One Room in a Castle
An adventurous, intimate exploration of three different Mediterrenean cultures, One Room in a Castle is a collection of letters, poems, and short stories from Connelly’s sojourns in Spain, France, and, most evocatively, on the Greek island where she has lived, on and off, for more than a decade.
Whether horseback riding in the Basque country or eating an impromptu meal with Gypsies in Avignon, Connelly invites the reader to experience the world in her way, with the eyes and the heart wide open. Written as letters, these vignettes provide a glimpse not only into physical landscapes, but into a journey of the heart and mind. Connelly’s fictional pieces skirt the hem of biography and autobiography, providing entry into the surprising rebellion of a Gypsy woman and a bear in Croatia, an unexpected love affair between two artists, and the curious friendship between a Guardia Civil Policeman and a foreigner searching for her missing sister.
A bestseller in Canada, One Room in a Castle incorporates work written in Connelly’s late teens and early twenties, when she first lived in Spain and France. Rarely does the work of a young writer reach publication in such an engaging, elegant form.
REVIEWS
Karen Connelly has an enviable, somewhat disquieting ability to possess the spirit of a place... The traveling self she discloses in One Room in a Castle is young, passionate and terrific at capturing the look and feel of a foreign land. .. One Room in a Castle contains . . . lyrical, evocative prose as well as a few fine short stories and some astute passages of self-discovery.
It is particularly good about sex - rarely in explicit terms, more often as a state of aroused, erotic encounter with the world... The unknown, the faraway, the endlessly strange spring to life in her work.”
- Books in Canada
“The undertow that keeps the reader moving, keeps you compelled, is Connelly's gift--robust, spirited, and poetic--with the language. Her images are memorable without being ostentatious . . . her prose is precisely balanced and invigorating.”
- The Globe and Mail
“. . . a book of letters to friends, readers, and herself in which her pen puzzles out social, sexual, and esthetic tensions; by the time they have taken the shape of this neat, handsome book, the originals have undergone a sea change . . . miraculous.”
- Quill & Quire, January, 1996
“An original, genre-defying work of considerable power.”
- Calgary Herald
“. . . Karen Connelly dares to write letters in an era when that noble art is said to be silenced by the relentless banality of e-mail. In One Room in a Castle - a meld of travelogue, short story, and memoir - Connelly demonstrates the charm of the epistolary form...I found the letters quite transporting, particularly the title segment of the book, in which Connelly tells of her rustic life on the isle of Lesvos . . . [She] is an intrepid wayfarer and an accomplished writer.”
- Ottawa Citizen
“One Room in a Castle is, above all, a celebration. At a time when the end of the century, the millennium, is upon us; when the state of human society and the health of the planet have reached new lows; when we are sick and fearful and the old gods have fled--here is someone who is still and everywhere dazzled by the simple wonder of being alive . . . perhaps Connelly, in particular, is an antidote to the age, gleaning bright days for us in what she herself call “our own era of failure and violent upheaval.”
- Henry Street, 5.2, Fall 1995