![Cover image for Brooklyn [Audiobook]](https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&client=charlottecofl&upc=&oclc=308176798&isbn=9781433291906&issn=/LC.JPG "Cover image for Brooklyn [Audiobook]")
Available:*
Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Punta Gorda | Audiobooks | FIC TOI CD | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Tibn has created one of fictions most memorable heroines and in Brooklyn, a luminous novel of devastating power. Tibn demonstrates once again his astonishing range and that he is a true master of nuanced prose, emotional depth, and narrative virtuosity.
Reviews (4)
Spanish Language Review
"La prosa de Tóibín és tant elegant per la seva simplicitat, com complexa per les emocions que evoca" New York Times
Guardian Review
One of the striking things about Colm Toibin, perhaps the most admired Irish writer to emerge since John Banville, is the feeling in his work of a powerful sense of humour being strategically suppressed. Toibin's writing isn't humourless; there are darkly comic scenes in The Master and some witty lines of dialogue in The Blackwater Lightship, and his journalism is frequently very funny. But in his novels, on the whole, he's so intent on leading his readers where he wants them without letting them catch him doing it that making them laugh too often might strike him as counterproductive. His fiction works hard to create the illusion that the characters reveal themselves almost independently of the narrating voice. It also aims to depict complicated feelings and interactions with a minimum of fuss and portentousness, using simple words and a precisely controlled tone that implies a certain hush. Toibin, it should be added, has serious interests. These include Catholicism and the legacy of Irish nationalism, the inward sufferings of gay people throughout most of history, and difficult emotional currents within families. Spanish and Latin American politics are part of the background to The South and The Story of the Night, and he touches in several books on the devastation done by Aids to gay men in the 1980s. He writes well about women, often putting them centre stage, and about people who feel compelled to hold their feelings at a distance, his Henry James in The Master being a good example. At the same time, he loves form and imposes strict rules on himself concerning point of view and narrative manipulation, rejecting tricks as firmly as Raymond Carver did. His plain style is unostentatious even in its plainness, avoiding musical balance but also taking care not to seem mannered or excessively clipped. In Brooklyn, Toibin continues to conjure strong emotions from the gaps between his lines, but this time humour has more of a place in the range of available tones. He fits it in partly through lightly comic dialogue. "No one likes flies," a haughty Wexford shopkeeper tells the heroine, a young woman named Eilis Lacey, "especially on a Sunday." Yet the jokes aren't free-floating. Toibin gives Eilis - whose point of view is strictly adhered to throughout - a well-tuned ear for such speech, which she uses to entertain her mother and elder sister. The reader quickly sees that there's something brave and sad about her spirited performances over the dinner table in the economically stagnant provincial Ireland of the early 1950s. Her father is dead; her older brothers, much missed by her mother, are working in England; there are few prospects of marriage and few jobs in Enniscorthy. Eilis's sister Rose, whose earnings from an office job support the family, plays golf in the evenings. At the club she meets a priest, back from America on his holidays, who knew their parents years before. The priest offers to arrange a job in Brooklyn for Eilis, who soon finds herself crossing the Atlantic third-class, fully understanding that, by organising this, Rose has sacrificed her own future. Toibin patiently dramatises Eilis's homesickness and her brushes with enforced American good cheer, her relations with her fellow inmates at an all-Irish boarding house, her work at a moderately enlightened department store, her night classes, and her pleased discovery of all-night heating and affordable women's fashions. In time she meets a handsome Italian-American man who speaks seriously and tactfully of marriage. Then a death summons her back to Ireland, where she finds that America has made her glamorous and desirable, and faces a choice between the old life and the new. This simple-sounding story takes on depth and resonance in a number of ways, starting with what it leaves out. There's no awed first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline; even the account of Eilis's first trip to a baseball game focuses on her boyfriend's way of being with his brothers, not the chance to write a set piece. Overemphasis is almost obsessively dodged. "'She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now,' he said": most writers would have put the speech tag between the two sentences, but not Toibin. Within his stern parameters, however, he's able to convey pathos, sharp observation, and finely detailed psychological realism. Brooklyn 's symmetries and neatly circular plotting aren't camouflaged as heavily as the rest of its artistry, but there's no mistaking the book for a conventional historical weepie. The word "love" is applied more often to Eilis's feelings about her room or her textbooks than to the men in her life, and Toibin doesn't sentimentalise his central character's experience of either country. We're used to getting these kinds of stories from an American perspective in which moving to America is the natural thing to do. Toibin makes his emigrant's story more painful without simply reversing those assumptions or ruling out an ironic distance from postwar Irish insularity. (A prim young woman from Belfast shares her views on Brooklyn's Italian and Jewish populations: "I didn't come all the way to America, thank you, to hear people talking Italian on the street or see them wearing funny hats.") Eilis herself is an interesting character, less defenceless and more troubled than she initially seems, and the novel uncovers the "dark, uncertain" areas within her with a very light touch. Her rejection of her landlady's proffered friendship, and her encounter with her sexually wistful female boss, are handled as delicately as any scene Toibin has done, although here and there his delicacy doesn't exclude a note of ribald amusement as well as worldly melancholy. Caption: article-taylertoibin.1 This simple-sounding story takes on depth and resonance in a number of ways, starting with what it leaves out. There's no awed first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline; even the account of [Eilis Lacey]'s first trip to a baseball game focuses on her boyfriend's way of being with his brothers, not the chance to write a set piece. Overemphasis is almost obsessively dodged. "'She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now,' he said": most writers would have put the speech tag between the two sentences, but not [Colm Toibin]. Within his stern parameters, however, he's able to convey pathos, sharp observation, and finely detailed psychological realism. Brooklyn 's symmetries and neatly circular plotting aren't camouflaged as heavily as the rest of its artistry, but there's no mistaking the book for a conventional historical weepie. The word "love" is applied more often to Eilis's feelings about her room or her textbooks than to the men in her life, and Toibin doesn't sentimentalise his central character's experience of either country. - Christopher Tayler.
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY now and then, with a thrill of connection, you come across a passage in a book that feels as if it had been written with exact foreknowledge of your state of mind: a soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. During a long-ago solo trip to Rome - a self-assigned distraction after a difficult break-up - I remember opening George Eliot's "Silas Marner" while sitting at the window of a high room in a cold albergo (once a nuns' cloister) as strains of conversation floated up from the courtyard. Describing her protagonist's new start in a new town, Eliot wrote of the relief that "minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love" may feel on finding themselves in a "new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap." In such a setting, she wrote, "The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories." For Silas Marner, this "exile" was self-sought. But for Eilis Lacey, the biddable daughter at the center of Colm Toibin's new novel, "Brooklyn," her leave-taking from Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, and her resettlement in New York in the fall of 1951 are imposed on her by her energetic, well-meaning older sister, Rose. Young, docile and incurious, unscarred by heartbreak or reversals of fortune, Eilis has no desire or need to quit her widowed mother, her friends, her familiar surroundings. Her "old faith and love" are intact, and she seeks no distance from her memories. But she submits to Rose's plan for her transplanting, bending to a superior force of will, wishing to do what her mother and sister expect of her, wishing to please. "Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbors, the same routines in the same streets," Toibin writes. "She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared." Confused by her family's "almost unnaturally happy" mood in the days before her departure, Eilis is relieved to hear her mother, in response to a friend's casual inquiry, blurt, "Oh, it'll kill me when she goes." But go she must, Eilis assumes, even though she "would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose could go instead." But the Lacey women cannot speak plainly to one another. "They could do everything," Toibin writes, "except say out loud what it was they were thinking." And so, too young to understand the consequences of her reticence, too obedient to bolt at the dock, too humble to imagine that her own life is her own business, Eilis boards the liner for America, an irrevocable step that her mother, her sister and Eilis herself might never have wished her to make had they thought it through. America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn't such a person; detachment isn't part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is. What were they thinking? They wouldn't, or couldn't, say. Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. His characters and plots vary widely. In his beautiful, painful novel "The Blackwater Lightship," he coaxed a touchy, lone-wolf woman to stiffly re-embrace her mother, their reconciliation precipitated by her brother's battle with AIDS. In his best-known novel, "The Master," he animated the inner world of Henry James. And in his story collection, "Mothers and Sons," he tapped the hidden bonds and vexed motivations of diffident men and women - from thieves, shop owners and farmers to a grandmother who plays favorites and gay men who rally to the side of a friend whose mother has died. In one of these stories, "Famous Blue Raincoat," a woman listens to a song, recorded by her long-dead sister, taken from an album her son has found in the garage. The song "gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister's face." She did not want that clarity, Toibin adds. "She hoped she would never have to listen to it again." In another story, "A Priest in the Family," an aged mother accepts the fact that her son, a priest, will go on trial for molesting teenage boys. "When people stopped to talk to her, she was unsure if they knew about her son's disgrace, or if they too had become so skilled at the plain language of small talk that they could conceal every thought from her, every sign, as she could from them." Yet when her son urges her to leave town during the trial, to "spare" her, she refuses. "When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance," she observes, "he had the face of a small boy." She tells him: "Whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going away. I'll be here." THROUGH all these books and stories, intimations of attachment, abandonment and strong feeling (felt but rarely spoken) fall like a plumb line. Toibin's new novel stands apart because its protagonist has such an uncritical nature that she doesn't see she has grounds for complaint, much less possess any impulse to initiate confrontation. But slowly, equably, and without malice, Eilis exacts a bittersweet revenge for the expatriation she never intended - or, rather, one unfolds for her unsought, organically. In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis - a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion - Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis's passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal. Accompanying her on the ghastly voyage from Ireland to America, where the sea swell has all the passengers green and reeling, he soon brings her to a Brooklyn boarding house run by a respectable Irishwoman. Eilis numbs herself against nostalgia until letters from home awaken her homesickness. Then she grieves. "She was nobody here," she thinks. "It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty." Unlike Silas Marner, unlike intentional voyagers everywhere, Eilis hasn't sought the consolations of anonymity. And so, when she meets a man, an Italian-American named Tony, she does what her instinct dictates: puts down roots. When her family calls her back to Enniscorthy, Tony seems to her like "part of a dream from which she had woken." And yet, back in Ireland, Eilis knows that if she were in New York it would be Enniscorthy that seemed like a "strange, hazy dream." Is it surprising if a seed grows where it lands, once it's been scattered? Can it be helped? In "Brooklyn," Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
This latest work from Toibin (www.colmtoibin.com), which follows The Master Mothers and Sons (2006), also available from Blackstone Audio, takes place in the early 1950s and centers on Eilis Lacey, who leaves her hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland, for Brooklyn, NY, in search of work and a new life. Narrator Kirsten Potter's (www.kirstenpotter.com) smooth voice and affinity for accents pull listeners along through the often plodding narrative. A lightweight work of literary fiction from IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Toibin that will appeal to fans of the McCourt brothers and those interested in Irish American history or 1950s Brooklyn. [The Scribner hc was called "more accessible and more sublime than [Toibin's] previous works" and was "highly recommended," LJ 3/15/09.-Ed.]-Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
