Mothers and Sons: Stories by Colm Toibin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mothers and Sons: Stories
Book Review: Haunting
Summary: 3 Stars
I realise that I'll undoubtedly be shot down in flames for daring to criticize this book but I must be true to my own feelings on it, as must any honest reviewer. This is a collection of short stories, set mainly in Ireland and with that overlying sadness that seems inevitable in Irish tales. The relationships between the mothers and sons are all different but all have an unbreakable link between them that survives, even when things are at their worst. Other reviewers have listed the stories in detail...the drug fueled rave, following the mother's funeral, the blind love which excuses the paedophilic priest etc. so I won't rehash them. Admittedly the writing is that of a master craftsman, polished to perfection and as precise as the work of a great artist, but I simply didn't enjoy the book, feeling a great cloud of depression fall over me..perhaps it's just that the Irish melancholy got too much for me! Book Review: The new Dubliners
Summary: 5 Stars
These are some of the fullest short stories I have ever read. Reading Toibin, you feel in the hands of a master storyteller. His stories are perfectly shaped, understated yet unforgettable, precise and graceful. You get the sense that Toibin loves his characters, these isolated, fractured, haunted souls and wants to protect them. But he wants you to see and love them too, and so he gives you the slightest peek at what remains hidden. And if he's done his job (and he doesn't fail once in this collection), you see something that perhaps, surprisingly, you have once known.Book Review: A poignant collection of short stories from an accomplished author
Summary: 5 Stars
There's little doubt that Irish culture holds in considerable regard the ability to tell an absorbing tale. The country's literature boasts a rich tradition of compelling short story writers --- among them James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and the modern master, William Trevor. Fresh from his acclaimed novel of the life of Henry James, THE MASTER, Colm T?ib?n, in his first collection of short fiction, shows that he has the talent to someday join their august company.
MOTHERS AND SONS recognizes that perhaps no other family relationship is more fraught with the tension between intimacy and distance than this one. In the thematically linked stories of this collection, all but one of which are set in modern-day Ireland, T?ib?n chooses to emphasize the circumstances that isolate mothers and sons and the failures of communication that often make it impossible to bridge that gap.
The stories in MOTHERS AND SONS don't feature much in the way of dramatic action and tend to be somewhat monochromatic in their tone and pacing. What T?ib?n offers that more than compensates for these shortcomings is his gift for sharp and often painful glimpses into the lives of characters struggling to deal with the harsh reality life has handed them. Typical of these insights is the one that appears at the conclusion of "A Journey," the shortest story in the collection. There, Sally contemplates the grim scene that confronts her when she returns home with her 20-year-old son who's been hospitalized for depression, and enters the bedroom where her husband lies crippled from a stroke. Examining herself in the mirror and deciding from that glance to let her hair go gray, Sally is "struck for a moment by a glimpse of a future in which she would need to muster every ounce of selfishness she had."
Among the most poignant stories in the book is "Famous Blue Raincoat." In it, a teenage boy discovers some albums recorded by a Dublin folk-rock band in which his mother and late aunt sang in the early '70s. Hoping to please his mother, he transfers the albums to CDs, but instead evokes for her only the memories of her sister's mysterious death. "Now, as the CD came to an end," T?ib?n writes, "she hoped she would never have to listen to it again."
In "A Priest in the Family," T?ib?n skillfully undermines the clich?d portrayal of an aging Irish mother doting on her son who has decided to join the priesthood. In its place, he offers the story of Molly, still vigorous in her late 70s, as she drives a car and works to master the Internet, but who's "not sure" she believes in the power of prayer. When Molly learns that her son Frank, a local parish priest, is about to go on trial for sexual abuse of some former students, the tragic circumstances provide them with an opportunity for a kind of reconciliation.
The collection's final story, the novella-length "A Long Winter," is the only one that doesn't take place in Ireland. Set in a village in Spain's Pyrenees Mountains, it chronicles the disappearance of a woman who abandons her unnamed husband and son Miquel, when the husband resorts to harsh measures to halt her problem drinking. She is caught in a blizzard that blows into the region a few hours after she leaves home on foot, and most of the story recounts Miquel's search for her, alternating between the fading hope that she will be found alive and his fear that her body finally will be discovered, devoured by vultures, when the snow melts.
In each of these stories, T?ib?n's prose is controlled and burnished. Only a mature, self-assured writer would launch the first story in the collection, "The Use of Reason," with sentences like these --- repetitive, and yet brilliant in their repetition: "The city was a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty."
At the midpoint of his career, Colm T?ib?n has demonstrated his ability to master a variety of literary forms. With MOTHERS AND SONS, readers can add the short story to that list and can only look forward to the next offering of this accomplished author.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
Book Review: Not the Stories Of The Second Sunday In May
Summary: 4 Stars
4.5 stars
"Sometimes they're more about the mothers, sometimes the sons, but most every story in Colm T?ib?n's Irish-inflected collection is expertly woven with the threads of devotion, obligation, practical self-interest, and naked emotional need that can tether even the most distant of mothers and sons together. In his shorter tales, T?ib?n can let those threads dangle awkwardly. It's only when he stretches out that T?ib?n fully inhabits his characters in Story Collection, letting them breathe beyond the narrow roles prescribed by the title." Entertainment Weekly
Com Toibin has written a novel that tells stories of mothers and sons, but often one or the other are not present. This is not your usual set of stories that you would discuss on that certain second Sunday in May with your mother. Oh, no, this is the reality. There is love and comfort and caring, but there is also the mess life makes. Each character in each story has his own story to tell. The stories start in Colm Toibin's Dublin and they work their way to the coast and beyond. We feel the land and see it in mind's eye. Not one story is my favorite, the collection of them all tells the complete story of mothers and sons. The chapter headings tell us a story in itself. Nine stories and some I will mention:
'The Use of Reason'- a man who is a thief has his secrets given away by his drinking mom.
'A Song'- a mother and son who do not know each other but connect in a fashion through a song.
'The Name of the Game'- a mother left penniless after her husband's death but she refuses to give in and leaves a legacy for her son.
'Famous Blue Raincoat'- a mother who was part of a singing group but is reluctant to tell her son the story. Leonard Cohen devotees will recognize this title.
'A Long Winter' a mother who drinks but will stop only in her own good time, and the family who loves her but who can't seem to connect.
"The short story is a craftsman's form, and Toibin's craft is immaculate. Not many writers in Britain and Ireland are working at this level of intensity and seriousness, with not a slack sentence in 270 pages and nothing shoddy or easily sardonic throughout. The short story also seems an ideal form for a writer much more interested in emotion, and the slow exposing of a character, than in action or community." Pico Iyer
I picked up this book and expected something reassuring and warm, but it is part of Colm Toibin's vision to show us that mothers and sons are often not what they seem, and often have missed connections. In some way these are stories of people who are not there. There is love and devotion and hard work and jobs and anger. There is not much mentioned of the fathers, but you know they are there. These are very moving stories and will stay with me. A mother of a son, and I will take the wisdom from Colm Toibin. Highly Recommended. prisrob 1/21/07
Book Review: "Precious and Fragile" Stories
Summary: 5 Stars
As the title indicates, Colm Toibin has written nine stories about mothers and sons. All of them are set in either the author's native country, Ireland or that part of the world he loves, Spain. Some of his characters, both mothers and sons, find themselves in life-changing events. In "A Long Winter" Miquel is faced with the disappearance and most certain death of his alcoholic mother who becomes lost in a snowstorm. Molly ("A Priest in the Family") discovers, after everyone else in the town does, that her priest son has been charged with child molestion and most certainly will go to jail. Others like Luke in the hauntingly beautiful story entitled "Famous Blue Raincoat" after the exquisite Leonard Cohen song merely discovers old tapes of songs from recordings that his mother and aunt made years ago and has no way of knowing why listening to them is so painful for his mother Lisa. Many of Toibin's characters exhibit a stoicism that should be instructive to all of us; while they may not lead lives of quiet desperation, they certainly lead lives of quiet resignation.
Mr. Toibin's language-- as he demonstrated so admirably in THE MASTER-- fits perfectly with his stories. His sentences are remarkably free of ornamentation and never get in the way of the story he is telling. His characters occasionally have quiet epiphanies. Molly from "A Priest in the Family" observes that her sister's spending a lot of time alone "was changing her face, making her responses slower, her jaw set. Her eyes had lost their kind glow." In a painfully poignant passage from "Famous Blue Raincoat" Lisa on her first visit to the United States to identify and bury her beloved sister Julie finds herself in what she describes as "a land of ghosts." Finally in the longest and best story included here, "A Long Winter" Miquel "associated his years of military service with dreams of home. . . he wondered why he had never viewed his life with his family in the village as precious and fragile," a phrase that is appropriate for these fine stories indeed-- precious and fragile.
Mr. Toibin is quite simply one of our best living writers.