Mothers and Sons: Stories by Colm Toibin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mothers and Sons: Stories
Book Review: Moments of severence
Summary: 4 Stars
Often I had to search for the mother-son relationship in these stories, because I was looking for a more traditional, warm bond between mothers and their sons, until I found that in these stories it is all about moments at which this bond is disturbed, often even severed. Beautiful prose. What annoyed me was the abrupt ending of several stories, which left me feeling that I missed something. Or can it be that Toibin just wants to focus on those moments of severence?Book Review: Irrisistible and delicious
Summary: 5 Stars
The characters created by Toibin are memorable, sometimes startling, sometimes chilling, and sometimes wryly humorous. My favorite is an art thief, from a blue collar background, who burns masterpieces to avoid being arrested by the police, who were notified of his crime by his alcoholic mother who got drunk and ran her mouth...
Each story is tightly crafted - some about a worshipful relationship, some about co-dependence, some about total distance. There's reality and exploration of the dark corners of our familiar relationships.
Book Review: Memorable stories
Summary: 5 Stars
The thread that ties the beautifully written nine stories in this book together is that in each one there is a complex relationship between a mother and a son. I don't think that all of them `focus' on this relationship, as the blurb on the back has it, for only in four of the nine stories is it central. Rather, each one seems to me to focus on either the mother or the son; but whichever it is, we are let deeply into that person's thoughts and see the world through that person's eyes, and mostly it is a sad or even tragic world. A death figures in several of the stories. Some are most evocatively set in various very Irish communities: a criminal one in the first story, an Irish pub in the second, a small village where everyone knows everyone else in others. The long last story is set in the mountains of Spain. All are memorable in their deceptively simple style and in their psychological content. Book Review: "She looked at herself as though a stranger": Complex Visions of Families
Summary: 4 Stars
Colm Toibin's _Mothers and Sons_ (2007) is a collection of nine short stories that loosely address the permutations of the mother-son relationship, primarily within Irish families, within the larger context of modern lives. All of these stories address strains or misunderstandings, where either the mother or the son is unable to connect with the other. Yet Toibin's stories are about more than this, and the mother-son theme is developed as an understated, almost minor theme, which makes the collection that much more fascinating. Toibin's title _Mothers and Sons_ insists that readers focus on a theme, which while important, could otherwise seem secondary in any given story. The suggestion is that the mother-son relationship is primary, in ways that the characters fail to grasp, and which the stories themselves purposely obscure.
In "The Use of Reason," a story about the haunting textures of memory and repression, Toibin introduces us to an unnamed Dublin thief, who has undertaken his biggest crime of his life, an art heist one with international implications, and must decide how to dispose of the stolen property. As a backdrop to the story, the narrator describes how the thief's mother has developed the dangerous habit of gossiping about her son's exploits when she is drunk at the pub. The thief's final decision regarding the paintings, including a Rembrandt of an old woman that likely symbolizes his own mother, follows a conversation where he demands that his mother stop "yapping," not about himself, ironically, but about his brother Billy.
All of the stories are memorable and original. "The Name of the Game," for example, describes in detail how a widow in her early forties with two children sets up a fish and chips and a beer and wine discount story in her husband's families' generation-old grocery. The name of the fish and chips shop is "The Monument," with ironic associations about her deceased husband and his family. "A Priest in the Family" tells the story of a seventy-year old mother's response to her son, a priest in the family, accused of sexual abuse. In "The Famous Blue Raincoat," a sixteen-year old son and aspiring musician develops an appreciation for his mother's former musical career in the 1970s--insisting that his mother's songs be re-released--while failing to recognize the painful memories that this evokes for her.
The final story in the collection, "A Long Winter," shifts unexpectedly to an isolated family of two sons, a husband, and wife in rural northern Spain. The story chronicles the disappearance a wife who leaves her family by foot in the middle of the winter after her husband pours out all of her drink. She is presumed dead, the victim of a sudden, impenetrable snow storm. Throughout the whole story, the father and son search and then wait hesitantly for the spring thaw to recover the mother's body. This story ends brilliantly.
In my opinion, the first and last stories in the collection are the strongest. In each story, as we struggle to uncover characters' complex motives we are brought back to the mother-son relationship, a bond which like the mother in "A Long Winter" is presumably buried, awaiting discovery or rescue.
Book Review: Mothers & Sons - ok reading...
Summary: 3 Stars
This book came highly recommended. I thought it was an OK read - nothing spectacular.