Mothers and Sons: Stories

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.

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 Tóibín, 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, Tóibín 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 Tóibín 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," Tóibín writes, "she hoped she would never have to listen to it again." In "A Priest in the Family," Tóibín skillfully undermines the clichéd 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

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.

One of our most intensely refined and challenging writers of the day, Colm Tóibín presents a new set of nine short stories correlated by the theme and title of mothers and sons, stories that mine the always fascinating relationship between mothers and sons, both positive and negative sides. This is writing of such apparent simplicity that the craftsmanship of his work is taken for granted - the mark of a truly fine writer. Here is a collection of stories to be read slowly, allowing time to digest each experience fully before moving on to the next. 'The Use of Reason' explores a son's theft of valuable art and the consequences of his actions result in a confrontation with his alcoholic mother that supercedes the criminal act. In the brief 'The Song' a young musician almost mistakenly hears his miscreant mother singing a ballad that should erase years of desertion just as in 'Famous Blue Raincoat' the son discovers songs his mother recorded with her hippie sister before disaster struck the drug-impacted band. In 'The Name of the Game' a mother attempts to recover the errors of her deceased husband in making a life for her son, unknowingly at odds with her son's true needs and goals. A mother faces the infamy of her priest son when his history of sexual abuse surfaces in 'A Priest in the Family', and in 'A Summer Job' the devotion of a son to his grandmother overshadows his relationship to his mother. In 'Three Friends' and 'A Long Winter' Tóibín delicately and with subtle sensitivity introduces same sex themes to embroider stories of strong and powerful tales. For this reader 'A Long Winter' (the longest of the stories) is so excellent it could be stretched into an entire novel! Tóibín finds unique lines of communication among his characters, some with words, others with quiescent descriptors, and the flow of his use of the English language peppered with bits and pieces of both Irish culture and Spanish concepts (in 'The Long Winter') is lyrical, pungent and abundantly enriching to read. His mind is fertile and his style of writing is full of grace and feeling. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, January 07

Colm Toibin is an Irish novelist who explores the theme of people not wanting to being known, even to themselves. As author of five novels (including "The Heather Blazing" and "The Master"), this is his first book of short stories and it continues his theme of alienation. The writing is brilliant and descriptive with his tales set in Ireland and Spain (where he lived in Barcelona for a time). The reader will not find a happy resolution in these stories but of mothers and sons not connecting, not reaching out to the other. His characters are fascinating and diverse but not heroic on a interpersonal basis. The reader will read these tales over nine nights but not in one sitting.