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Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all.
A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín's finest piece of cction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her.
Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, The Master -- including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.
- Sales Rank: #212919 in Books
- Brand: Toibin, Colm
- Published on: 2008-01-01
- Released on: 2008-01-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.25" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
The nine stories in Mothers and Sons examine in depth some of the ways that the bond that is forged--or not--between mothers and their sons is altered, re-formed, or broken forever. In The Master, his fictionalized life of Henry James, Toíbín made the reader see and understand the writer more fully than ever before. Similarly, these new stories look at relationships between fully formed adults and, with a few deft strokes, make clear what their mutual history has brought them to. In most cases, they must deal with loss, while trying to grasp the complexities of that sometimes precarious balance between a mother and her son.
In the first story, "The Use of Reason," a lifelong burglar is nearly brought down by his mother, who talks too much when she drinks in her local pub. In "A Song," Noel, on the town with a group of his musician friends, ends up in the same bar as his estranged mother, who is asked to sing. She sings an Irish ballad about love and treachery and he is convinced that she is singing directly to him. In "A Priest in the Family," Molly's son Frank is accused of abuse, but no one has the courage to tell her until it is almost time for the trial. Her reaction is not entirely predictable. "Three Friends" takes place after a young man attends his mother's funeral. He joins his friends for a night of carousing and drugs ending with a late-night swim, where he is emboldened to make an overt sexual pass at one of his buddies, with interesting results. The final story, "A Long Winter," is set in Spain in a remote village. Miquel's mother drinks. Everyone knows it but Miquel. His father pours out her supply of booze and she leaves the house. So far it's a simple story. It doesn't stay that way. Each of these stories has its own gravitas, its own sadness, and that laser-beam of insight that is Toíbín's trademark. --Valerie Ryan
From Publishers Weekly
Though not a grand storyteller or a consummate imitator of various voices and cadences, Gerard Doyle's introspective and masterful reading of most of Tóibín's short stories is nearly perfect. Doyle's assured voice fits Tóibín's characters, who think more than they act, fail to communicate with those closest to them and prefer their own company to that of others. There is little dialogue since people feel they can confide in no one, even their own mother or son. Doyle phrases the stories carefully in order to highlight the rich nuances and stark lighting and scenery. The stories end abruptly, with the characters on the verge of, rather than at the end of, some transformative experience. Therefore, the extra long pauses between stories are welcome. Unfortunately, Doyle loses some of his power in the last story, "A Long Winter," which is set in Spain, but in which, oddly, Doyle affects a Slavic accent. Nevertheless, Tóibín's consummate writing skills are not to be missed by lovers of serious literature. Simultaneous release with Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 16).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In The Master (2004), Toibin's much-applauded fictional version of the life of American literary icon Henry James, the Irish fiction writer openly displayed an ability to "get under the skin" of a recognizable historical figure. His collection of stories further reveals his dexterity in achieving an understanding of a variety of individuals, none of whom seem to be based on himself. The collection's title indicates the general theme upon which each story elaborates--each story taking the theme in its own direction. Whether in a 9-page sketch of an inadvertent encounter in a pub between an estranged mother, who is a famous singer, and her grown son, or a 70-page, more fully wide-ranging scenario involving a runaway mother, his exacting control over both form and material never varies; in other words, his adaptability in writing short or long, and in working with characters far different from one another, is astonishing. His appreciation of the short story's strengths as differing from those of the novel sustains the power of his vision into these characters' triumphs and tragedies, and a rich but supple prose style seals each story's--and thus the collection's--absolute success. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Colm Tóibín: Master Storyteller
By Grady Harp
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
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A poignant collection of short stories from an accomplished author
By Bookreporter
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 disappearance of a woman who abandons her unnamed husband and son Miquel, when the husband resorts to harsh measures to halt her problem drinking. She is caught in a blizzard that blows into the region a few hours after she leaves home on foot, and most of the story recounts Miquel's search for her, alternating between the fading hope that she will be found alive and his fear that her body finally will be discovered, devoured by vultures, when the snow melts.
In each of these stories, Tóibín's prose is controlled and burnished. Only a mature, self-assured writer would launch the first story in the collection, "The Use of Reason," with sentences like these --- repetitive, and yet brilliant in their repetition: "The city was a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty."
At the midpoint of his career, Colm Tóibín has demonstrated his ability to master a variety of literary forms. With MOTHERS AND SONS, readers can add the short story to that list and can only look forward to the next offering of this accomplished author.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Family Affairs
By C. Hutton
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.
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