Customer Reviews

The Empty Family: Stories

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The people who feature in the nine stories that make up this collection seem to be solitary individuals with strong needs for personal autonomy. This results in a sense of loneliness, of detachment from the people and events surrounding them, even when they return home for a funeral or to attend to some unfinished business. But loneliness is sometimes regretted, at least a little. Consider Lady Gregory reflecting on her affair with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in `Silence', feeling the lack of `a close discreet friend to whom such things could be whispered.' Carme, in `The New Spain' has travelled home to Menorca to claim her inheritance. While she feels `no desire to make contact with anyone, no one she had left behind in London, and no one here...' her energies are absorbed in recapturing aspects of the past. Once she has rid herself of her parents and resolved to remove the wall that her father built between her grandmother's house and the sea, she feels `a contentment that she had never expected to feel, an ease she had not believed would ever come her way.' Both women, in their different ways, are drawn to the past.

Other stories include `Two Women' in which a well-known but difficult Irish-born set designer returns to Ireland and comes face to face with an aspect of her past life, when she meets the wife of her long ago (and now dead) lover. `The Street' in which Malik and Abdul, two Pakistani workers in Barcelona, surreptitiously establish and then come to terms with the nature of their relationship is both the longest story in the collection and in many ways the most challenging. The loneliness, in both these cases, is at least partly a consequence of choice.

The past is one theme in this collection, as is loss and exile. In a couple of cases, exile is a consequence of relationship choice, in others it is because of geography. Homosexuality, in a couple of stories, adds another dimension. Abdul and Malik become each other's real family while other relationships (in this and other stories) are threatened.

In these stories, Colm Tóibín has created different worlds full of challenges for each individually defined family. It's deceptively easy to read - the writing is beautiful - but not always easy to understand, and never entirely comfortable.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

In his latest literary release, the modern Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, introduces his readers to the strange and alienating world of the unloving family as seen through the eyes of the returning prodigal. Each of the stories in this collection deal with individuals who have courageously decided to return to their past to recover a missing part of their troubled lives: the warm and reassuring embrace of family as expected in a traditional Irish home. None of these stories offer that mythical Irish welcome mat for those returning from afar. As an Irish man who has lived abroad for years, I can truly appreciate the experience of feeling alone in my native land. What Toibin's characters find instead is a wall of indifference, a veil of contempt and a vacuum of emptiness. To underscore the growing sense of disconnectedness and unease between individual and family, Toibin takes us through painful encounters where old settings and memories are dredged up in minute detail without any hope of bringing people back together in a renewed and loving relationship. It is as if these former familial settings in the stories remain as a troubling reminder of the lack of human grace or power to sustain them into the future. This is because at that critical moment when the past meets the present, the awful truth is revealed: the family is merely an empty social shell from which the individuals have long ago stepped out into the bigger world to fend for themselves. Toibin portrays them as truly irreconcilable outcasts who wander in from faraway countries where the morality and sense of purpose is so vastly different that they might as well be from another planet. As short stories go, all are superbly written, packed with intriguing detail, involving great story lines but, alas, lacking in a sense of ultimate purpose. None of the main characters ever has their true identity as sons, daughters, or lovers affirmed within the context of family.