![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 15th, 2010 05:34 pmI've had a busy morning, with lots of errands and running around, but now it is five o'clock and I'm home. I'm sitting in the sun at my kitchen table, there's a batch of strawberry-ginger ice cream churning on the counter, and I'm going to spend a little time writing about books.
I finished Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn at the end of last week. The novel tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who emigrates from the town of Enniscorthy in Wexford (the same town that serves as the setting for Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship) to Brooklyn in the 1950s. Tóibín spends a little bit of time establishing Eilis's life with her mother and sister in Ireland, but the majority of the book is devoted to her immigrant experience. Eilis comes to America 100 years after the tremendous waves of famine immigrants, yet her experience is in some ways similar: she moves into an entirely Irish enclave, where everyone attends the same church and knows which county everyone else comes from. Tóibín gives us wonderfully detailed sketches of Eilis's landlady and the other Irish girls in the boarding house, describes Eilis's job in a clothing store and the bookkeeping classes she takes at Brooklyn College, and then brings in the drama: Eilis falls in love in America, then is called back to Ireland by a sudden tragedy, and must decide where her future lies.
There was much that I loved about Brooklyn. I loved Tóibín's sentences, his willingness to linger on details, the seemingly effortless and perfect way he renders dialogue. I loved Eilis as a character, reserved and thoughtful and awkward, but with a core of steel and rare flashes of brilliance. I loved the way Tóibín captured the split experience of the immigrant: the way that each place seems like home when you're there, yet recedes into dream-like unreality when you're away. And I am still quite fond of my theory that Tóibín writes the fiction of shyness. But for all that, I couldn't quite love the book as a whole. When I put it down, I was left wondering why this story? What about this story made it overwhelmingly compelling for Tóibín? Whatever it was, I couldn't feel it myself.
I finished Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn at the end of last week. The novel tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who emigrates from the town of Enniscorthy in Wexford (the same town that serves as the setting for Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship) to Brooklyn in the 1950s. Tóibín spends a little bit of time establishing Eilis's life with her mother and sister in Ireland, but the majority of the book is devoted to her immigrant experience. Eilis comes to America 100 years after the tremendous waves of famine immigrants, yet her experience is in some ways similar: she moves into an entirely Irish enclave, where everyone attends the same church and knows which county everyone else comes from. Tóibín gives us wonderfully detailed sketches of Eilis's landlady and the other Irish girls in the boarding house, describes Eilis's job in a clothing store and the bookkeeping classes she takes at Brooklyn College, and then brings in the drama: Eilis falls in love in America, then is called back to Ireland by a sudden tragedy, and must decide where her future lies.
There was much that I loved about Brooklyn. I loved Tóibín's sentences, his willingness to linger on details, the seemingly effortless and perfect way he renders dialogue. I loved Eilis as a character, reserved and thoughtful and awkward, but with a core of steel and rare flashes of brilliance. I loved the way Tóibín captured the split experience of the immigrant: the way that each place seems like home when you're there, yet recedes into dream-like unreality when you're away. And I am still quite fond of my theory that Tóibín writes the fiction of shyness. But for all that, I couldn't quite love the book as a whole. When I put it down, I was left wondering why this story? What about this story made it overwhelmingly compelling for Tóibín? Whatever it was, I couldn't feel it myself.
