, and the unfinished, mostly unlikeable characters floating like dark clouds on top of this
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gorgeous sparkling prose. We are all doomed. But to follow your bliss blindly, impetuously is, despite Joseph Campbell, is not always the path to wholeness or happiness. The parents of Nicholas - especially the father - were those typical Irish dragged by "God" to destroy themselves and all around them. The search for meaning and beauty commanded by God may as well be the command to search for coal in the most unstable mine. Nicholas' worship of his father makes this even more perverted. The folks on the island resolve to live brighter lives. Son Sean's lengthy withdrawl from life is incomprehensible to me (but this IS magical realism, after all). I do not like it when a brief episode of epilepsy turns a character into stone. My daughter has had severe epilepsy for over 30 years. She's up and running not long after tremendous lengthy convulsions. (I suppose THIS would be magic realism to Mr. Williams & his readers). Nicholas is injected into this island setting to redeem all. Our book club wanted to see the ending as "all living happily ever after". I am not convinced. Had Williams not abandoned this book when he did (at a very good point, no complaints from me) he would have gone on to torpedo the hoped-for love. Irish books always have to wallow in mock dramatic oppressiveness. Show Less
LibraryThing member mattviews
FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE is a typical story of miracle. The most memorable message out of this debut of the Irish writer is "life is a mystery, we cannot understand it. Once you accept that, it hurts less." In fact, the reading of the first few chapters does not seem to forebode any miracle or
Nicholas Coughlan's father decides to quit his job in the government, abandons his family, and becomes a painter - because God has spoken to him. He leaves Nicholas and his mother behind and takes up painting in Dublin. Nicholas' mother dies of brooding over the reason why her marriage has turned cold. The little boy loses his confidence and respect in his father. As he traces the footsteps of his father and tries to make sense of this ethereal revelation to which his father scrupulously abides, he realizes that happiness for his family is not meant to come simply, that in some inexorable way his family has been singled out. Nicholas is waiting for a miracle.
When God speaks to Nicholas' father the second time he takes his life. He has sat in front of a heater and fed into it his canvases until the home burns crumbling down around him. Nicholas ponders that his father might have maddened himself with the thought that perhaps there had never been a voice from God and that the ruins of the life in which he finds himself has all been caused by his own folly. So the inconsolable truth about the Coughlans is that there has never been a call, yet nothing makes sense unless one looks at the occurrences in a grand picture. The now coming-of-age Nicholas resolves to recover the only painting that survives the fire - one that his father has given it away as a prize for a poetry contest. It possesses meaning for his life because it has not survived for nothing.
Isabel Gore lives in persistent guilt that she is responsible for her brother's fit at the seaside. She feels a prisoner of what she has done (or has not done) as weeks stretch into months and then years - nobody can shoulder for her the baggage of her heart. It begins to seem as if what has happened on the shelf of rock by the sea has eternally robbed him of speech and movement and has given no reason. Isabel too, is waiting for a miracle.
She never knows she will fall in love during the last year of high school and the love affair will have rendered her mindless about going to university. In utter insolence and insubordination the nuns at the covent school lose control of her - it is one of those moments in life when the plot jolts forward and understanding and planning vanish in a rash manner to an extent that she banishes forever the uncertainty of her feelings for the son of a Dublin tweed hat maker.
But Nicholas and Isabel are made for each other. How would they have known? The series of events that develop around these two unrelated families somehow cross one another's paths and trigger the making of a miracle. All the open-ended threads slowly converge as strangers enter each other's spheres of living in a circuitous manner. While for most of the novel we see how lives shatter with the fall of one day's light, FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE is an unforgettable tale about the illuminating power of love. It's about affirmation of destiny, love, and miracle.
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happiness. Miracle, after all, is a product of some circuitous events. Nicholas Coughlan's father decides to quit his job in the government, abandons his family, and becomes a painter - because God has spoken to him. He leaves Nicholas and his mother behind and takes up painting in Dublin. Nicholas' mother dies of brooding over the reason why her marriage has turned cold. The little boy loses his confidence and respect in his father. As he traces the footsteps of his father and tries to make sense of this ethereal revelation to which his father scrupulously abides, he realizes that happiness for his family is not meant to come simply, that in some inexorable way his family has been singled out. Nicholas is waiting for a miracle.
When God speaks to Nicholas' father the second time he takes his life. He has sat in front of a heater and fed into it his canvases until the home burns crumbling down around him. Nicholas ponders that his father might have maddened himself with the thought that perhaps there had never been a voice from God and that the ruins of the life in which he finds himself has all been caused by his own folly. So the inconsolable truth about the Coughlans is that there has never been a call, yet nothing makes sense unless one looks at the occurrences in a grand picture. The now coming-of-age Nicholas resolves to recover the only painting that survives the fire - one that his father has given it away as a prize for a poetry contest. It possesses meaning for his life because it has not survived for nothing.
Isabel Gore lives in persistent guilt that she is responsible for her brother's fit at the seaside. She feels a prisoner of what she has done (or has not done) as weeks stretch into months and then years - nobody can shoulder for her the baggage of her heart. It begins to seem as if what has happened on the shelf of rock by the sea has eternally robbed him of speech and movement and has given no reason. Isabel too, is waiting for a miracle.
She never knows she will fall in love during the last year of high school and the love affair will have rendered her mindless about going to university. In utter insolence and insubordination the nuns at the covent school lose control of her - it is one of those moments in life when the plot jolts forward and understanding and planning vanish in a rash manner to an extent that she banishes forever the uncertainty of her feelings for the son of a Dublin tweed hat maker.
But Nicholas and Isabel are made for each other. How would they have known? The series of events that develop around these two unrelated families somehow cross one another's paths and trigger the making of a miracle. All the open-ended threads slowly converge as strangers enter each other's spheres of living in a circuitous manner. While for most of the novel we see how lives shatter with the fall of one day's light, FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE is an unforgettable tale about the illuminating power of love. It's about affirmation of destiny, love, and miracle.
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LibraryThing member haymaai
The Four Letters of Love is a thought-provoking novel that I serendipitously found at the public library used bookstore. Situated in picturesque Ireland, the story begins in the first person with Nicholas, a young twelve year-old boy, telling of how his father received a directive from God
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commanding him to quit his civil servant job and to become an artist painter. Nicolas’ father embarks on his new calling, and abandons the family for long periods of time during his painting trips to Western Ireland. The other main character in the story is Isabel Gore, the daughter of the master teacher living on an island off the Galway coast. Although Isabel’s parents have high aspirations for her, her beauty and high-spirit attract the eye of a bucolic young man named Peader, whom she ends up disastrously marrying. Without giving too much away, this is essentially a love story about Nicholas’ devotion to his father and his undying love for Isabel. Beautifully and lyrically written in a more traditional style of writing, as with Jane Austin, this story led me to ponder issues about destiny and faith, as Nicholas comes to realize that nothing is happenstance, but is all part of God’s plan to complete the weave in the fabric of our lives. I especially loved one passage in which the author states, “In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.” Because this novel is so brilliantly written and provocative, I decided to give it five stars, even though it might not be as light-hearted or frivolous as many of the books that I so enjoy. Show Less
LibraryThing member adrianburke
One of those books which makes you more out of breath the further you read while knowing the experience of that first reading can never be repeated.
LibraryThing member N.W.Moors
What a lovely written book about miracles, faith, angels, love, and magic! Set on the west coast of Ireland and Dublin, Mr. Williams interweaves the stories of Isabel Gore and Nicholas Coughlan. Isabel lives on an island off Galway, the daughter of a poet/teacher and the most beautiful girl on the
The writing is exquisite:
“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.”
My only quibble is that I thought the ending was a bit rushed, but maybe that's because I wanted the book to go on. It's a lovely story that evokes the best of Ireland.
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island, but she is full of guilt for her musical brother's lapse into illness. Nicholas is the son of a civil servant in Dublin who heard the commandment of God to leave his depressed wife and young son in the summers to tramp about the west coast to paint.The writing is exquisite:
“The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of white waves.”
My only quibble is that I thought the ending was a bit rushed, but maybe that's because I wanted the book to go on. It's a lovely story that evokes the best of Ireland.
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Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 1999)