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A review by tasmanian_bibliophile
The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín
4.0
‘I said that my real family is you.’
The people who feature in the nine stories that make up this collection seem to be solitary individuals with strong needs for personal autonomy. This results in a sense of loneliness, of detachment from the people and events surrounding them, even when they return home for a funeral or to attend to some unfinished business. But loneliness is sometimes regretted, at least a little. Consider Lady Gregory reflecting on her affair with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in ‘Silence’, feeling the lack of ‘a close discreet friend to whom such things could be whispered.’ Carme, in ‘The New Spain’ has travelled home to Menorca to claim her inheritance. While she feels ‘no desire to make contact with anyone, no one she had left behind in London, and no one here…’ her energies are absorbed in recapturing aspects of the past. Once she has rid herself of her parents and resolved to remove the wall that her father built between her grandmother’s house and the sea, she feels ‘a contentment that she had never expected to feel, an ease she had not believed would ever come her way.’ Both women, in their different ways, are drawn to the past.
Other stories include ‘Two Women’ in which a well-known but difficult Irish-born set designer returns to Ireland and comes face to face with an aspect of her past life, when she meets the wife of her long ago (and now dead) lover. ‘The Street’ in which Malik and Abdul, two Pakistani workers in Barcelona, surreptitiously establish and then come to terms with the nature of their relationship is both the longest story in the collection and in many ways the most challenging. The loneliness, in both these cases, is at least partly a consequence of choice.
The past is one theme in this collection, as is loss and exile. In a couple of cases, exile is a consequence of relationship choice, in others it is because of geography. Homosexuality, in a couple of stories, adds another dimension. Abdul and Malik become each other’s real family while other relationships (in this and other stories) are threatened.
In these stories, Colm Tóibín has created different worlds full of challenges for each individually defined family. It’s deceptively easy to read - the writing is beautiful – but not always easy to understand, and never entirely comfortable.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
The people who feature in the nine stories that make up this collection seem to be solitary individuals with strong needs for personal autonomy. This results in a sense of loneliness, of detachment from the people and events surrounding them, even when they return home for a funeral or to attend to some unfinished business. But loneliness is sometimes regretted, at least a little. Consider Lady Gregory reflecting on her affair with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in ‘Silence’, feeling the lack of ‘a close discreet friend to whom such things could be whispered.’ Carme, in ‘The New Spain’ has travelled home to Menorca to claim her inheritance. While she feels ‘no desire to make contact with anyone, no one she had left behind in London, and no one here…’ her energies are absorbed in recapturing aspects of the past. Once she has rid herself of her parents and resolved to remove the wall that her father built between her grandmother’s house and the sea, she feels ‘a contentment that she had never expected to feel, an ease she had not believed would ever come her way.’ Both women, in their different ways, are drawn to the past.
Other stories include ‘Two Women’ in which a well-known but difficult Irish-born set designer returns to Ireland and comes face to face with an aspect of her past life, when she meets the wife of her long ago (and now dead) lover. ‘The Street’ in which Malik and Abdul, two Pakistani workers in Barcelona, surreptitiously establish and then come to terms with the nature of their relationship is both the longest story in the collection and in many ways the most challenging. The loneliness, in both these cases, is at least partly a consequence of choice.
The past is one theme in this collection, as is loss and exile. In a couple of cases, exile is a consequence of relationship choice, in others it is because of geography. Homosexuality, in a couple of stories, adds another dimension. Abdul and Malik become each other’s real family while other relationships (in this and other stories) are threatened.
In these stories, Colm Tóibín has created different worlds full of challenges for each individually defined family. It’s deceptively easy to read - the writing is beautiful – but not always easy to understand, and never entirely comfortable.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith