Customer Reviews

Mothers and Sons: Stories

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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

I realise that I'll undoubtedly be shot down in flames for daring to criticize this book but I must be true to my own feelings on it, as must any honest reviewer. This is a collection of short stories, set mainly in Ireland and with that overlying sadness that seems inevitable in Irish tales. The relationships between the mothers and sons are all different but all have an unbreakable link between them that survives, even when things are at their worst. Other reviewers have listed the stories in detail...the drug fueled rave, following the mother's funeral, the blind love which excuses the paedophilic priest etc. so I won't rehash them. Admittedly the writing is that of a master craftsman, polished to perfection and as precise as the work of a great artist, but I simply didn't enjoy the book, feeling a great cloud of depression fall over me..perhaps it's just that the Irish melancholy got too much for me!

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)

4.5 stars

"Sometimes they're more about the mothers, sometimes the sons, but most every story in Colm Tóibón's Irish-inflected collection is expertly woven with the threads of devotion, obligation, practical self-interest, and naked emotional need that can tether even the most distant of mothers and sons together. In his shorter tales, Tóibón can let those threads dangle awkwardly. It's only when he stretches out that Tóibón fully inhabits his characters in Story Collection, letting them breathe beyond the narrow roles prescribed by the title." Entertainment Weekly

Com Toibin has written a novel that tells stories of mothers and sons, but often one or the other are not present. This is not your usual set of stories that you would discuss on that certain second Sunday in May with your mother. Oh, no, this is the reality. There is love and comfort and caring, but there is also the mess life makes. Each character in each story has his own story to tell. The stories start in Colm Toibin's Dublin and they work their way to the coast and beyond. We feel the land and see it in mind's eye. Not one story is my favorite, the collection of them all tells the complete story of mothers and sons. The chapter headings tell us a story in itself. Nine stories and some I will mention:

'The Use of Reason'- a man who is a thief has his secrets given away by his drinking mom.

'A Song'- a mother and son who do not know each other but connect in a fashion through a song.

'The Name of the Game'- a mother left penniless after her husband's death but she refuses to give in and leaves a legacy for her son.

'Famous Blue Raincoat'- a mother who was part of a singing group but is reluctant to tell her son the story. Leonard Cohen devotees will recognize this title.

'A Long Winter' a mother who drinks but will stop only in her own good time, and the family who loves her but who can't seem to connect.

"The short story is a craftsman's form, and Toibin's craft is immaculate. Not many writers in Britain and Ireland are working at this level of intensity and seriousness, with not a slack sentence in 270 pages and nothing shoddy or easily sardonic throughout. The short story also seems an ideal form for a writer much more interested in emotion, and the slow exposing of a character, than in action or community." Pico Iyer

I picked up this book and expected something reassuring and warm, but it is part of Colm Toibin's vision to show us that mothers and sons are often not what they seem, and often have missed connections. In some way these are stories of people who are not there. There is love and devotion and hard work and jobs and anger. There is not much mentioned of the fathers, but you know they are there. These are very moving stories and will stay with me. A mother of a son, and I will take the wisdom from Colm Toibin. Highly Recommended. prisrob 1/21/07

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.

As the title indicates, Colm Toibin has written nine stories about mothers and sons. All of them are set in either the author's native country, Ireland or that part of the world he loves, Spain. Some of his characters, both mothers and sons, find themselves in life-changing events. In "A Long Winter" Miquel is faced with the disappearance and most certain death of his alcoholic mother who becomes lost in a snowstorm. Molly ("A Priest in the Family") discovers, after everyone else in the town does, that her priest son has been charged with child molestion and most certainly will go to jail. Others like Luke in the hauntingly beautiful story entitled "Famous Blue Raincoat" after the exquisite Leonard Cohen song merely discovers old tapes of songs from recordings that his mother and aunt made years ago and has no way of knowing why listening to them is so painful for his mother Lisa. Many of Toibin's characters exhibit a stoicism that should be instructive to all of us; while they may not lead lives of quiet desperation, they certainly lead lives of quiet resignation.

Mr. Toibin's language-- as he demonstrated so admirably in THE MASTER-- fits perfectly with his stories. His sentences are remarkably free of ornamentation and never get in the way of the story he is telling. His characters occasionally have quiet epiphanies. Molly from "A Priest in the Family" observes that her sister's spending a lot of time alone "was changing her face, making her responses slower, her jaw set. Her eyes had lost their kind glow." In a painfully poignant passage from "Famous Blue Raincoat" Lisa on her first visit to the United States to identify and bury her beloved sister Julie finds herself in what she describes as "a land of ghosts." Finally in the longest and best story included here, "A Long Winter" Miquel "associated his years of military service with dreams of home. . . he wondered why he had never viewed his life with his family in the village as precious and fragile," a phrase that is appropriate for these fine stories indeed-- precious and fragile.

Mr. Toibin is quite simply one of our best living writers.

These are some of the fullest short stories I have ever read. Reading Toibin, you feel in the hands of a master storyteller. His stories are perfectly shaped, understated yet unforgettable, precise and graceful. You get the sense that Toibin loves his characters, these isolated, fractured, haunted souls and wants to protect them. But he wants you to see and love them too, and so he gives you the slightest peek at what remains hidden. And if he's done his job (and he doesn't fail once in this collection), you see something that perhaps, surprisingly, you have once known.

Two stories in this book, The Long Winter and Three Friends, are reason enough to read through the rest of this rather bleak and poignant collection. A certain thematic relentlessness is probably inherent in a book of short stories, if only because rather than hiding out in a longer work, an author's obsessions divulge themselves again and again once character and setting are no longer the central concern.

This is certainly the case in Mothers and Sons, where the characters' refusal to exit their own orbs and connect with one another, where the dead bodies don't turn up and the mysteries of their deaths are never solved, is sometimes maddening, sometimes enlightening and almost always sad. Perhaps singling out The Long Winter and Three Friends, the two stories in the book where the characters are able to take refuge in a ramshackle semblance of intimacy, is to miss some darker point; all the same, there is something quite moving in the awkward tenderness of these two stories- both of which involve a mother's death and a son's taking comfort with another man- which gives the booka depth and complexity it would lack without them. These are hardly what one would call romantic stories- in fact, there is a not so subtle desperation at work, a stong sense of pity and escape, in both the encounters- but without them, Mothers and Sons might just be too easy an invitation to despair. Still and all, a highly recommended book by a thoughtful, interesting writer.

Colm Toibin's _Mothers and Sons_ (2007) is a collection of nine short stories that loosely address the permutations of the mother-son relationship, primarily within Irish families, within the larger context of modern lives. All of these stories address strains or misunderstandings, where either the mother or the son is unable to connect with the other. Yet Toibin's stories are about more than this, and the mother-son theme is developed as an understated, almost minor theme, which makes the collection that much more fascinating. Toibin's title _Mothers and Sons_ insists that readers focus on a theme, which while important, could otherwise seem secondary in any given story. The suggestion is that the mother-son relationship is primary, in ways that the characters fail to grasp, and which the stories themselves purposely obscure.

In "The Use of Reason," a story about the haunting textures of memory and repression, Toibin introduces us to an unnamed Dublin thief, who has undertaken his biggest crime of his life, an art heist one with international implications, and must decide how to dispose of the stolen property. As a backdrop to the story, the narrator describes how the thief's mother has developed the dangerous habit of gossiping about her son's exploits when she is drunk at the pub. The thief's final decision regarding the paintings, including a Rembrandt of an old woman that likely symbolizes his own mother, follows a conversation where he demands that his mother stop "yapping," not about himself, ironically, but about his brother Billy.

All of the stories are memorable and original. "The Name of the Game," for example, describes in detail how a widow in her early forties with two children sets up a fish and chips and a beer and wine discount story in her husband's families' generation-old grocery. The name of the fish and chips shop is "The Monument," with ironic associations about her deceased husband and his family. "A Priest in the Family" tells the story of a seventy-year old mother's response to her son, a priest in the family, accused of sexual abuse. In "The Famous Blue Raincoat," a sixteen-year old son and aspiring musician develops an appreciation for his mother's former musical career in the 1970s--insisting that his mother's songs be re-released--while failing to recognize the painful memories that this evokes for her.

The final story in the collection, "A Long Winter," shifts unexpectedly to an isolated family of two sons, a husband, and wife in rural northern Spain. The story chronicles the disappearance a wife who leaves her family by foot in the middle of the winter after her husband pours out all of her drink. She is presumed dead, the victim of a sudden, impenetrable snow storm. Throughout the whole story, the father and son search and then wait hesitantly for the spring thaw to recover the mother's body. This story ends brilliantly.

In my opinion, the first and last stories in the collection are the strongest. In each story, as we struggle to uncover characters' complex motives we are brought back to the mother-son relationship, a bond which like the mother in "A Long Winter" is presumably buried, awaiting discovery or rescue.

The thread that ties the beautifully written nine stories in this book together is that in each one there is a complex relationship between a mother and a son. I don't think that all of them `focus' on this relationship, as the blurb on the back has it, for only in four of the nine stories is it central. Rather, each one seems to me to focus on either the mother or the son; but whichever it is, we are let deeply into that person's thoughts and see the world through that person's eyes, and mostly it is a sad or even tragic world. A death figures in several of the stories. Some are most evocatively set in various very Irish communities: a criminal one in the first story, an Irish pub in the second, a small village where everyone knows everyone else in others. The long last story is set in the mountains of Spain. All are memorable in their deceptively simple style and in their psychological content.