Some reviewers may be disappointed that The Orgy does not provide the salaciousness its title suggests. Some may be embarrassed by an author who gives so much of herself in a book that is not labeled autobiography. More are bewildered by not knowing what label to put on it. It is not a novel, or a book about the Irish coast of Kerry, or a description of [the Fair,] an ancient ritual….

The impossibility of putting this book into a customary classification is one reason for reading it. (p. 668)

A first reading of this book left me overwhelmed with its colors and shapes and sounds. I had been to a part of the world of whose location I was hardly aware on the map, and I had come to know it better than places many times revisited, because I had been there with a person of extraordinary perception...