Brooklyn

Colm Toibin: Irish author and academic

Early life and education

Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, in the east of Ireland on May 30, 1955 in a family that valued education. He had difficulty learning to read yet and he was able to read not until he was nine. He spent his secondary education in Wexford where he became fond of poetry and went to University College in Dublin. There he got a degree in History and English in 1975.

Career beginnings

He then taught English in Barcelona, and started writing essays, newspapers articles, novels, plays and short stories. Back to Ireland in the 1980's he involved in journalism as an editor for a major Irish magazine covering politics and current affairs.

Literary works

The theme of travel fuels his fictions and the readers may identify with his mostly Irish-born characters. He published his first novel The South in 1990 and several books of fiction followed among which:

• The Heather Blazing (1992)
• The Story of the Night (1996)
• The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
• The Master (2004)
• Brooklyn (2009)
• The Testament of Mary (2012)
• Nora Webster (2014)

Most of them have been sold worldwide and translated in many foreign languages.

Academic career and current position

He has taught comparative literature in prestigious American Universities and he currently teaches at Columbia University as well as being Chancellor of Liverpool University therefore he divides his time between the US and Dublin where he is much acclaimed.

Film adaptation

The much-celebrated and best-seller Brooklyn was adapted into a film in 2015 by Nick Hornby starring Saoirse Ronan as the main protagonist Eilis Lacey.

Vocabulary

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn: A Literary Analysis

Awards and Recognition

Colm Toibin's novel Brooklyn won the Costa Novel Award in 2009 and was longlisted for the Booker Prize the same year.

Historical and Personal Context

The novel can be read as a personal work in a historical context as the scene is first set in Ireland, in the author's hometown in the early 1950's and carries on in New York where the author's aunts emigated. It offers a new perspective on the plight of the Irish immigrants.

Plot Summary

The young unemployed Eilis, soon finds herself on board a liner to the US where Father Flood, a catholic priest, provides her with a job in a department store. In Brooklyn the young woman experiences homesickness and faces the inability to express her emotions : "Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought."

However she finds a cohesive Irish community thanks to her all-female Irish boarding house and the local Friday night dances where she meets her Italian husband to be Tony. The climax is reached when Father Flood summons Eilis and tells her that her sister has died unexpectedly.

Character Development and Themes

At that point Toibin's deftness to paint the picture of Eilis split personality allows us to understand her loyalty to her family and her past and her sense of belonging nowhere really : "It made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother's daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew".

Critical Reviews

Rodrigo Perez's Review

"A heartbreaking and poignant story about choices, country, commitments, sacrifice, and love, Brooklyn is a superb, luminous, and bittersweet portrayal of who we are, where we've come from, where we're going, and the places we call home".

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

About the novel's realism : "The portrait Tóibín paints of Brooklyn in the early '50s is affectionate but scarcely dewy-eyed ; Eilis encounters discrimination in various forms – against Italians, against blacks, against Jews, against lower-class Irish – and finds Manhattan more intimidating than alluring. Tóibín's prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable."

Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"It's a classic American story about an immigrant's lonely, unspoken yearnings and about feeling 'this was the only life she was going to have, a life away from home' … It leaves readers wondering if Eilis is making the right life for herself, the same question we all face."

Christopher Tayler, The Guardian

"His fiction works hard to create the illusion that the characters reveal themselves almost independently of the narrating voice."

Vocabulary