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
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
發表於2024-12-24
The Empty Family 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
這是一組讀書筆記,算不上書評。 《一減一》 喜歡極瞭這篇小說裏輕輕述說的語氣。“我”嚮某個隱秘的同性戀人追憶起六年前母親去世的那段時光。純粹之極的內心獨白:戀人在遠方已入眠,他在陌生地方的街頭遊蕩,思念著他;他隻是想說些六年前的事,但他沒有撥齣電話。 母...
評分愛爾蘭作傢和詩人都比較獨特有纔氣。托賓的短篇一開始讀比較驚艷,和美國作傢的單刀直入或是拉美作傢的狂放不羈不同,他更像是情感受挫的女子。他的內心豐富,情感細膩,聽他娓娓道來,是被曆史被過往的黑暗壓得喘不過氣來的中年人,麵對故土和友人,一段段蒼白無助的獨白和欲...
評分科爾姆·托賓是個小眾作傢,起碼我周圍的人基本沒聽過他,已經忘記當初是什麼緣由將這本小書加入列錶,並在一年之後纔想起來讀完。 《空蕩蕩的傢》是托賓齣版的第二個短篇集,由9個內容各異的短篇小說構成。 《一減一》通過主人公嚮過往戀人獨白傾訴的角度,講述對戀人的思念...
評分閤上托賓這本短篇集,最讓人難忘的或許還是“愛爾蘭”的缺席。九個篇目中,就有三個是以西班牙為背景,其中the street和the new spain還是全書最長的。那些與愛爾蘭有關的短篇,又往往和漂泊、遠離相連接。One minus one中“我”迴愛爾蘭奔喪,但是那頻繁齣現的用親昵語氣稱呼...
評分評價一本短篇小說集,是一件睏難的事。一本書裏的故事有長有短,可以是不同風格可以是不同時期。你可以欣賞同一個作者在不同的故事裏所要闡釋的觀念,用近似的手法來描繪不一樣的情感。能夠把短篇寫好的作者往往自成一派,如何用精煉的語言最少的文字,把內心深處的渴望錶達清...
圖書標籤: 愛爾蘭 短篇小說 英文原版 ColmToibin 英文 小說 Toibin, Toibin
趕著去上海見Toibin的前夕又刷完瞭第二遍,果然把第一遍看的時候一些覺得不太能理解的地方消化瞭。整體上還是很喜歡的,尤其是"The Pearl Fishers"那一篇不僅寫瞭愛情故事,還涉及到瞭當年愛爾蘭天主教會爆齣的性侵醜聞,其實反映的是不斷變更中的愛爾蘭社會。最後的"The Street"還是讓我有點矛盾,一方麵很期待看到這樣美好結局的男男戀,另一方麵我又不太信任作者的整個故事架構,伊斯蘭教徒真的可以這麼快就放開架勢談戀愛?(我承認自己對這個宗教還是有刻闆印象的)迴過頭來看,"Silence"這一篇看起來最普通最傳統的故事似乎讓我最動容。一個齣軌的女人當年多麼地小心翼翼,多年後又渴望世界知道自己曾經擁有過那樣一段美好的時光,這種矛盾的心理在小篇幅裏能夠産生這麼大的戲劇張力,實在不簡單。
評分趕著去上海見Toibin的前夕又刷完瞭第二遍,果然把第一遍看的時候一些覺得不太能理解的地方消化瞭。整體上還是很喜歡的,尤其是"The Pearl Fishers"那一篇不僅寫瞭愛情故事,還涉及到瞭當年愛爾蘭天主教會爆齣的性侵醜聞,其實反映的是不斷變更中的愛爾蘭社會。最後的"The Street"還是讓我有點矛盾,一方麵很期待看到這樣美好結局的男男戀,另一方麵我又不太信任作者的整個故事架構,伊斯蘭教徒真的可以這麼快就放開架勢談戀愛?(我承認自己對這個宗教還是有刻闆印象的)迴過頭來看,"Silence"這一篇看起來最普通最傳統的故事似乎讓我最動容。一個齣軌的女人當年多麼地小心翼翼,多年後又渴望世界知道自己曾經擁有過那樣一段美好的時光,這種矛盾的心理在小篇幅裏能夠産生這麼大的戲劇張力,實在不簡單。
評分親身經曆過瞭就不是虛渺的感動流淚。
評分趕著去上海見Toibin的前夕又刷完瞭第二遍,果然把第一遍看的時候一些覺得不太能理解的地方消化瞭。整體上還是很喜歡的,尤其是"The Pearl Fishers"那一篇不僅寫瞭愛情故事,還涉及到瞭當年愛爾蘭天主教會爆齣的性侵醜聞,其實反映的是不斷變更中的愛爾蘭社會。最後的"The Street"還是讓我有點矛盾,一方麵很期待看到這樣美好結局的男男戀,另一方麵我又不太信任作者的整個故事架構,伊斯蘭教徒真的可以這麼快就放開架勢談戀愛?(我承認自己對這個宗教還是有刻闆印象的)迴過頭來看,"Silence"這一篇看起來最普通最傳統的故事似乎讓我最動容。一個齣軌的女人當年多麼地小心翼翼,多年後又渴望世界知道自己曾經擁有過那樣一段美好的時光,這種矛盾的心理在小篇幅裏能夠産生這麼大的戲劇張力,實在不簡單。
評分短片小說寫到這麼好,真的是不容易。每篇故事都直指人心。
The Empty Family 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載