Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Brooklyn, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. Biography Colm Tóibín is a literary star of the "new" Ireland, the one -- as noted by National Public Radio's Jacki Lyman -- is short on whiskey and St. Patrick and long on cell phones, personal computers, and a stage set for economic opportunity. This is an Ireland where the people stop to cheer an author, yes, an author, whose latest novel has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, even though its key subject matter is the protagonist's struggle with his homosexuality. "When I went down to get my groceries, people stopped their car and got out of them and waved at me and looked at me as though I was an athlete and shouted at me, ‘Come on, you can do it. You can do it,'?" Tóibín said on NPR's All Things Considered in 2000. "And I basked in the sunshine of Irish approval and love for about three weeks.... You know, sort of -- I keep wondering when this, you know, backlash or something is going to happen, but I'm afraid it isn't going to happen. I'm afraid the country has changed, and being a writer there is actually quite a nice thing these days." In fiction, travelogues, essays, and newspaper columns, Tóibín has established himself as a writer who can connect both the political and the personal to a sense of place. Though his work has often been informed by the political history of Ireland, he has also drawn on his travels to places like Spain and Argentina to create settings for his work. And, even though his current home of Dublin has never made an appearance in any of his fiction, the environs of his youth -- County Wexford -- have been prominent. The Washington Post, in a 2000 review of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, which Tóibín edited, called him a "journalist and critic of influence, a brilliant novelist steadily harvesting his own postage-stamp piece of Wexford as diligently as Faulkner worked Mississippi." "Colm Tóibín has established himself as a major and distinctive voice in contemporary Irish fiction," the Dictionary of Literary Biography has noted. "While his work makes much of the complex associations between people and place, he eschews easy stereotypes of Irishness in favor of the often-contradictory impulses that pull on contemporary lives. Tóibín was born into a family that had a long history in his hometown. His father, who died when Tóibín was 12, was a local schoolteacher, and his grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was twice imprisoned by British authorities for civil disobedience against British rule. Tóibín explored this history as a writer, following four years teaching English in Barcelona, Spain. He began as a features editor but moved to editing a current affairs magazine and joined the Sunday Independent in Dublin in 1985 as a columnist. As an author, he started by writing travelogues on Ireland and Spain before publishing his first novel in 1990. The South, which draws on Ireland's Catholic-Protestant tensions as well as Tóibín's life in Spain, is about an Irish woman who leaves her husband and son and moves to Spain, falls in love with a political artist, and returns to Ireland as an artist herself, once her son is grown. This novel would establish Tóibín's reputation as a writer with a keen sensibility for characterization ("His novels have been noted for their deft characterizations, particularly of women, as evidenced by the strong female protagonist in The South," noted Contemporary Literary Criticism), but it wasn't until later novels such as The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship that readers would realize his insight into gay characters as well. "This is not a simple, upbeat story about gay liberation or political activism," Merle Rubin wrote in The Christian Science Monitor in 1997. "Powerfully imagined and tautly written, it is a subtly shaded portrait of a country in transition, a culture beginning to reflect important political changes, and a man coming to a new understanding of himself." David Bahr, writing in The Advocate in 2000, predicted that The Blackwater Lightship -- now that it had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize -- would finally make Tóibín known outside his magazine's primary readership: "His latest...should finally prove to straight American readers what many gay people have long known: that Tóibín is one of the more honest and subtly powerful novelists publishing today.... Perceptive and moving, The Blackwater Lightship again reveals Tóibín to be the kind of restrained, quiet writer whose prose feels as natural as breathing. His poetic narrative is so understated that its profound lyricism often takes you by surprise, infusing a potentially familiar tale with vibrant new life." Mixing fiction and biography in 2004, Tóibín penned a novel inspired by the life of Henry James. "Ambitious and gracefully plotted," said the New Statesman. In the pages of London's Observer, a previous Tóibín skeptic confessed he had been swayed. "There's little in Colm Tóibín's previous work, to some of which this reviewer has been immune or even mildly allergic, to prepare for the startling excellence of his new novel," Adam Mars Jones wrote, "The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture." Moving fully into nonfiction, Tóibín continued to impress. The New Statesman observed that The Irish Famine: A Documentary was "no arid survey of the historiography of the famine, but a stimulating quest, prompted by a personal and vocational curiosity. And Joseph Olshan, writing in Entertainment Weekly in 1995, awarded Tóibín's The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe an A, not only for its ability to dissect the Church's close relationship with European politics and social order. "[W]hat Tóibín comes back to is the transcendent power of Catholic ritual," Olshan writes. "Indeed, in a very moving centerpiece, Tóibín describes a therapy session during which he relives his father's death and comes to realize that his most profound wish is to bless his deceased parent with the sign of the cross. This is an extraordinary document." But it may always be the intensely personal moments in his fiction that will always stand out. Susan Salter Reynolds noted as much in the Los Angeles Times in 2000. "There is little reconciliation in Colm Tóibín's novels; moments in which the stage is set for it usually pass," she wrote. "His novels build to these moments, fraught with potential, from which the air goes out with a nasty little hiss, and a new chapter, full of reasons not to live, begins.... It's good to read Tóibín's honest novels, in which human beings fail to forgive, fail to understand. We spend so much of our lives in the dark, shouldn't literature face this as squarely as we must?" Good To Know Tóibín's novel The Story of Night is No. 84 on the Publishing Triangle's list of the best 100 gay and lesbian novels of all time. He counts two books by James Baldwin -- Giovanni's Room and Go Tell It on the Mountain -- as major influences on his work. Tóibín covered the downfall of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1985. He joined such authors as Roddy Doyle in the 1997 novel Finbar's Hotel, in which each of the seven authors wrote individual chapters set in the same 24-hour period at a fading hotel. Hometown: Dublin, Ireland Date of Birth: 五月 30, 1955 Place of Birth: Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland Education: St. Peter's College, Wexford; University College, Dublin, B.A. in English and history Website: http://www.colmtoibin.com
发表于2024-11-26
The Empty Family 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书
圣荷西飞华盛顿,经停丹佛。廉价航空的座椅后背没有任何娱乐设施,只好翻出Kindle里买来后还未读过的《空房间》,来自爱尔兰作家科尔姆·托宾的短篇小说集。在几十页琐碎的回忆片段之后,我的思绪飞离了爱尔兰的漫长冬夜来到常年雾气弥漫的旧金山。今天的航班是我在半年多的旅...
评分总有一天,人们会开始讨论爱情的。大多人并不知道她什么时候会出现,什么时候会离去,有时候即便面面相觑,也互不相识。 喜欢上一个人,你会发现万物甚美 而爱上一个人,你会开始梦见死亡 当爱情来了又走,一切看似风平浪静,可她终究不会饶过任何人。 不久前读完科尔姆·...
评分爱尔兰作家和诗人都比较独特有才气。托宾的短篇一开始读比较惊艳,和美国作家的单刀直入或是拉美作家的狂放不羁不同,他更像是情感受挫的女子。他的内心丰富,情感细腻,听他娓娓道来,是被历史被过往的黑暗压得喘不过气来的中年人,面对故土和友人,一段段苍白无助的独白和欲...
评分合上托宾这本短篇集,最让人难忘的或许还是“爱尔兰”的缺席。九个篇目中,就有三个是以西班牙为背景,其中the street和the new spain还是全书最长的。那些与爱尔兰有关的短篇,又往往和漂泊、远离相连接。One minus one中“我”回爱尔兰奔丧,但是那频繁出现的用亲昵语气称呼...
评分这是我第一次纯用耳朵“看”完的一本书。随着8小时35分钟全文朗读的抑扬顿挫,无数个画面渐次浮起。 托宾是文学化的优秀作家,背向这个浮躁时代而写作,他这本最新中短篇小说集里的故事大概多少都带点自传性,好几位主角是离乡多年重归故里的爱尔兰人。叙事多采取插叙回忆的方...
图书标签: 爱尔兰 短篇小说 英文原版 ColmToibin 英文 小说 Toibin, Toibin
From the internationally celebrated author of Brooklyn and The Master, and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, comes a stunning new book of fiction. In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín 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 Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained. Like Tóibín's celebrated novels, and his previous short story collection, Mothers and Sons, reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, The Empty Family will further confirm Tóibín's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power." (Los Angeles Times) From the Hardcover edition
短片小说写到这么好,真的是不容易。每篇故事都直指人心。
评分短片小说写到这么好,真的是不容易。每篇故事都直指人心。
评分短片小说写到这么好,真的是不容易。每篇故事都直指人心。
评分亲身经历过了就不是虚渺的感动流泪。
评分短片小说写到这么好,真的是不容易。每篇故事都直指人心。
The Empty Family 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书