The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín
\"I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.\" In the nine captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Toibin delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Toibin's stories manages to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained. A stellar collection from one of the greatest writers in the English language.\n\nReviews\n\nThough better known on these shores as a novelist, Toibin\n(Brooklyn) here proves his mastery of the too-often-dismissed short\nstory form. Each narrative is an all-encompassing world that will\nstop readers on their axis and cause them to reconsider the\nsuddenness, ecstasy, and isolation of human connection in settings\nas divergent as 19th-century England and post-9/11 Spain. (LJ\n11/15/10) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned\nsubsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.\n\nToibin returns to his native shores from Brooklyn for the bulk of\nthese nine pristine stories, all-save one-contemporary tales of\nlives haunted by loss, whether it's the legacy of a sexually\nabusive priest in an already complicated love triangle in "The\nPearl Fishers," the long-absent gay son who returns to Dublin from\nNew York to attend to his mother's last moments in "One Minus One,"\nor the aching void that greets an academic's return to a family\nhome on the Irish coast in the wistful title story. Affairs,\nairports, and deathbeds populate a mature prose that's as tender\nwith descriptions of sexual, often gay, love as it is with the\nheart's more inexpressible reaches, never more so than in the\ncomplex "The Street," where two Pakistanis find love in the\nrepressive backdrop of blue-collar Barcelona only to be met with\nviolence and a curious captivity. These stories go a long way\ntoward establishing Toibin as heir to William Trevor, with\nreverberations that show how life encompasses more than the living.\n(Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Publication Details
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Binding: Paperback
Published by: Picador Australia: , 2010
Edition:
ISBN: 9781405040235 | 1405040238
240 pages.
Book Condition: Very Good
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