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Brooklyn Colm Tóibín 9780141041742 Books

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Brooklyn Colm Tóibín 9780141041742 Books

In "Brooklyn," Colm Tóibín introduces us to Eilis Lacey, a young woman looking to find a place for herself in her small Irish hometown a few years after the end of World War II. She has a good head for figures and would love to find work as a bookkeeper or accountant, but although she has been taking classes, employment opportunities are few and far between, and all she's been able to find so far is part-time work in a shrewish neighbor's grocery shop. Unlike her elegant, outgoing older sister Rose, Eilis doesn't have much of a social life either beyond a couple of close lifelong friends. When a visiting priest offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she dreads leaving the only home she's ever known, but she never seriously considers turning down the offer. In Brooklyn, Eilis keep homesickness at bay by focusing on her department store job during the day, her studies in the evening. Not until the evening she meets Tony, the handsome plumber son of Italian immigrants, at a church dance does she begin to allow herself to set down even the most tenuous emotional roots in the new land. Unfortunately, just as she starts to think she might be ready to accept that her future lies in America with Tony, devastating news arrives from Ireland, and Eilis finds herself caught between two countries, two obligations, two futures that could be hers.

There isn't much in the way of a traditional plot here. There's no antagonist, no central conflict, almost no dramatic action. "Brooklyn" is not so much a novel as a slice of life. This is realistic fiction in its purest form, neither one whit more interesting than life itself, nor one whit less. Tóibín's prose is smooth and unobtrusive, and the reader finds himself sinking, as it were, into the flow of another life. We want to know what's going to happen for precisely the same reason that Eilis does, for the same reason we look forward to the unfolding events of our own lives. "Brooklyn" is by turns tense, ambiguous, tedious, and uncomfortably irresolute, because life is all of those things. This is *not* the kind of novel you read to escape reality, but to illuminate it delicately from within.

More than anything else, perhaps, "Brooklyn" is a character study of the phlegmatic personality. From the beginning, we see the major decisions in Eilis's life being made by those around her. Her neighbor offers her a part-time job, and she doesn't want to take it, but she does. Her family and Father Flood arrange for her to go to Brooklyn, and she doesn't want to go, but she does. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know anything about the ending, even in the most general terms.) Although she appears to gain independence and confidence from her experiences in America, it becomes obvious in the end that these changes are merely superficial: the unassuming demeanor is gone, but Eilis again and again betrays her instincts and her principles, and finds herself in the end faced with a dilemma she can't get out of without hurting some of the people she cares about, largely because she can't manage to assert herself at the crucial moment. Even the all-important choice she makes in the end isn't so much chosen as forced upon her by circumstance (including a chain of coincidences that might not seem particularly farfetched in any other novel, but here served as a rude awakening, ten pages before the end, that this was a piece of fiction and not a rich slice of history after all).

"Brooklyn" is a lovely little book with a light touch that belies its true depths. Readers looking for escape, high drama, or wholly affirmative character development are likely to be disappointed, but those willing to immerse themselves in the narrative and let the flow of events carry them to the end, however unsatisfying, are likely to find themselves strangely satisfied for all that.


Tags : Brooklyn [Colm Tóibín] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York,Colm Tóibín,Brooklyn,Penguin Books,0141041749,Literature & Fiction

Brooklyn Colm Tóibín 9780141041742 Books Reviews

I liked this book, its main characters, and its storyline until Eilis flip-flopped on her return trip to Ireland. Toibin had so carefully established her as a smart, if somewhat passive, young woman, whose aim it was to please everyone; so it didn’t ring true that she suddenly transformed into a self-enwrapped, unfaithful little flit.

We can understand her having fallen, over a period of months, for faithful, good-hearted Tony; but there was nothing to justify her sudden switch to Jim or the easy way she neglected her mother once he came on the scene. I like characters to change for good and logical reasons; Eilis seemed to have changed because it was convenient for the author. And just a little convenient, too, that Miss Kelly and Mrs. Kehoe happened to be cousins who spoke by telephone twice a year. In those days, most people couldn’t even afford to make overseas calls to their immediate family members, but these two cousins, who never once mentioned the other in conversation, spoke twice a year!

Rewrite, please. She goes back to Ireland and realizes how much she has accomplished in two years—and I don’t mean her svelte figure, suntan, and stylish clothing. Revisiting Ireland helps her appreciate her own inner strength, and she resolves to go back to Brooklyn and get her accountant’s degree. The Jim diversion makes no sense and I dislike Eilis for having fallen so unbelievable out of character.
I can think of very few times when I liked a movie better than the book, but this is one of them. Where the screenwriter and director and actress succeeded, the author failed. Hollywood took Toibin’s story and created a charming character in Eilis, a girl whose endearing kindness made us love her; this from the author’s one-dimensional character who either did not feel emotions or would not reveal them. We are given, by Toibin, all the vapid details of her life but not her reaction to them, and although we want to connect with this girl, we are not allowed to do so. When she leaves the dance with Tony and he asks, for the first time, if she will go with him again next week, we don’t get elation, we don’t get intimacy or sexual tension, we don’t recognition that someone likes us and is willing to risk rejection for us. We get “Eilis realized that this invitation would mean that she could go to the dance without having to take the feelings of any of her fellow lodgers into account.” What? Seriously?

What is perhaps most disquieting is the praise heaped on this book by the literary establishment. The publishing industry is an embarrassing clutch of inbred New York literati who stand as self-appointed gatekeepers while keeping company with a complicit establishment of editorial critics. As long as they keep reminding each other of their brilliance and superiority, all is well. It is infuriating to read how Toibin’s writing in Brooklyn is “spare” and has “remarkable power,” etc. This is utter nonsense. Shame on you all. While some of Toibin’s other work may achieve these heights, Brooklyn most certainly does not. The writing is not “spare,” it is simply simple. Juvenile. Sophomoric. Something you’d expect to get from a second-year English-lit student. It has a “See Spot run” sort of quality, as if the writer couldn’t decide if he was writing a children’s book or an adult novel. There’s nary a well-crafted, insightful sentence to be found. Toibin seems to have forgotten the concept of authorial irony and the subtleties of narrative that flow from such irony, the enjoyment it evokes for the reader. There is an unending train of “she thought”s and “she felt”s and “she knew that”s even though we Think we Know what she Felt without being told at every turn.

The ending, if you can get there, is well done. But a good ending does not justify the means when it comes to a novel. See the movie instead.
In "Brooklyn," Colm Tóibín introduces us to Eilis Lacey, a young woman looking to find a place for herself in her small Irish hometown a few years after the end of World War II. She has a good head for figures and would love to find work as a bookkeeper or accountant, but although she has been taking classes, employment opportunities are few and far between, and all she's been able to find so far is part-time work in a shrewish neighbor's grocery shop. Unlike her elegant, outgoing older sister Rose, Eilis doesn't have much of a social life either beyond a couple of close lifelong friends. When a visiting priest offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she dreads leaving the only home she's ever known, but she never seriously considers turning down the offer. In Brooklyn, Eilis keep homesickness at bay by focusing on her department store job during the day, her studies in the evening. Not until the evening she meets Tony, the handsome plumber son of Italian immigrants, at a church dance does she begin to allow herself to set down even the most tenuous emotional roots in the new land. Unfortunately, just as she starts to think she might be ready to accept that her future lies in America with Tony, devastating news arrives from Ireland, and Eilis finds herself caught between two countries, two obligations, two futures that could be hers.

There isn't much in the way of a traditional plot here. There's no antagonist, no central conflict, almost no dramatic action. "Brooklyn" is not so much a novel as a slice of life. This is realistic fiction in its purest form, neither one whit more interesting than life itself, nor one whit less. Tóibín's prose is smooth and unobtrusive, and the reader finds himself sinking, as it were, into the flow of another life. We want to know what's going to happen for precisely the same reason that Eilis does, for the same reason we look forward to the unfolding events of our own lives. "Brooklyn" is by turns tense, ambiguous, tedious, and uncomfortably irresolute, because life is all of those things. This is *not* the kind of novel you read to escape reality, but to illuminate it delicately from within.

More than anything else, perhaps, "Brooklyn" is a character study of the phlegmatic personality. From the beginning, we see the major decisions in Eilis's life being made by those around her. Her neighbor offers her a part-time job, and she doesn't want to take it, but she does. Her family and Father Flood arrange for her to go to Brooklyn, and she doesn't want to go, but she does. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know anything about the ending, even in the most general terms.) Although she appears to gain independence and confidence from her experiences in America, it becomes obvious in the end that these changes are merely superficial the unassuming demeanor is gone, but Eilis again and again betrays her instincts and her principles, and finds herself in the end faced with a dilemma she can't get out of without hurting some of the people she cares about, largely because she can't manage to assert herself at the crucial moment. Even the all-important choice she makes in the end isn't so much chosen as forced upon her by circumstance (including a chain of coincidences that might not seem particularly farfetched in any other novel, but here served as a rude awakening, ten pages before the end, that this was a piece of fiction and not a rich slice of history after all).

"Brooklyn" is a lovely little book with a light touch that belies its true depths. Readers looking for escape, high drama, or wholly affirmative character development are likely to be disappointed, but those willing to immerse themselves in the narrative and let the flow of events carry them to the end, however unsatisfying, are likely to find themselves strangely satisfied for all that.