Tag: Literary Others

Reveiw: The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 20 Comments

The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: January 2011
Categories: Literary, Short Stories
Source: Library

Description:


Colm Tóibín’s exquisitely written new stories, set in present-day Ireland, 1970s Spain and nineteenth century England, are about people linked by love, loneliness and desire. Tóibín is a master at portraying mute emotion, intense intimacies that remain unacknowledged or unspoken. In this stunning collection, he cements his status as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times).


“Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, widowed and abandoned by her lover, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. In “Two Women,” an eminent Irish set designer, aloof and prickly, takes a job in her homeland, and is forced to confront devastating emotions she has long repressed. “The New Spain” is the story of an intransigent woman who returns home after a decade in exile and shatters the fragile peace her family has forged in the post-Franco world. And in the breathtaking long story “The Street,” Tóibín imagines a startling relationship between two Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence.


Tóibín’s characters are often difficult and combative, compelled to disguise their vulnerability and longings. Yet he unmasks them, and in doing so offers us a set of extraordinarily moving stories that remind us of the fragility and individuality of human life. As The New York Review of Books has said, Tóibín “understands the tenuousness of love and comfort—and, after everything, its necessity.”


My Thoughts:

Usually I have a difficult time reading short story collections. They run together for me and I can’t stop thinking of the book as a novel. But The Empty Family gave me no such problems. Every story was complete and separate and contained in its own fully formed world. 
I read most of The Empty Family during Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-Thon and finished it up the next day.  I read it at the end of the event. I was tired. No, I was exhausted. The fact that these stories grabbed my attention and kept me awake says a lot.
This book has been out for quite a while but it escaped my notice until I was looking for reading material for The Literary Others LGBT Reading Event. A big thanks to Adam @ Roof Beam Reader for inspiring me to look for books out of my normal reading range! 
Other Blogger’s Thoughts on The Empty Family:
“I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly.”