I’m reading Mothers and Sons (2007), a gorgeous collection of nine short stories by Colm Tóibín. The Irish writer has always been one of my favorites, although I’d forgotten how much I loved his prose until this weekend. His sentences are deceptively plain; they don’t get in the way, as my mother might put it. And certainly they’re the stylistic antithesis of, say, Michael Ondaatje, whose novel The English Patient Anthony Lane memorably judged to be “so finely written that I found it, to all intents and purposes, unreadable.”
Instead, you might read Tóibín’s writing in the same way that one of his characters in Mothers and Sons reads the world—
with the feeling that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that a person was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else. There were always layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.
Behind this post, I should say, lies a hidden motive: to tell you about Tóibín’s planned appearance next month at the Virginia Festival of the Book, a five-day event sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (of which I am an employee in good standing). In the weeks to come, I’ll happily be reacquainting myself with Tóibín’s novels and his nonfiction.
I’ll also be writing about To Conquer Hell, a great new history of the World War I Battle of the Meuse-Argonne by Edward G. Lengel. In a session moderated by yours truly, Lengel will be joined by historian Scott E. Casper to talk about “Finding the Story in History.” Casper’s new book, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon, is well reviewed in this morning’s Washington Post Book World.
IMAGE: Colm Tóibín © Craig Abraham 1998
This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Comments