Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Powered by CGISpy.com
|
|
Colm Toibin
Viking 2009
I very much enjoyed this novel. In clear unfussy prose Toibin tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman who cannot find work. Emigrating to New York, she eventually settles to her new life - only to be brought back to Ireland by a family tragedy. Once again, she gradually adapts to her surroundings, until once more she has to return to her new home. It’s a simple story of an ordinary person trying, in a modest way, to take control of her destiny - and failing. Its last few lines (“Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them, and more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more”) are for me up there with other great closing passages (Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, On the Road, Brighton Rock) - but all the way through this story kept my interest and involvement. However, I kept forgetting it was set in the fifties; it could easily have been the twenties, such is the sparsitiy of period detail. This isn’t necessarily a criticism (novels full of carefully selected brand names and headlines can be very annoying) but it is perhaps symptomatic of a larger problem, one which also makes the depiction of place less convincing than it could be (wouldn’t an untravelled Irish girl notice a little more on her first trip to Manhattan, for example?). That said, this is a very good novel, and, in its depiction of arrivals, homesickness, and the mixed emotion of homecoming, second to none.
14th June 2009
http://www.colmtoibin.com/
See also: The Heather Blazing; The Master
Just click below.
Powered by CGISpy.com