Author: Colm Toibin

YogiBear

I've read two books by Colm Toibin recently.

"The Blackwater Lightship" & "The Master"
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Here is a review from Amazon that sums up "The Master":

Focusing on the life of Henry James, Colm Toibin's The Master goes beyond the usual "novelization" of someone's biography. Toibin has done a tremendous amount of research and has obviously read everything James has written, but he has so distilled this information that he actually recreates Henry James. Most remarkably, he does this while using the third person point of view to tell the story, preserving the objective tone but bringing forth characters and events so vibrant with life that Toibin's James is the man we know from his novels, letters, and journals. When the novel opens in 1895, James's play, Guy Domville, has been booed on its opening night. James, now fifty-two, has hoped for a career as a playwright, believing success on stage will put an end to "his long solitary days" and allow him to spend more time among actors, whom he finds fascinating. Described as "a great stranger...observing the world as a mere watcher from the window," James is a lonely, solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James's early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation.
When James begins writing his stories and novels, he draws inspiration from the people he knows best and the events which have affected their lives and his own. His sister Alice is the model for a child in The Turn of the Screw, his cousin Minny Temple is the inspiration for several of his most important female characters-in "Poor Richard," Daisy Miller, and Portrait of a Lady--and his brother Wilky's wounds in the Civil War provide James with details he includes in other stories. Virtually every aspect of James's life works its way into a story, and as he gets inside the psyches of his characters through his fiction, he reveals his own psyche, his sympathies, and his personal conflicts.
Toibin's dual focus on James's life and its embodiment in his fiction give powerful immediacy and verisimilitude to this novel, and one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James. His connections to great families and writers whose names are well known, and to people willing to accept James completely on his own terms provide Toibin with unlimited source material. It is Toibin's own talents in ordering this information, bringing it to life, and revealing its importance, however, which make this masterful novel so important. Mary Whipple

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"The Blackwater Lightship" is such a captivating book.. I'm going to post Mary Whipple's review again for this one. She sums it up in a nutshell.



Colm Toibin cuts straight to the heart in this sensitive novel of an independent daughter, long estranged from her overly controlling mother, and their attempt to reach some sort of understanding and level of communication. Daughter Helen and mother Lily are drawn to the neutral ground of Helen's grandmother's house in rural Ireland when Helen's brother Declan is gravely ill with AIDS and wants to return to the strand for a last look at the sea. Toibin is both straightforward and graphic in describing Declan's declining health and completely open in describing the romantic relationships of Paul and Larry, Declan's two gay friends who are also attending him at the cottage in Cush. But the focus of the story remains squarely on Helen and Lily and their long estrangement, so intense that Lily was never invited to attend Helen's wedding and, after seven years, still has not seen her grandchildren. In the crucible of Declan's sick room, those attending him are painfully aware of the tenuousness of life, and as they reach out to him with love, they share many of their innermost feelings and the stories that have shaped their lives.In prose that is so simple and so controlled one wonders how it can possibly carry the weight of these emotion packed scenes, Toibin empathizes with Helen, a daughter whose mother failed to meet her emotional needs when she was a child, and then tried to overpower and control her when she became strong enough to stand on her own. At the same time, he explores Lily's competing needs and the limitations imposed on her by her husband's early death and her need to support her family both financially and physically.
The obvious symbolism of the lightship, the wave-washed strand, and the eroding headland on which the grandmother's cottage perches adds weight and universality to the crises facing the participants in this intense and poignant domestic drama. The involved reader will come away with new understandings of the need for connection, the essence of compassion, and the full meaning of love as the characters in this thematically complete novel find their resolutions. Mary Whipple

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**Highly recommended**

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Anyone else read any of his books?

buck65

Yes, the Master is fantastic, the Blackwater Lightship to me was a waste of time.

YogiBear

They're very different books alright & The Master would be my preference too.
I enjoyed Blackwater Lighthouse though.. The old-school Irish banter, the charactors & I liked the setting too.. I found it really visual.

nerdysal

Did not like The Blackwater Lightship at all! I thought it was well written, but I don't like those kind of stories at all. I prefer a happier type of book

simu

nerdysal wrote: »

Did not like The Blackwater Lightship at all! I thought it was well written, but I don't like those kind of stories at all. I prefer a happier type of book

I found it readable but a bit clichéd. Like one of those real-life magazine stories at times. I might give the master a go some time but I'd rather read some of Henry James himself first.

A film was made of the Blackwater Lightship too but it's terribly "oirish-american".

stolenwine

I have alot of time for Colm Toibin, I have just finished "The Story of the Night"(i think Alan Hollinghurst owes him some gratitude(?)) and am looking forward to reading "Homage to Barcelona" this summer.

Writers' rooms: Colm Tóibín-

http://books.guardian.co.uk/graphic/0,,2126103,00.html

LiamMc

Read "Walking along the Border".

Also read a watching the pilgrims go pray around Europe type book. It included a chapter on Lourdes, on some of his early flights to Barcelona he travelled by air-charter to Tarbes and by land to Barcelona. And because he was a young single male travelling, he said, pilgrims travelling to Lourdes, used to presume he was a priest.