What do actors bring to a performance or a reading of poetry that authors do not? What makes Ben Whishaw right for this material? This is simple: Ben Whishaw’s voice, his commitment to getting things right, his sensitivity to language, his presence.

https://www.92ny.org/insider/colm-toibin-on-adapting-seamus-heaney

Colm Tóibín’s novel "Long Island", the sequel to "Brooklyn", will be released in May 2024.

***SPOILERS***

"A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn - perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever.”

Let's cross fingers it includes a certain Irish male character 🥰

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

- Colm Tóibín

Born and bred in Wexford, ‘Ireland’s corner county’, author Colm Tóibín cannot escape his home place or his favourite pub - nor would he want to, as he reveals in the title essay in his new collection, A Guest at the Feast.

I know when to go out; I know when to stay in

From "How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann's Head":

"Tóibín’s appetite for social life is reminiscent of one of his idols, Henry James, who accepted a hundred and seven invitations to dinner in London during the winter season of 1878-79. Tóibín thinks that his own record occurred in 1981, during his years as a journalist in Dublin: almost every night, he said, he was “out drinking with friends and hanging out in every pub, going to every art thing.” In part, Tóibín is searching, like James, for an anecdote that will grow into a story. The germ can lie fallow in his mind for a long time. His best-known novel, 'Brooklyn'—which was published in 2009, and later was adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan—took its inspiration from a chance comment made by a visitor paying a condolence call after the death of his father, more than forty years earlier, when Tóibín was twelve and growing up near the Irish coast, south of Dublin. 'One evening, a woman came and said her daughter had gone to Brooklyn and showed us all these letters,'”' he recalled. 'When she was gone, I heard people saying that the daughter had come back from America and not told anyone she’d married there.' "I asked Tóibín several times why he enjoyed being so busy—was it a way to escape 'the dark side of his soul,' as his Mann character muses in the new novel? Tóibín resists analysis in general. Once, when I inquired if he was happy, he answered, 'I don’t know what you mean by "happy."' This time, he initially quoted the musical 'Oklahoma!': '"I’m just a girl who can’t say no."' But I pressed him, and eventually he said, 'I think I’m sort of sad, and I’m not sad when I’m out with people—the sadness just sort of goes, departs, leaves me.' I wasn’t sure if I’d achieved a breakthrough or been rewarded for my persistence. Tóibín tries to please, if he can."

From "Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self"

In the midst of writing a novel, Oates sometimes felt so powerful—as if singled out—that she was startled when she passed store windows and saw her small, ordinary reflection. She made use of any stretch of free time, plotting the end of a novel while she was getting a cavity filled, or writing in the car on the way to book events. If her writing was going well, she didn’t want to stop ('one image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another'), and if it was going badly she also didn’t want to stop, because she needed to “get through the blockade, or around it, over it under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.' (After a few hours away from her desk, revising felt 'as if one is coming home.') Her friend Emily Mann told me, 'I’ve seen her, in the middle of a party, check out, and I think, She’s just written a chapter.' To waste time made her feel 'slithering, centerless,' she wrote in her journal, 'a 500-pound jellyfish unable to get to this desk.' Oates was friends with Susan Sontag, who had a busy social life, and after the two spent time together in New York City Oates told her, 'In some respects, I am appalled by the way you seem to be squandering your energy.' She reminded Sontag that 'the pages you perfect, day after day,' will be the 'means by which you define your deeper and more permanent self.'"

Brooklyn, C. Tóibín, 2009

Hello, just some romantic vibes to your evening. Have you seen the Me Before You movie or read the book?

Books Read in June:

1). The Pumpkin Eater (Penelope Mortimer)

2). In the Woods (Tana French)

3). White on White (Aysegül Savas)

4). The Lost Properties of Love (Sophie Ratcliffe)

5). Exteriors (Annie Ernaux)

6). All the Beloved Ghosts (Alison MacLeod)

7). The Queen of the Night (Alexander Chee)

8). The Manningtree Witches (A.K. Blakemore)

9). Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín)

For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.

The Master by Colm Tóibín

Unused cover for

Clytemnestra

By Colm Tóibín.

Design by Michael Morris.

Well Brooklyn the book was a little different from the film… Eilis was more complex in the book for sure

What is a single life? There are always others. Others like us come and live. Each breath we breathe is followed by another breath, each step by another step, each word by the next one, each presence in the world by another presence.

- Colm Tóibín, House of Names

"the store was a great emptiness"

This week I listened again to an interview the Louisiana Channel did with the novelist Colm Toibin who’s most famous for a book called Brooklyn and most recently he released a big novel about Thomas Mann that seems to’ve been mostly either trashed or ignored. He’s a writer of great enough stature that if a major publication doesn’t remark on his latest book it’s because they’d rather not be…

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"You'll feel so homesick that you'll want to die, but there's nothing you can do about it. You'll have to endure it, and it won't kill you."

"And then one day, the sun will come out. You might not even notice straightaway, you'll feel that faint. And you'll catch yourself thinking about something, or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who's only yours. And you'll realize, that this is where your life is."

(She goes back to America)

- Brooklyn, Colm Toibin

Primo titolo della mia lista estiva di “contemporanei” spuntato, e senza alcun piacere. Tóibín scrive una storia piuttosto semplice e comune, ma non per questo priva di interesse e di potenzialità, in modo fin troppo banale. Anche laddove l’azione potrebbe portare dei cambi di tono e del movimento ci sembra tutto piatto: nessun personaggio colpisce, nessun momento resta impresso. Il romanzo scorre così: come un rigagnolo su un terreno lievemente inclinato, aiutato dalla sola gravità.

Peccato.