Greeting her compatriot, the great lady of Irish letters Edna O’Brien (1930-2024), who died in the middle of summer (The world (of July 28), writer Colm Toibin noted in the newspaper The Irish Times : “I like the intimate tone of his novels, his art of the underlying, of the whispered, his attention to nuances.” So many rare and subtle features that apply perfectly to the work that the author of Teacher (ed. Robert Laffont, 2005) and Magician (Grasset, 2022) built it himself.
In thirty-five years of writing, Toibin, born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, Westford County, has built up a rich corpus of a dozen novels (translated by the very faithful and very precise Anna Gibson), short stories, essays, articles and even a film script (Return to Montaukby German director Volker Schlöndorff, 2017) that make him one of the great prose writers of his generation. The publication of his new novel, long islandA story that he entrusted to “World of Books”, he put “fourteen years of thought”, It is an opportunity to return to some of your chosen themes.
Silence
Would Colm Toibin go so far as to say, like Vigny, that “Silence alone is great” The fact is that it implicitly occupies a considerable place in the Tobinian universe. The main characters “keep his words”often without having “nothing to say”at least “Nothing that is easy and simple” to the state. Some people refrain from speaking – like Jim, the unhappy lover of Brooklyn (ed. Robert Laffont, 2010), found in long island : “He began to count the seconds, up to one hundred, then up to two hundred. (…). He felt his question still hanging in the air. And then it became clear to him that[Eilis] would not respond. » Others use non-dialogue as a weapon, like Eilis’s husband Tony: “ [Il] He had guessed her intention and, without doing anything, remaining silent, with his gaze fixed on the road, he made the task impossible for her. (…) There was nothing in his expression or in the way he breathed or drove. Yet he created around him an aura of vulnerability, even of innocence, designed to prevent him from uttering the slightest irrevocable word: a threat that, once uttered, could never be withdrawn.
In Colm Toibin’s toolbox, secrecy, silent hesitation, emptiness, omission, moderation and, of course, the tacit form a panoply of privileged instruments. As a counterpoint to his crystalline sentences, they allow him to create, in the literal sense of the term, the“unheard” or the “misunderstanding” which frames all his narrative. So much so that his raw material is not really the word, but its cruel absence, that great void of the word, painful and ambiguous, in which he imprisons his characters.
You have 71.78% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
